How is AI meaningless? I mean, I guess the term can be seen as silly, but I mentally map it to "statistical computing."
[edit] Since I'm getting down votes, can someone clarify? I wasn't being contrarian with the above comment. Is my mental map of what AI means as an industry term incorrect?
AI doesn't have to be statistical. It can be rule-based, for example. The reason it's useless is that knowing your headset has "AI" in it doesn't tell you anything about its functionality.
Any term/phrase can be rendered meaningless by overuse and misuse. The person you are responding to isn't claiming AI, as it actually is and what it actually means, is meaningless. They are claiming that "AI" the phrase is becoming meaningless.
Understood and my point was that anytime I see AI used in articles these days, they seem to be referring to statistical computing solutions. I know AI can also refer to rule based algorithms, but I rarely see it applied in those contexts these days.
Put another way, does anyone read the above statement and think "MS is developing a chip to accelerate A*?"
I think you've hit it on the head. 'AI' computations are a variety of mathematical and statistical techniques, which on their own are varied and interesting but it doesnt suggest a fundamental difference in hardware over general purpose computing. GPUs provide distinct advatages for some kinds of operations, but its not well defined that "AI" has its own set of computations for which hardware can be custom built for, and be distinguishable from existing kinds of CPU hardware.
'AI' is often a delicate term (in the sense the real meaning is often hotly debated). It represents what many people worked decades of their lives for, but it is still really as hard and as abstract since the idea was first conceived.
Using the term might get points for marketing, but you'll only get contempt from the people who realize what it really stands for.
"Statistical computing" is kinda outdated and stems from misunderstanding what ML is and the past reliance on some well-known statistical methods. Look at it as a parallelizable non-linear optimization able to reduce dimensionality by employing cool tricks and surprisingly efficient in some real-world tasks. If you just take a general, fully-connected DNN, it wouldn't work at all; those tricks like CNN/RNN/LSTM/GAN make it all work within a narrow setup of hyperparameters.
AI uses more than statistics. Some algorithms doesn't use statistics at all, for example you can build decision trees using information theory instead of statistics. Statistics is a big part of AI, but in most algorithms you will find more than just statistics like optimization, algebra, ...
Your definition feels pretty reasonable, but I think the issue is that the term "AI" is being slapped on tons of services that do extremely basic predictions. If it has a formula in it, it's now "AI".
[edit] Since I'm getting down votes, can someone clarify? I wasn't being contrarian with the above comment. Is my mental map of what AI means as an industry term incorrect?