Get the latest tech news

The Four Fallacies of Modern AI

And Why Believing in Them Hinders Progress

This isn't just a semantic game, Mitchell argues; it creates a flawed mental model that leads to misplaced trust, encouraging us to deploy systems in high-stakes situations where a lack of true understanding can have serious consequences. The primary counterargument can be framed in terms of Rich Sutton's famous essay, "The Bitter Lesson," which argues that the entire history of AI has taught us that attempts to build in human-like cognitive structures (like embodiment) are always eventually outperformed by general methods that just leverage massive-scale computation. The goal, at least from a pragmatist point of view, should be to infuse our current alchemy with the principles of science, to make scaling smarter, safer, and more grounded by integrating the hard-won insights about how intelligence actually works.

Get the Android app