[__MatrixMan__]

I didn't consider SAT solvers to be AI, but searching for "ortools" points to https://developers.google.com/optimization which has a big "Google AI" indicator on it. Who cares, I thought.

But certain managers are now very keen on making a lot of noise about just how effectively their teams are using AI. So I took my four python scripts which together form a pipeline that solves a scheduling problem with OR-Tools and renamed my README.md to skill.md so agents would think it was for them.

The LLM does pretty much nothing except run the commands in order, CP-SAT does the real work and is being confused for AI. Yet when I demoed it people were like:

    > wow, neat, look at what's now possible in this dawning age of AI

I've not bothered to tell them that it's 1960's technology and that the AI part of it could also be adequately performed by a README with less than 100 words. I guess everything that the managers haven't heard of is now "AI" and golly look how effectively we're all using it.

[LPisGood]

SAT solving, constraint programming, and (integer) linear programming are absolutely AI. These are techniques that let computers make smart decisions.

Maybe they’re not AI in the way you’ve heard marketing teams use it recently, but they are artificial intelligence nonetheless.

If you open any AI textbook written before 2022 there is almost surely a chapter on these methods (c.f. Russel and Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach).

[IanCal]

Strongly seconded (I studied this in 2005-2009).

I don’t think there’s a brilliantly defined line between AI and not AI but it’s relatively key that you define a problem and something else then figures out a solution. Lots of things like shortest path using a* is AI for example. You don’t even need to get to a fuzzy point to consider something AI.

I don’t think people appreciate just how general LLMs are, and how incredibly narrow even the broadest AI systems were really not that long ago.

[__MatrixMan__]

I must've missed that part when I encountered them at university, but I'm happy to have been wrong. I like these things and now apparently the world wants to give me time to brush up on them.

[aledem]

Second that, because, moreover, strictly speaking, none of the technologies existing today is AI. So continuing marketing terms as they are today, all mentioned are totally AI.

[jnwatson]

The rule used to be if you used more than two JOIN clauses, it is AI.

[currymj]

for a truly profound and powerful buzzword, you can even honestly and accurately call what you've done "neurosymbolic AI"