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AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

Just not in *exactly* the way you might think.

The phrase describes the then-high tech magic lanterns in the 17th and 18th centuries and the illusionists and charlatans who exploited them to convince an excitable and paying public that they could command great powers — including the ability illuminate demons and monsters or raise the spirits of the dead — while tapping into widespread anxieties about too-fast progress in turbulent times. Silicon Valley leaders’ constant invocation of AGI, paired with years of more generalized and deterministic insisting that AI Is The Future, lends a gravity to the technical systems, known as large language models (LLMs), that really have gotten pretty proficient at predicting which pixel or word it should fill in next, given a particular prompt. Last month, I wrote how the tide was turning for OpenAI: Between mounting legal woes and plateauing user growth, a disastrous Wall Street Journal interview and being booed at SXSW, the backlash, it seemed, had become at least as prominent as the mythos the world’s top AI company had worked so hard to generate for itself.

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