AI
A moving label, not a technology. “AI” doesn’t name a fixed thing the way model or token does, it points at whatever computers can newly, impressively do. Right now it points at large language models. It has pointed at very different things before:
| Era | What “AI” meant |
|---|---|
| 1950s | Symbolic reasoning, theorem provers, checkers programs. |
| 1960s-70s | Rule-based symbolic programs, ELIZA, SHRDLU. |
| 1980s | Expert systems, thousands of hand-written if-then rules encoding human expertise. |
| 1990s | Game-tree search, Deep Blue beating Kasparov (1997). Researchers avoided the word “AI” entirely |
| 2000s | Statistical machine learning, spam filters, recommenders. Still sold as “machine learning”, not “AI” |
| 2010s | Deep learning, image recognition (AlexNet, 2012), AlphaGo (2016). |
| 2020s | Large language models, ChatGPT (2022) made “AI” mean chatbots |
The pointer moves by a known mechanism, sometimes called the AI effect: once a technique works reliably, it gets renamed, it’s “just” search, “just” statistics, and “AI” slides forward to the next unsolved thing. The observation is old. Bertram Raphael put it this way in 1971: “AI is a collective name for problems which we do not yet know how to solve properly by computer.” Larry Tesler’s version, from around 1979: “Intelligence is whatever machines haven’t done yet.”
This is why conversations about AI so often talk past each other. A claim like “AI can’t reason” or “AI is overhyped” carries a hidden timestamp, it may be about expert systems, about 2010s image classifiers, or about last month’s LLM, and each reference supports a different conclusion. When a discussion about AI stalls, the fix is usually to swap the word for whichever precise term is actually meant: the model, the harness, the agent, the context it was given.
Avoid: “AI” in any technical claim, name the part you mean instead. “AI coding” as a label for the practice is fine; “the AI is hallucinating” is not.
Usage:
“The CTO wants to know whether AI could handle the triage queue.”
“Translate that before scoping it, she means an LLM in a harness with access to the ticket system. ‘AI’ on its own isn’t a spec.”
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