A Short Rant on AI

I could make the rant incredibly short: AI doesn’t exist, and we don’t currently have a path to it existing.

What we have is a series of tools that can make high-level educated guesses about interpreting data that has not been explicitly structured for them in systems external to themselves.

Think about it like this:

Websites have “structured data” and “unstructured data”.

Structured data exists within specific formats that have been designed around standards put in use across services. An example would be a website for a grocery store where they list their business hours, denoting them with code strings that identify those bits of info for any outside machine tools looking at the site. In our example, that means that Apple Maps on my iPhone, when I search for the nearest Aldi, can see that they close at 8:00PM, and it ingests that data and presents it in the app in a predictable area.

Unstructured data would be more like a small business owner building their own website, and instead of using “structured data” for their open and closed times, they mention those times in a blog post in natural language. If I searched for them in Apple Maps, the app might query the site for business hours, but the data isn’t where it’s expected, and my map fails to pull that closing time.

Current “artificial intelligence” operates by being “trained” on billions of pieces of data to allow it to make sufficiently correct inferences about unstructured data that exists on the web. It has been fed most all of the versions of “We’ll be open on Friday from 12:00 to 9:00”, and it has learned that what comes next is what should be in a structured data field, so it translates the unstructured data into structured data.

The problem is that it’s like a kid reading to get an assignment done, rather than someone reading to learn, so it’soften as likely to see someone say, “I wish we could be open from 12:00 to 9:00, but we’ll be closed for a network upgrade, and report back that they will be open from 12-9.