A retrospective: the appeal and failures of the AI discipline
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An author reflects on his experience twenty years ago traveling to London to pursue a degree in "Computing with Artificial Intelligence," and explains why he still keeps AI on his personal profile to this day. The article uses the "AI effect" as a thread, discussing that this discipline has both its failures and the appeal that keeps drawing him in.
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In a personal essay, the author reflects on twenty years since leaving home to study computer science, explaining why AI drew them in: a field built on tackling problems computers cannot yet solve, where success gets absorbed into ordinary technology (the "AI Effect") and only the failures keep the AI label. They contrast that tradition of heuristics and resource-constrained approximation with today's generative AI, which they see as mostly scale-up engineering, and with papers whose contribution is simply asking an LLM to do something. They still call themselves an AI researcher "at heart," with a tongue-in-cheek "not that kind" disclaimer.
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