Thank you for reading it. It's a complex subject so I had trouble being concise while still being precise.

I feel like what is true has become a very subjective and fluent thing in the past decade or so. With the internet being flooded with misinformation. Be it from a press that feels the news cycle getting shorter and faster every day, from foreign powers that use the internet and their power/money to spread misinformation or well meaning people simply repeating what they heard. And now in the past few years we can add the flood of slop to that list. It often makes me doubt what is the actual truth, what are half truths and what is outright false.

With these "AI" tools the subjects are hard and given the amount of money, power and attention involved, the water gets pretty muddy fast. It starts with the name of these tools being AI (or even superintelligence wtf). A decade ago calling an LLM a form of AI was fine, because the implication was clear. Neural networks are classified as a form of AI in terms of research and computing, so it's true. But it's only true in the same way Koopas in Super Mario Bros 1 have an "AI". Enemy behavior patterns was often called AI by most people, that's a perfectly fine descriptor. But in those cases everyone understood it was a descriptor for computer algorithms and simple patterns. We all understood it was a very different thing from human intelligence, even though the name was similar. These days the name AI has gotten mixed up in the sci fi concept of AI, something that is beyond humans in many ways, something that often turns evil and is at war with mankind. Because those are interesting concepts and stories for us.

So what is the truth? Is calling an LLM an AI correct? Technically yes. But if the implication is it's anything like those AI systems from sci fi, absolutely not. Obviously it can be very hard to tell what is implied and where the boundary is.

Most experts agree the path these LLMs are on are a pretty dead end and not the way to go. It will not lead to any form of general intelligence and will always suffer from hallucinations and severe limitations. No matter what Uncle Huang says. Creating a super large general model runs into scaling issues very fast. More compute and memory doesn't help that much and increases costs, more data isn't available they've mined it all and the last few sources they are adding doesn't help that much. Experts have said for a while now we need to have multiple smaller expert models, models that are good at one thing but do that one thing very well and very efficient. Then using an orchestration layer we can route requests to these smaller expert systems and get good results without much compute or storage. These smaller models are easier to make, easier to update, cost way less to run and provide better results.

But the large AI companies don't really want that, as vendor lock-in is much harder, collecting all of the data is much harder. Think of a future where you can just download the models you want and even have them be open weight and created with open source tools. And small enough to run on your own computer, with perhaps a special part of the CPU or an addon card like the NPUs we have today, or even on the GPUs we already have. Because of this threat they are still chasing the god model, which can do anything and everything, be better than a human and so good everyone would need to use their tool or be left behind.

So what they are trying to do is make the public afraid of their models. Invoke those Terminator like ideas of a super intelligence that destroys mankind. They do this because they want governments to impose regulations on what AI can and can't do, how it can be used and what sort of guardrails and checks there need to be. As they have access to billions if not trillions of dollars, they can afford to implement these regulations so they comply. At the same time they can lobby and bribe their way into having the regulations be in line with what they want. The trick is (so they hope), new startups can't follow those regulations, so they are no longer a threat. And open models (especially those from EVIL China) also can't ever comply, so for anything except personal hobby stuff it can't be used. That would give them all of the market to themselves with very little threats to their little club. It wouldn't be a monopoly as such, but it's run by a few weird men that know each other very well.