There's essentially a push to relabel/rename many "unsupervised" methods and "self-supervised". Yann Lecun is one of the more famous proponents of this (https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10155934004262143), but I've been seeing the term gain traction.
The reason for this is that people felt that unsupervised learning was a misleading name for many of the so-called unsupervised learning methods, such as language-modeling. They argue that there is a supervised training signal in these methods, the only difference is that the training signal comes from the model "input" itself, rather than an external label.
Ultimately, I'm not entirely sure if there is really a distinction between the two if you argue it all the way down to the details (is PCA unsupervised? or self-supervised since it's constructing a model with respect to its own inputs), but I think it's generally intuitive what self-supervised methods refer to and I'm on board for this renaming.
The reason for this is that people felt that unsupervised learning was a misleading name for many of the so-called unsupervised learning methods, such as language-modeling. They argue that there is a supervised training signal in these methods, the only difference is that the training signal comes from the model "input" itself, rather than an external label.
Ultimately, I'm not entirely sure if there is really a distinction between the two if you argue it all the way down to the details (is PCA unsupervised? or self-supervised since it's constructing a model with respect to its own inputs), but I think it's generally intuitive what self-supervised methods refer to and I'm on board for this renaming.