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You should give it a try. Tao is a wonderful person and is trying to help humanity.
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> is trying to help humanity.

That is what all marketing wants you to think...

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It’s not marketing. This guy could have signed up for one of those hundred million dollar salaries with a phone call and did not. I know several people who have met him and everyone says he’s the genuine article. He’s actually just devoted to human mathematics.

One tragic thing about all of this is that unlike almost every profession, mathematics actually has a kind of honesty. You honestly solve the problem or you don’t. The pecking order in mathematics at least used to have a grounding in actual abilities. People respect this guy because he’s actually legit.

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Legit people are used by marketing all the time.
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Out-of-hand dismissal of Terence Tao is certainly a take.

And the term "artificial intelligence (AI)" has been the name of the field for 70 years and counting. If anything, "LLM" is a misnomer that's been lingering around since 2018-19. When the term was coined, these systems were relatively small, experimental, and could only produce impractical facsimiles of the English language. This is obviously no longer the case today.

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"artificial intelligence" is a vague and moving target. I'm not sure I would call that "a field".

It's been used to talk about computers playing chess, then machine learning, and now LLM-based systems.

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Of course it's been "used" to talk about those things, because all of those things are examples of AI. Always have been.
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Then it has always been the age of "AI"...So the article title is inaccurate!
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We can meaningfully talk about (1) the existence of a field and (2) the said field hitting its stride. The title of Tao's article denotes the latter.

And oh, what a stride it is: https://vibemathed.com/stats

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Sure, but I expect more precision from people like the author.
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>This is obviously no longer the case today.

Advancement in capability does not mean the mechanism is the different. The LLM name denotes a very specific mechanism..

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>The LLM name denotes a very specific mechanism..

No, not really. This is just the term that stuck around. The "large" is now up to five orders of magnitude larger and "language model" has gone far beyond any simple notion of modeling a singular natural language. And anything you'd cite about transformers, or tokens, or autoregression, etc., is more of a factoid about what works best and happens to be the most convenient in the here and now. I see all of this as an unbroken continuation of work that's been going on since the 1940s.

Instead of trying to play word games, why can't you just read Tao's article?

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> The "large" is now up to five orders of magnitude larger and "language model" has gone far beyond any simple notion of modeling a singular natural language.

Does not matter. It is still an LLM.

And I am not the one who is playing word games. You and your idols are, for sake of marketing.

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If you place an LLM into a harness, alongside evaluation, feedback and problem decomposition / solution integration - it is still an LLM?

There is an LLM acting as a component in a larger system. But that larger system is not an LLM. Calling it an "AI" is indeed an act of marketing as there is no learning / adjustment as we would expect from an intelligence, but calling it an LLM seems to be inaccurate. So what is it?

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>Calling it an "AI" is indeed an act of marketing

Again, this is literally the name of the field (and the tech). It's been around longer than you and probably your parents.

Dartmouth workshop (1956):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop

Random dusty undergrad textbook from the early 70s:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/816fxHVJkHL._SL1500_.jpg

>there is no learning...

If human-like continual learning is suddenly the standard, you can just as easily say that terms like machine learning and deep learning are an "act of marketing".

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>Does not matter. It is still an LLM.

Cool. So now you can accept that "LLMs" are an obvious example of AI.

>You and your idols are, for sake of marketing.

Let's be very clear here. Terence Tao is arguably the greatest mathematician alive. Yet, you are throwing lazy insults and accusations around because you don't like the term "AI". And that's my final comment for you, troll.

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> So now you can accept that "LLMs" are an obvious example of AI...

Not sure what this has to do with what I said. A lot of things have been called "AI" in various times. None of them including the current crop of LLMs are not really AI. But people use AI term loosly and that is fine. But it is a problem when a some thought leader does it.

>troll.

Tell me you have run out of arguments without saying you have run out of arguments...

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