Buzzword of the year

April 19, 2022 @ 11:28 am · Filed by under Linguistics in the comics

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Or the decade?

Yesterday's SMBC:


The mouseover title: "I just need 10 dollars for every connection in the connectome."

(Which would be $5.4 trillion for the Pathways Language Model…)

The aftercomic:

See also "Sleepless in Samsung", 3/7/2019; and "Meta-methodology", 4/19/2021.

April 19, 2022 @ 11:28 am · Filed by under Linguistics in the comics


13 Comments

  1. Carl said,

    April 19, 2022 @ 1:09 pm

    "Artificial Intelligence" is one of those rare bits of jargon that is more rigorously defined in common usage than in its subfield. In common usage, it means "a computer that can think in a human-like manner." In computer science it means "please fund my research."

  2. Timothy Rowe said,

    April 19, 2022 @ 3:33 pm

    According to the Jargon File, artificial intelligence is the field researched by the artificial intelligencia.

  3. Brett said,

    April 19, 2022 @ 6:46 pm

    @Timothy Rowe: Nice try, but that's not the Jargon File's style of humor at all.

  4. Rod Johnson said,

    April 19, 2022 @ 10:24 pm

    Here's a tweet which seems to be a source for that rather labored bon mot (though it seems likely it isn't the first):

    https://twitter.com/AgileCoachMDW/status/1495844072493355013

  5. Kristian said,

    April 19, 2022 @ 10:29 pm

    If "artificial intelligence" is more impressive than "machine learning" (which seems to be the point of this cartoon), why doesn't he say he does artificial intelligence at the party?

  6. David Marjanović said,

    April 20, 2022 @ 6:07 am

    Because scientists mainly know other scientists, so bragging is futile in social situations.

  7. KeithB said,

    April 20, 2022 @ 7:45 am

    Stan Kelly-Bootle's "Devils DP Dictionary" from 1981 attributes it to Christopher Strachey.

  8. Philip Taylor said,

    April 20, 2022 @ 1:32 pm

    Although I think that David M's hypothesis is sound, I also think that the aspects of one's life that one seeks to emphasise (if one seeks to emphasise them at all) may well depend on the circumstances. So I can imagine, for example, someone at a party saying "I conduct research into the harmful effects of potential treatments for cancer" rather than "I practice vivisection".

  9. wanda said,

    April 20, 2022 @ 6:28 pm

    "Machine learning" can also be puffery. When I first opened up a text on machine learning, I was so disappointed to learn that the first chapter was about doing regressions! I was like, I could have been saying all along that I was doing machine learning!

  10. Thomas Lumley said,

    April 20, 2022 @ 8:14 pm

    My favorite version of this is that a logistic regression model is statistics if it's in R, machine learning if it's in Python, and AI if it's in PowerPoint

  11. Michael Watts said,

    April 20, 2022 @ 11:42 pm

    If "artificial intelligence" is more impressive than "machine learning" (which seems to be the point of this cartoon), why doesn't he say he does artificial intelligence at the party?

    One interpretation is that funding agencies are much stupider than random people at parties.

  12. David Marjanović said,

    April 21, 2022 @ 8:52 am

    Vivisection is a thing of the past and has nothing to do with cancer research anyway…

    One interpretation is that funding agencies are much stupider than random people at parties.

    Scientists certainly think so, and the rules around submitting grants generally give no reason to think otherwise…

  13. Philip Taylor said,

    April 21, 2022 @ 2:52 pm

    Would that that were true, David. Sadly it is anything but :

    Each year, more than 100 million animals—including mice, rats, frogs, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, monkeys, fish, and birds—are killed in U.S. laboratories for biology lessons, medical training, curiosity-driven experimentation, and chemical, drug, food, and cosmetics testing. Before their deaths, some are forced to inhale toxic fumes, others are immobilized in restraint devices for hours, some have holes drilled into their skulls, and others have their skin burned off or their spinal cords crushed. In addition to the torment of the actual experiments, animals in laboratories are deprived of everything that is natural and important to them—they are confined to barren cages, socially isolated, and psychologically traumatized. The thinking, feeling animals who are used in experiments are treated like nothing more than disposable laboratory equipment.

    Source: https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-experimentation/animals-used-experimentation-factsheets/animal-experiments-overview/

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