It's the latter. In 5 years, what we consider to be AI today will just be standard product features and the AI being discussed will be some new set of capabilities that are just being developed, and the same will happen 5 years after that.
But whatever we have in five years will probably take over the "AI" moniker, like how ML had it ~10 years ago.
During the last AI winter, we relied on things like Bayesian filtering to categorize spam without a lot of ado, and it was a product of the previous AI surge.
Transformer based inference and generation are already useful, and there's no going back from that, even if the architecture will never get us artificial super intelligence.
It's talking about how what we can "AI" today will be treated as bog standard - the same way this happened with Recommender systems 3-4 years ago, Neural networks 4-7 years ago, statistical learning (eg. SVM) 7-10 years ago, etc.
The title is a reference to a fairly prominent article about "Big Data" that was based on the same premise.
Well maybe they are? But they are all very specialized tools. And it’s not difficult to understand how they conceptually work. I guess...
Meanwhile a conversational partner in a box that can answer any of my questions? (If they eventually live up to the promise) Umm, how the hell would a normal person not call that magical and indeed “AI”?
I’m sorry but the True Believers haven’t made anything before which is remotely close to AI. Not until contemporary LLMs. That’s why people don’t call it that.
AI is an ingredient that will power products and experiences, and we will talk about those.
Think skynet or HAL. All powerful and all knowing systems that run every aspect of our lives.
Even our concept of VR is so far behind what people have expected from sci-fi movies for decades. Until we can jack in and get full sensory feedback, VR will continue to get talked about out as more than fancy 3D glasses.
In the 80s we all wanted the hoverboards from back to the future. We never got them but we keep calling things with wheels hoverboards because these ideas are too good to die and the general public still wants them.
LLMs and gen AI are totally different. They are very clearly AI. You're literally having a conversation with a computer! I don't think people will stop calling it AI.
And recommender systems were/are absolutely a ML/AI subfield.
> I don't think people will stop calling it AI
That already did in the above two cases, as well as plenty of other cases in the entire ML/AI world.
The only reason people will stop talking about them is because they've become completely normal in their daily lives IMO.
- AI 2.0
- AI 4.0 (Industrial revolution, again, so let's use higher numbers)
- WebAI 5.0 (skipping enough numbers to now be sure it will be _novel_)
Any more ideas? No wrong answers, in five years no one will look at this list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
(May be further out than five years)
Also, we have been using if/else and math as AI systems for decades. Wikipedia lists of lot of ideas under AI. Every calculator was AI, since it took a job (calculating) from a human, when it was invented. Says wiki, not (only) my opinion.
This is not to say that we will not talk about AI at all in five years, in the same way that we still talk about big data today, only that we will not talk about AI in five years because of its success.
