I think one of the biggest mistakes we have made as an industry is conflating the words “AI” and “LLMs.” The irony is right there on the surface. Naming is one of the hardest things to do in software, and we’ve done it poorly for the primary tool of software.
the point is public perception. when the general public hears “AI” they don’t think about all the lesser systems that are technically AI, they think of AGI
Then the issue is with the uneducated public - not the use of correct terminology. Changing the definition of terms will just create more confusion, not less.
yep, that’s what I’ve been saying. the public is uneducated because the people selling AI want them to be. using the technically correct but often misunderstood umbrella term “AI” instead of the more specific term “LLM” is one of the ways that ignorance is maintained
Referring to a multimodal AI as an LLM isn’t technically accurate either, because it’s not just an LLM. There’s also the vision/audio encoders, diffusion model, and multimodal projectors.
AGI is just a type of AI. It’s a term coined long after AI that doesn’t define new goals and capabilities that weren’t already part of AI research, except that they were rather abandoned. If anything, “AGI” was the marketing term to revitalize and focus on those ideals. So there is nothing wrong with the general public to associate “AI” with what you would specifically describe as “AGI”.
Furthermore, I don’t understand what this public perception has to do with your claim. If they thought of only narrow AI, then would it not make even more sense to call their LLM-based products AI…
AGI is a subcategory of AI just like LLMs and diffusion models are. That term has existed since 1997 and was coined by Mark Avrum Gubrud in an article named ‘Nanotechnology and international security’