Sir, – It has been a rare day when the pages of The Irish Times do not contain at least one reference to AI – each of which tends to contribute to my consternation – so it was a particular treat to find Chris Horn’s article (“AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality, and its true business impact has yet to be proven”, Business, November 14th).
I had been aware that the best large language models (“LLMs”) had achieved only 90 per cent results when confronted with narrative arithmetical problems normally set for American 14-year-olds. I was fascinated to learn, however, that even relatively small changes (even such as changing the name of the person said to be making a purchase) in the questions from the standardised tests resulted in poorer performances by the LLMs. This rather suggests that discussions of these questions and answers may have formed part of the massive amount of information the LLMs absorbed as part of their training.
I have long had serious doubts about the ultimate usefulness of AI. For one thing, I object to its being called “artificial intelligence”. I have no problem with the abbreviation itself, however, since for me AI stands for “automated information”. In the same way that an extremely knowledgeable person may appear to be more intelligent than he actually is, AI can at least appear to be exercising a degree of intelligence, even if only that of an above-average 14-year-old.
AI is also designed to identify and duplicate patterns in the information it possesses, but while this may have its benefits it is ultimately dependent on the information it holds. A knowledgeable but rather dim person may give us very good advice as a result of seeing an analogy between our situation and one of which he is already aware, but we might be better off with advice from a smarter and more creative friend.
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I was, by the way, also glad to hear that Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame) is ignoring AI for now. I suspect that when he reviews it “in five years’ time”, he will find that it does not justify the massive investment currently being made in it. – Yours, etc,
WILLIAM HUNT,
Ranelagh,
Dublin 6.