[ben_w]

> It very frequently feels like management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks. It is remarkable that investors have any faith in such founders/entrepreneurs at all.

My guess is the causality is usually* the managers are pursuing things because their investors (/government ministries) hinted it was the future after snorting a line of "TED talks" and "social-media".

Irony is, I really do mean "hinted", it can be a sycophantic/fawning relationship where those with the power don't even realise what's going on. One place I interviewed at ages ago now, before the current AI boom, the CTO and I were talking about what they were doing with AI: a bunch of if-else statements forming a manually-built decision tree. But they had to say "AI" to keep interest high.

* this clearly wasn't the case with Zuckerberg's pivot to anything given his ownership structure and piles of cash, so The Metaverse is entirely his fault; Musk, despite the ownership structure, clearly ran out of investor's money or he wouldn't have taken SpaceX public, so his pivots may still have been as I posit.

[rcxdude]

One piece of managment advice I've gotten is to be very careful about what ideas you're throwing out there, because people can very easily get the wrong idea about the priority, and this can get worse as multiple layers get involved.

[datsci_est_2015]

Well people assume that as you move up the chain of command, the ratio of noise to signal drops precipitously. If your CEO is focusing on idle musings then I would fear that you’re directionless. But in reality no one person can be laser focused for 24 hours a day, including the 5 minutes you happen to spend with someone talking about something you just read while in the elevator.

[inigyou]

Decision trees are one of the oldest forms of AI! There are even algorithms to automatically form decision trees, though you don't need ML to have AI.

[ben_w]

Indeed; As I recall, I mentioned GOFAI in the interview and got amused agreement.

[erikerikson]

Those algorithms were only called machine learning and it's the opposite. Before the marketers got ahold of it we reserved AI for the actually intelligent, sentient, full strength vision of intelligent systems. We now talk about general AIs and A[Super]Is.

[rrvsh]

That's not true. AI was widely used to refer to the decision systems and state machines that produced NPC behaviour in video games, and I'm sure many other things than just science fiction

[erikerikson]

That's true. The gaming community used the acronym that way. Good exception to the rule.

As your respondents point out there's also been the pattern of clever algorithms being classified as "AI" until they were understood. That differentiated those selling snake oil from the serious.

[regularfry]

Parsing used to be "AI". If you look at proceedings of old AI conferences you get this impression that anything interesting you might program a computer to do has passed through the field at some point.

[inigyou]

Weren't they trying to parse human languages? I think that's still AI. And they didn't manage to, but what they tried ended up falling down to a more basic level of computer science.

[kyle-rb]

The term AGI was coined almost 30 years ago; is that when the marketers got ahold of it?

[datsci_est_2015]

I would say IBM poisoned the well with the term AI. Watson was probably the biggest inflection point, but there was stuff earlier too.

[ben_w]

I'm old enough to remember Deep Blue.

[erikerikson]

Obviously not but the community has shifted its language away from AI.

I did not claim we coined AGI in response to marketers.

[inigyou]

It's all different forms of monkeystatus games. Humans, like other primates, have an area of the brain which monitors how dominant they are within the pack. Capitalism is all about this brain area. Despite beliefs, it has nothing to do with merit.