To me they're the same thing. If there's a bunch of training data that is fed into a system that creates a model, then it's not traditional programming, where someone laboriously writes out if statements by hand. AI and ML aren't, as far as I'm aware, rigorously specifically defined terms. They're words that marketing picked up and ran with it. To me, what matters is: is there a black box somewhere in the system that's a bag of numbers, or is it code that a human could dig in and read.
There are both ML that is not AI, and AI that is not ML.
For example, if you pick them manually, decision trees can be AI but not ML. Video game character behavior is a trivial example.
Eliza for example is also not ML, but could be called AI.
Likewise, there is ML that is not AI. Such is debatable, because you could always argue that using machine-learning on anything results in intelligence. The way I see it, things like image enhancement or voice replacement are not artificial intelligence at all. I probably could not define a hard line where it becomes artificial intelligence though.
I don’t know what the op meant by manually picking but the expert systems of the 80s and case based reasoning systems of the 90s used fairly static decision functions and were explicitly called AI at the time.
for example, mob behavior in Minecraft is often described as AI. It's nothing more than some simple state tracking, task prioritization, pathfinding, etc. and absolutely none of it has been through autodiff.
It is correct to argue about misleading terminology. "AI" contains the word "intelligence", and for instance logistic regression algorithm is not intelligent, while it is clearly ML, since machine learns something. As Machine learning is broader category, it should include Artificial Intelligence, not vice versa.
Also, 'every single course' is perhaps an overstatement - a course that I co-authored tries to get it right from the first principles.
The machine is learning something so that it can produce outputs based on its learned knowledge. At a high level that seems to be very clearly AI. What am I missing here? You’re probably right, I’m asking genuinely.
It's a matter of definitions, but I can at least understand someone wanting to make a distinction between reactive and non-reactive 'AI' (such as data filters).
There's overlap and edge cases, though: Maybe you have a program that summarizes texts. One could argue that's no different from a passive filter. But can you then ask questions about the text? That's unquestionably AI.
AI and ML have very clear definitions[1]. ML has been a subset of AI, always has been. Latest marketing or "scare quotes" doesn't/shouldn't change that. Especially not in a technical forum like HN.
Laypeople are changing how “AI” is used in common language, like they previously did for “algorithm” and “crypto”.
The textbook definition of AI is a system that solves problems that are difficult for humans. Whether the approach uses formal logic, machine learning, neural networks as a special case of machine learning, optimization, search problems, etc. does not matter.
I never heard people calling machine learning "AI" until large language models made it trivial to market it as such. Like, I remember back when Netflix, for instance, was going around advertising how machine learning (not AI) powers their recommendations.
You should listen better. The University of Edinburgh had an entire Department of Artificial Intelligence when I was an undergrad there in the 1990s, and one of the things it researched was machine learning.
That example kind of illustrates my point though? ML being in an AI book doesn't mean ML is AI, just as being in the dairy section does not make almond milk dairy.
It illustrates that some people can’t distinguish between a useful label by association for the general public, and their own desperate compulsion to litigate hair-splitting category distinctions.
Someone who was truly on the ball on this matter might’ve observed that Edinburgh in the 90s was so balkanized by internecine personality conflicts that most research that might later be strictly labelled “machine learning” actually took place in adjacent units and not directly under the DAIry. But I suppose you haven’t heard that, either.
Exactly what do you think my argument is? It's not "I didn't hear of [anything], therefore it doesn't exist / is not admissible". It's roughly "I didn't see machine learning referred to as 'AI' for years, until LLMs happened, at which point most companies that used to say 'machine learning' started calling the same things 'AI'".
You don't have to be snarky about it. I've heard it's okay to not know things. Is that wrong too?
Also:
> desperate compulsion to litigate hair-splitting category distinctions.
All I'm saying is that neither one is a strict subset of the other. Even though AI and ML are incredibly related to the point of even mostly overlapping in practice, they're not the same thing! AI is an outcome and ML is a mechanism. You can use the mechanism to achieve the outcome, or you can use a different mechanism to achieve the outcome, or you can use the mechanism to achieve a different outcome. That's all. If that's a hair-splitting category distinction to you, then so be it.
Ed: I disagree. My recollection is that machine learning was routinely sold as “AI” even when it obviously wasn’t. (IBM’s Watson was good at Jeopardy but not real medical applications.)
This isn’t exactly the same, but nothing in the book Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence would be considered AI today.
You must be thinking of a different machine learning. All the on-device machine learning, backend machine learning, OCR, etc. was all called "machine learning" before LLMs. Yes, the field of artificial intelligence still existed, often used machine learning, and called the result "AI". But Apple would call keyboard prediction machine learning. Microsoft would call OCR machine learning. YouTube called machine transcription machine learning. Google called camera image enhancement machine learning.
Microsoft now calls everything AI (actually mostly "Copilot"). YouTube now calls everything AI (including genuine LLMs and generative features, but also everything it used to call machine learning). Google now calls everything AI (including everything it used to call machine learning). Apple is seemingly the only one immune.
My argument is not that no one ever used "AI" to refer to a product that utilized machine learning, but rather that the term of art in the industry for machine learning itself was actually "machine learning", not "AI", until LLMs took over and made it "AI".
You would not pull a library off the shelf for "AI", it would be for machine learning. You would not implement and perform "AI", but machine learning. Even central parts of the AI ecosystem like PyTorch advertise as being for "deep learning", which is a subset of machine learning. Not "AI".
Counter example, the book that is the foundation of much coursework and learning for people in AI, has a whole section on "Machine Learning" with all that k-means and such in there - https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/
I'm really not sure how that's a counterexample. The section is called machine learning, not AI. Machine learning is a useful tool for artificial intelligence, so I'd be surprised if a book about AI did not talk about it.
I'm saying that Machine Learning was borne of AI from the very beginning. ML has become specialized enough that we may later (much much later) declare it somehow larger/separate/overlapping, but it originated from AI as the generic umbrella.
Thank you. I was starting to think the history revision was almost true, but your recollection is very much in sync with my own. Everything was machine learning, nobody talked about AI unless it was for research, now marketing has changed that, unfortunately.
> Everything was machine learning, nobody talked about AI unless it was for research
Machine learning was AI. The specific wording was a branding choice, because "AI" was a deeply stigmatized brand. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter ) But there was not a conceptual division.
There's a close analogue to how modern genetic researchers are happy to tell you that your genome is not informative as to your "race", but it is informative as to your "ancestry".
For a long time, AI was a bad word that stood for unfulfilled promise. See AI Winter. Hence, researchers strictly avoided the term while still working on learning algorithms, the same that power LLM training.
It's stupid because there's no formal definition of what counts as AI, so we repeat the same conversation every time. Hence the joke ML is just AI that works.
There's a book from 1995, called Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, by by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, which gives the definition "AI is the study of agents that receive percepts from the environment and perform actions." but doesn't define intelligence.
I personally would find it sufficient just to prove both that AI can exist without ML and that ML can exist without AI. The former is easy to prove, since AI has essentially existed since even before computing, while the latter is harder to prove, since ML as a field was created for AI.
> If we go with that, though, I'd say AI is anything that uses a model to make decisions instead of hand written "if" statements.
Hand-written if-statements are a model though...
I would say AI is anything with the intention of performing as a human does. In my opinion, LLMs are AI because they're designed to either perform a human role, or be addressable like a human to a user. (In general I do not agree with implying intelligence by humanity or that it is exclusive to humanity, but it is genuinely the easiest way for me to explain this here.)
Even LLMs that are used as part of harnesses or backend services would count for this, because you could technically replace the model with an equivalent human and they would be able to read and write in its place.
And pre-LLM AI would also count for this, because the whole selling point of AI is that it's like a human in some way or could perform as a human does in some way. Even if it's purely for entertainment value or whatever, if the entertainment value includes that it seems like a human.
But uses of ML that have nothing to do with this would not count, like for example camera image enhancement. You could say a human could sit there and work through some algorithm manually (like from a book, etc) but that's not what image enhancement algorithms are doing. Now if you let an LLM have access to human-UX-ful photo editing tools and let it iterate or etc. then that would be AI but that's another thing.
It's difficult to define precisely exactly what this definition is though. Different people have different ideas of what "performing as a human does" means. If the ML algorithm is executing machine code instructions to perform a task then could a human execute the same machine code instructions by hand to prove that it's AI? No, because the human has to be in place of it, not emulating it. The human would have to take its inputs and give its outputs, without depending on its definition. So, then, it depends on where you define the boundaries of the system. LLMs typically output in tokens, so would a human have to think in tokens? No, because the use of tokens is as a text encoding, and humans are perfectly free to use tools in their work, etc. A human being able to read and write text in English would still prove that a language model that reads and writes the same but in tokens is AI as long as they would be more or less interchangeable.
Of course, today's LLMs are not really true replacements for humans but I'm not talking about performance here, just where they can be positioned. AI to me is more of an intention than a technology -- any technology can be AI depending on how you use it. ML however is a technology, no matter the intention.
I took one longer ago than that and it wasn't all perceptrons and neural networks. It included other things too, like: planning, search methods, inference engines, decision trees, ...
Calling things "robots" is more about the amount of movement. Spinning in place like a washing machine sprayer isn't enough to qualify.
A paint conveyer belt is not a robot. A sprinkler system is not a robot. A CnC machine might be a robot. A conveyer belt that sorts items might be a robot. A roomba is a robot. And all of these function just fine.
I think of robots as general purpose, machines are specific purpose. When it works, we make it single purpose because that’s far far cheaper than general purpose.
>> Cardiac events from Apple Watches is not “AI” though
> It would have been, 20 years ago.
No, it would have been called what it is both then and now; an asynchronous message emitted by a device having sensors capable of detecting when to do so.
Even for upper middle class parents, "using a screen as a babysitter" just means you're more stressed and have less hands around. My kiddo has not seen a screen at the age of 2, but that's just because he has two parents at home at 5pm everyday.
I made the error of wasting my time (ahem... it was fun while it lasted, at least) not having a kid until I turned 49... which meant our parents were too elderly (or dead) to help (my mom had me at 35) in any significant capacity, and the rest of my relatives (as it just so happened) already had plans to move away to FL before he was conceived.
This has resulted in so much stress (especially in the 3's and 4's, because he still doesn't sleep through the night in his own goddamn bed) that I arguably lost a job from it... 50+ year old bodies are simply not well-capable of handling toddlers for the more-than-fulltime-weekly hours that they require
I'm sure there are fringe benefits though but damn
I don't think child rearing is supposed to be as difficult as modern society makes it.
As you pointed out, you don't have a lot of help in raising your kid. You're expected to do it mostly with your partner (or god forbid alone).
They've done some studies of hunter gather tribes to determine who handled babies the most. Turns out the kids' actual parents only handled the kids for about half the time (I think even a little less)! The term for it is "alloparenting".
Evolution did not prime us for this level of child care. Good luck to you!
Even without going that far back, I imagine it was easier when parents kicked the kids out of the house and told them not to come back until dinner time.
> Even without going that far back, I imagine it was easier when parents kicked the kids out of the house and told them not to come back until dinner time.
Did people ever do that with under-twos? Or under-fives?
The big difference in more recent times was community and extended family help, and at least one parent having more time at home.
I'm of an age to have grown up like that, and one of the real drags was having to take my 3-5 year-old sibling along on whatever activity the rest of us were up to. ("But mom, we're building a fort - do I have to?") The other kids with younger siblings did the same. As I recall, at five I wasn't to leave the yard by myself, but as a mixed-age group of ~3-11 year-olds, yeah: we ran around all over the place together. The older kids took on responsibility for the younger ones.
So, yeah, that's eighties suburbia, and my sister wasn't less than two. On the other hand, if there'd been a larger age difference (and, maybe if I'd been a girl? My mum was more progressive about gender roles than most of her contemporaries, but still) I expect she'd have been entrusted to me earlier. Starting at the age of ~4 I'd been left alone with my sister for up to an hour while she napped, with the instruction to run next door to get my mother if she woke up.
It was not like that in the London suburb I grew up in in the 80s. I think it was more common in smaller and poorer towns - maybe because people had less space at home. I agree the age gap probably affects it a lot. Keeping an eye on a younger child at home with help near by is very different from going out.
Kids spending a lot of time in front of the TV was already a concern in the 80s so screen time was definitely a problem back then. IIRC the average amount of time children spent watching TV a day was about five hours a day in the UK.
Of course. Regions and cultures and families varied all over the place - and still do today. I wasn't trying to make any kind of universal claim, just explaining how our social group handled the "but what do you do about younger kids?" question the GP asked.
Yah. Screen time (and, once I got older, specifically video games) caused a lot of parental angst amongst my peer-group's parents, too. My family didn't have a TV, so I read lots of books. Funnily enough, I (later) ran across Victorian-era think-pieces about how books were damaging to young people for all of the same reasons that people are (now, and back when we were kids) concerned about screens.
By the way, this same subject came up in another thread a few days ago, and I had this to say:
Evidently there was quite a bit of handwringing in the 1950s that the "nuclear family" was bad for children and would lead to more divorce, since there were no longer grandparents and aunts and uncles around to help with childrearing.
I'm EXTREMELY jealous of my partner's older cousins who are now grandparents and specifically stipulate that their kids drop their grandkids off at their house every other weekend (!!!!) so that they can devote it to themselves.
If that's not a good-marriage hack, then I don't know what is! And their parents KNEW it! Because when that's NOT happening, the weekends are almost 100% kid-focused. It is absolutely overwhelming, even with breaks here and there.
That stage does not last very long and kids require a lot less attention as they get older. if you are still at that stage I imagine its tough, but it will get a lot easier pretty soon and it is definitely worth it.
It’s 2026, they’re more like 140 year old by now :)
> now crammed full of people and cars
Funnily enough, if you look at the 1950 census, in every single building I have lived in in San Francisco, there were more people than there are now :).
The city has so much underdeveloped land (come on, 2% of of the surface of of the second densest city in the US spent on the lowest density sport ever, golf???), tearing down our heritage does not make sense when we have so much usable space.
Instead of trying to decide for yourself where growth should go, I recommend letting the owner of each place decide what to do with it. That's what really solves crises like these - not everyone's opinion, but allowing the owner of every property to act in their motivated self-interest.
Good luck finding anyone in SF who wants to replace open space with more density. SF is amazingly lucky that it has so much green space and it's a big reason the city is so desirable. Increasing sprawl into our open spaces seems like a really bad idea to me (and I assume most people who live in SF). You could argue we should replace golfing with other green-space uses, and I'm sure you'd find takers, but for more sprawl? I doubt it.
Also I never understood this obsession with "heritage". Why not promote the next generation of SF architecture instead? Modernize the victorian into increased density, create something new and creative. Over time blend the new-ness with the old. This ideology of stasis seems at-odds with SF's image as an innovation hub, both technologically and culturally. Why should our architecture be stagnant when our ethos is to constantly push forward?
This is one of the big loses we've had to NIMBYism / prop 13 / regressive zoning. We could have such cool, interesting architectural advances, but ironically our perverse urban development incentive structure discourages those kinds of innovations.
This is an issue in other cities that don’t have prop 13 fwiw, the United States just does not do redevelopment barring a few poor inner neighborhoods getting gentrified by foreclosures in like Houston or Dallas. That’s the natural consequence of individual ownership of houses.
Consequences for American car executives, are you crazy? Have you seen Stellantis cars recently? Large parts of the US (and European most likely) car industry is driving straight into irrelevance
On the topic of Stellantis, I rented one recently (through no fault of my own) and when I returned it the guy asked me how it was. I told him I wouldn't drive one of those things again if they paid me, and the guy said "yeah we get that a lot, let me get you the discount".
It sounded like they had a "Stellantis discount" for people who said something.
Jeep Wagoneer, I just remember the Stellantis logo on the infotainment boot screen. I thought it was a Stellantis Wagoneer because the Jeep logo was almost completely absent, at least in memory.
Okay so this was actually about a year or two ago, but I remember the infotainment system glitched out a lot for no discernible reason, which prevented me from accessing a lot of the controls, and I had some difficulty with the hardware controls which just felt poorly thought out from a UX standpoint.
Some of the things an owner would obviously get used to, but it felt like you were constantly struggling with it to do simple things that you don't even really notice doing in most vehicles.
The infotainment system was constantly having trouble, like freezing up or just shutting down for no apparent reason and not turning back on. I remember a lot of issues with the backup camera. Not unique for a modern car, but this one had more than its fair share of glitches. I think I had to reset it twice. It also developed an issue (sorry can't recall what it was exactly) that persisted for a day or two which spontaneously resolved itself while I was driving back to the dealership.
I want to say it had hardware AC controls (which is good), but I think I had it for three days and only figured out how to adjust it the way I wanted it on day three. I don't recall if I didn't understand that something was a button, or if a button actually had several different "modes" which weren't readily apparent, like being a combo rocker/push button. Normally these sorts of things are obvious from how the dash is deaigned, but my wife and I took three days to puzzle it out.
There were some other minor problems, but altogether it felt poorly thought out and kind of low quality, which clashed with some of the "luxury" accents my model was equipped with, like wood paneling and the lights which spelled out "WAGONEER" on the ground at night when you opened the door, which felt gimmicky. That money would have been better spent on refining the UX.
I actually don't think it was a bad drive, if you were just driving. I was just constantly frustrated trying to do anything else with it.
Thank you. Reminds me my struggle with a new cellphone about 6 or so years ago (don't remember the brand :(). Random reboots when I was using Maps (a very scary thing when you are driving in a new country), corrupted memory card and lost images, random freezing. Call quality was ok, pictures were so-so, but it is just like you said - things around main function - that's what makes or breaks the experience. On paper the phone looked really good, but the experience as whole was awful. Got back from the trip, returned phone back to Costco...
Stellantis is wild. They went from having a large portfolio of brands, each of which had many popular vehicles in America to having the Chrysler minivan, the Dodge charger, the Jeep Wrangler/Gladiator, and the Ram pickup.
It is though, like, 90-95% of suburbia, and why the US has close to 100% of car commuters ( https://vis.csh.ac.at/citiesmoving/ ). Even small cities like Rennes (or even Clermont-Ferrand, which has objectively mediocre transit) have less car commuters than NYC, which is insane.
Yeah, the main issue with differential privacy is that you need competent government officials making decisions who understand math beyond a high school level.
> The law does have immigrant visas for people who can come here and say "I want to work here and seek permanent residency. I'm not intending to go back." H1B isn't like that.
you are, obviously, interpreting the law to fit your narrative:
""The fact that an alien is the beneficiary of an application for a preference status filed under section 1154 of this title or has otherwise sought permanent residence in the United States shall not constitute evidence of an intention to abandon a foreign residence for purposes of obtaining a visa as a nonimmigrant described in subparagraph (H)(i)(b) or (c), (L), or (V) of section 1101(a)(15) of this title or otherwise obtaining or maintaining the status of a nonimmigrant described in such subparagraph"
All this means is that you, indeed, can be dual intent and apply for permanent residency while holding a H-1B, like generations of Americans have done before ourselves.
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