ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Really Understands AI

Large Language Models are dumber than your neighbor’s cat

Image by author via Midjourney and Canva.

If you want to know what a person is really like, watch how they treat the staff in a restaurant. Power reveals the true character of those who hold it.

I couldn’t take Sam Altman out to dinner but I could watch his behavior in a similar setup: a live interview. Just like clients have an edge over waiters, OpenAI’s CEO had an edge over his listeners — and what he did was take every single one of them for a fool.

“We now [have] these Language Models that can, uh, understand language”, he said. “We don’t have it working perfectly yet, but it works a little, and it’ll get better and better.”

There are a thousand ways Sam could’ve formulated that first sentence, but he chose the only verb that conveys a big fat lie. But wait, you may say, he added that it’s working only a little, didn’t he? That’s also a lie because Large Language Models don’t understand anything — and they can’t get better at something they can’t do.

The Black Box Bullsh*t

What most people call “Artificial Intelligence” these days is a specific brand of tech called Machine Learning. You basically show a computer a bunch of examples of what you want to achieve…