There is a long history of bad naming conventions in the field of AI, including “artificial intelligence” itself imo. (What is “intelligence” here? It’s more like “automation” or “automated problem solving”.)

What really happens is that we figure out something that works, sometimes inspired by some biological thing or neuroscience thing.

Examples: neural network, attention, reasoning, hallucination, agents, experts in “mixture of experts”.

And then we go to name it, and rather than reaching for some three letter acronym we sometimes borrow a more catchy term.

I almost never means the original research was confused about what is going on. And in some cases we eventually strip away things from the original, like in neural nets which used to have a more biologically inspired activation function but we found out that ReLU works just as well because the important thing was the non linearity not the sigmoid.

There are two things occurring here. One is the AI effect, once something mysterious becomes creatable it is not intelligent at all.

The other isn't a problem of the field of AI, but the total fields of intelligence together. There is no formal agreed upon definition of what intelligence actually is across disciplines. It would be slightly hypocritical to point out the field of AI on this, when biology and psychology are just as guilty.

The more we look, the more lumpy intelligence seems to get. We find some species have min/maxxed portions of intelligence that we have to question what general intelligence actually is. It also should give us pause that some less generally intelligent agent can cause massive problems by maxing out the right stats.

Automated problem solving... of specifically the kind of problems we'd normally need human intelligence to solve (coding, translation, etc.). So "automated intelligence" would make sense to me.

> There is a long history of bad naming conventions in the field of AI, including “artificial intelligence” itself imo.

It's all marketing. AI companies repurpose the terms of AI researchers to exaggerate their products. The public has an idea of what AI means and the companies exploit it. AI, in public perception, is what the Terminator movies are about.

It's exactly like all the "hover boards" you can buy.