Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I think OpenAI did this before I get around to writing this blog post, but if you want AI to succeed, stop calling it AI.

There is a large part of society that doesn’t like “AI.”

First, how do you pronounce “AI?” Is it “A” then “I” or it some word that sort of sounds like “-ayiaiaiaiai?” Second, why doesn’t anyone expand that “AI” thing into a couple of words? What are they hiding? And another thing, “Why do you keep talking about the science behind something instead of just saying something. We don’t call it “liquid dynamics;” we call it plumbing.

Instead of calling it “AI,” let’s just have products that do something for us. Let’s have a product: I speak into my phone, “Get me plane tickets to Chicago for Tuesday morning coming back Thursday afternoon.” Boom. I got ’em and they’re paid for. We don’t need “a generative AI large language model with 17Billion parameters (what are parameters, anyway?) trained on travel data scooped off the Internet in privacy violating fashion…”

There are scheduling programs where I enter the names of everyone I wish to invite and the week I wish to meet them. Boom. Here is the day and time when everyone can meet. I don’t care if there is AI, IA, AAA, or a hamster running in a wheel. I just want a time that is open on everyone’s schedule.

OpenAI seems to have done this. They have ChatGPT. Oh, chat. I know what chat is. Good. I can chat to the computer and get real answers. “GPT?” That’s like a jeep, you know, that fun car. So I’m chit chatting in a fun way and getting answers. Good stuff.

Funny how that all became a super-successful product?

Want AI to succeed? Stop calling it AI.