Should jackasses on HN use plain language instead of jargon? Surely.
But AI workers mainly develop and use jargon because it is an easy and natural way to consolidate concepts.
Sure, there is a kind of conspiracy caused by publish or perish. Researchers may use jargon to make their work harder to reject on review; laborious speech and jargon can make statements sound more profound. However, no technical field is immune to this. We'll need to systematically change science before we can eliminate that problem.
Until we manage that, if you care about the concepts enough to want to understand them before there are good plain speech descriptions, just pop the jargon into google scholar and skim read a few papers, and you're good to go. If you don't care about the concepts that much, then don't worry about the jargon. The important concepts will get their own non-technical explanations in time.
As it stands, AI jargon is not that bad. It tends to be pretty fair and easy to understand, compared to jargon in, say, biochemistry or higher math.
But AI workers mainly develop and use jargon because it is an easy and natural way to consolidate concepts.
Sure, there is a kind of conspiracy caused by publish or perish. Researchers may use jargon to make their work harder to reject on review; laborious speech and jargon can make statements sound more profound. However, no technical field is immune to this. We'll need to systematically change science before we can eliminate that problem.
Until we manage that, if you care about the concepts enough to want to understand them before there are good plain speech descriptions, just pop the jargon into google scholar and skim read a few papers, and you're good to go. If you don't care about the concepts that much, then don't worry about the jargon. The important concepts will get their own non-technical explanations in time.
As it stands, AI jargon is not that bad. It tends to be pretty fair and easy to understand, compared to jargon in, say, biochemistry or higher math.