Why Does Every AI Cycle Start with Chat?

[nameless912]

Short answer: because chat is a shortcut to anthropomorphization in folks' brains. It's much easier to assign personality and intent to a chat than a floating head that needs to be 99.999% lifelike in order to not feel completely fake.

[random_i]

A better answer: natural language is the programming language everyone knows.

[AndrewKemendo]

Not an actual pattern

AI cycle in 2012 started with alexnet

AI cycle in 2019 started with Stable Difffusion

[rsynnott]

Depends what you mean by 'cycle', I suppose. The current hype-cycle _really_ started with ChatGPT; that was the point where people started getting super-excited and declaring that it would replace all human work by next Thursday.

[NBJack]

Chat is perhaps the cheapest implementation you could ever build. It's a linear interaction, easy to test, and arguably the easiest to encode/decode (with a fixed set of inputs too). As an added bonus, it has a familiar, well-understood interface.

[wildzzz]

It is now but it hasn't always been easy to make a computer chat naturally like a human without using canned responses. Chess positions are a much easier interface to implement because it's a closed set and very structured (grid position + piece). But humans don't speak in chess moves so it would be difficult for us to speak to an AI that does.

[alan-hn]

Exactly. Text is very easy for us to analyze, understand, and compare inputs with outputs

[seadan83]

I'm curious about: alpha go, Watson, and the AI that "conquered" chess. Are those outliers, or part of a larger story? It feels to me a contemporary history of AI would mention those milestones.

[P_I_Staker]

Every chat begins with a big smile, yet AI has no face. You've been warning. Acts should be in accordenly

[porcoda]

Uhm… The boom in AI with LLMs wouldn’t have happened without about a decade of major focus on images (both generative models and DNN models that blew traditional image processing out of the water), and planning/optimization type problems (alpha go, chess, etc.). Seems incorrect to claim that chat starts every cycle.