this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
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Considering I saw an article headline about a study involving a neural network labeled as "AI", definitely not.
Aren't neural networks AI by definition, if we take the academic definition into account?
I know that thermostat is an AI, because it reacts to a stimuli (current temperature) and makes an action (starts heating) basted on it's state. Which is the formal AI definition.
Wait. That actually means transformers are not AI by definition. Hmm, I need to look into it some more.
EDIT: I was confusing things, that's the definition of AI Agent. I'll go research the AI definition some more :D
Yes, neural networks are, usually, AI, but no, thermostats are not AI.
The definition of AI is more or less "a machine that can accomplish something that an intelligent thing like a human can do but which would be unfeasible or impossible to create an explicit algorithm for the machine to follow in order to accomplish it."
So natural language translation is AI: before it became usable in the 2000s, this was seen as something that only humans could do. Producing meaningful text and recognisable images from scratch or a prompt is AI for the same reason.
On the threadiverse people equate AI with Artificial General Intelligence, i.e. something capable of true reasoning, with something we might call "understanding" (not a concept that I can attempt to define, but if you think about that ability which LLMs lack in spite of being able to produce text as if they had it) but this is ahistorical.
I always just considered AI as a CS field that included things like planning, pathfinding, logic and symbolic reasoning, and ML, of course. Most of it is built on optimization and constraint satisfaction algorithms.
Pathfinding is another great example.