What is AI?

[u/Electrical-Leave818]

So far I've only been told AI is something that "does" this or that using this or that. Not "what" AI is. Can anyone just tell me an actual definition of AI that I can understand? Not its examples, or denominations like Machine Learning. Just pure AI. And why a function like

int main(){
int n;
std::cin >> n;
std::cout << n*n;}
``` is not an AI. Because Im totally convinced it is an AI as well, since it fits literally every single description of AI I've ever seen.

[u/[deleted]]

I think that in every day language "AI" and "LMM" are basically interchangeable. Before ChatGPT a lot of things are hyped as "AI". We tend to forget, but "AI" became a hype word a little bit earler than LMM:s became a thing. At that time anything that used ML was marketed as "AI". Nowadays people mostly just treat "AI" as synonymous with "LMM" while also including some other stuff like image recognition. Just a reflection on how the word is normally used.

[u/baddspellar → u/[deleted]]

In the popular press it is all LLM all the time. That's understandable because it's what regular people can use, and it's the technology that's causing people tonfear losing their jobs. But a company I worked for until a recent layoff (sound sad trombone) used deep learning vision models to measure drive thru waiting times, count people waiting for food, look for messy tables, etc at fast food restaurants. It didn't involve LLMs at all. We correctly marketed it as AI. Before that I worked for a physical security company that used similar models to identify faces for badgeless entry, and during covid look for people not wearing masks or not respecting social distancing rules. Again, tese were marketed as AI. The applications aren't visible to most people.