Yesterday, a speaker from the company formerly known as Facebook corrected themselves after mentioning “unsupervised learning,” saying they weren’t supposed to use that term any more. This must be challenging after years of their chief AI scientist promoting unsupervised learning. The reason is apparently that they don’t want the public to worry about the rise of unsupervised AI! Instead, they are using the terms “unlabeled” and “self supervised”.

If I were the lexical police, I would’ve blacklisted the term “learning,” because we’re really just estimating parameters (aka “weights”) of a statistical model. I felt bad saying “learning” even back when I worked in ML full time, but that’s probably just because I lived through the AI winter during which the quickest route to rejection of a paper or grant was to mention “artificial intelligence.”