> parroted in the media

ugh just recently I saw a news article gushing about how AI had helped with some health/medicine study, and various patient organizations were all like "oh yeah this is a Good use of AI" and then I click the link to read the study and it's decision trees and clustering on a tiny dataset that you could analyze with a ten year old laptop.

I mean, sure at some point decision trees and clustering were called "AI", but the way the article was written you'd think OpenAI and Anthropic were responsible for the advancement of medicine.

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YeGoblynQueenne a day ago | parent | next [-]

Decision tree learning is a form of machine learning and machine learning is subject of AI research. Same for clustering. Why are you saying they "were" called AI? They still are. Maybe everyone now synechdochically calls LLMs AI but that doesn't mean other kinds of AI are not AI.

AI research is not over yet. If OpenAI and Anthropic fail to bring on the Singularity, what are we going to call the continuing research on AI? Are we going to call it something else than "AI" because that was taken by LLMs? Does that make any sense at all?

	▲	internet_points a day ago \| parent [-]
		> that doesn't mean other kinds of AI are not AI I kind of agree, though I find "AI" to be an almost useless term, in particular these days. I dislike the current state of discourse where AI is used to mean inhumanly large models, so I tend to use a specific term like LLMs instead of AI. But the point here wasn't whether this or that form of ML is in fact AI. The term "AI" was almost never used in mainstream media until a few years ago, when it suddenly it was all over the place https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=AI,Biden... and nearly without exception referring to very large generative text/image models. So when a news article in 2026 talks about AI without specifying that it's nothing to do with ChatGPT etc. (and in fact using a very different method requiring no large pre-trained model and no dependence on large companies), I find it highly misleading.

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red-iron-pine a day ago | parent | prev [-]

yeah but you'd need skills to operate the 10 year old laptop. probably have to copy and paste and understand excel and maybe whatever the hell a confidence interval is

this allows said middle managers to do the analysis themselves and feel mostly confident in the results.