AGI is essentially a PR term rather than a rigorous concept, and its promotion distorts research priorities and confuses young people about what the technology actually is.

2:43AGI, by the way? >> Uh, AGI to me is just a bit of it's it's a PR term. Uh, and it it's uh some people think it's it's fun because you have to have these great aspirations. I think it's just distortion. I think it confuses young people. And as I will talk about today a little bit, I think that uh one of the things I uh find most

3:01alarming about the the so-called thought leaders that uh one will see often on podcasts and uh other venues is the alarmist tone or the exuberant tone. And I think 20 and 25 year olds are watching that and and saying am I going to be exuberant or I'm going to be alarmist? Those are the two choices. And I hope that this conversation we're about to have is uh one that uh makes it clear to

3:25young people that there is other ways to to approach life and in technology. I've never actually thought of myself as an AI researcher. I didn't h read an AI book. The the term was coined in the in the 50s and John McCarthy and others had particular goals in mind for coining it. Um and they had particular methods in mind like logical inference and so on that didn't really quite pan out. In the

3:46meantime uh in the 60s and 70s you know 80s something arose called machine learning the actual methods like decision trees and nearest neighbor and uh logistic regression and hidden markup models were developed in other literatures mostly statistics operations research and so on and that led to industrial success stories. So supply chains and commerce and uh transportation systems all used and still to this day use vast amounts of

4:10machine learning. they used gradient-based methods and you know the cloud was developed to handle machine learning workloads at Amazon in fact uh and so that's the tradition I came up in I was trying to think about systems building uh at scale um that would also serve multiple people the AI buzzword returned I think you know maybe five or so years ago uh because the the data that got to be started to be used was

4:33language data and so the box now is not just making predictions about supply chains or commerce or prices or whatever it spits out a human fluent language and people said, "Oh my god, we've solved the old AI problem." In fact, in some ways by if you define the AI problem narrowly like the touring test. Yeah. But there was this ongoing tradition of machine learning and by that time had