What has been bugging me for a long time is the fact that LLMs are called AI when they are very clearly not.
The promised capabilities are just not there, LLMs are never going to magically turn into AGI. And yet, CEOs promise exactly that although they surely must know better by now.
Just to make it abundantly clear: they are making claims about the technology that are patently false, misleading and vastly exaggerated. They’re selling snake oil.
It really reminds me of Theranos, where the idea sounded good but once they tried implementing it they realized it wasn’t feasible. And yet, Elizabeth Holmes continued, there was just too much money going around.
“AI” is just the same. LLMs looked amazing in the beginning, but by now we know how limited their application really is. And yet, there seems to be no limit in how much money can be sunk in the whole “business”.
It’s not a bubble when everyone is lying about the product, it’s a scam.
Well, obviously AI is a nebulous term that defies a concise definition.
Yes, generative AI has been oversold.
Yes, I agree that General Intelligence is not going to arise from incremental improvements to LLMs.
The limitless money being poured in to the whole shit show presently is not completely without purpose. In the same way that roman roads existed long after the collapse of the empire, and physical data networks existed after the dot com bust, so too will the data centres exist after everyone realises that LLMs aren’t very productive.
It’ll be great for the surveillance state