The most hopeless attempt at a semantic alternative is probably the most accurate: “software.” Stefano Quintarelli, a former Italian politician and technologist came up with another alternative, “Systemic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences” or SALAMI, to underscore the ridiculousness of the questions people have been posing about AI: Is SALAMI sentient? Will SALAMI ever have supremacy over humans? What is a better alternative? Reasonable technologists have tried for years to replace “AI” with “machine learning systems,” but that doesn’t trip off the tongue in quite the same way. We need a different lexicon that doesn’t propagate magical thinking about computer systems, and doesn’t absolve the people designing those systems from their responsibilities. The closest scientists have come is to emulating the brain of a worm, with 302 neurons. Long-running efforts to try and replicate the human brain with its roughly 85 billion neurons have all failed. Neural networks aren’t copies of the human brain in any way they are only loosely inspired by its workings. Not helping matters: Terms like “neural networks” and “deep learning” only bolster the idea that these programs are humanlike. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google both suffered embarrassing demos in which their new search engines glitched on facts. That is foolhardy when GPT-4 continues to make errors, and it was only a few weeks ago that Microsoft Corp. These systems are trained to generate text that sounds plausible, yet they are marketed as new oracles of knowledge that can be plugged into search engines. Helped along by an army of humans reprograming it with corrections, the models glom words together based on probability. But GPT-4 and other large language models like it are simply mirroring databases of text - close to a trillion words for the previous model - whose scale is difficult to contemplate. The system sounds even more humanlike than its predecessor, naturally reinforcing notions of its intelligence.

Last week OpenAI announced GPT-4, a major upgrade to the technology underpinning ChatGPT.

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