The problem with "AI" is that it doesn't work

Don't get me wrong, there are some very exciting things about this technology, but it's also misunderstood and it has been drastically mis-sold.

LLM's are really just the next evolution of machine learning technology we have had for a very long time, not at all dissimilar to the tech that allowed Google photos to detect a dog, or Google translate to translate between languages that don't translate with direct word replacements well and the list goes on.

LLMs are a probabilistic prediction engine. What makes them special is that they are working with more data and compute than any prediction engine before them, but they still can't "think", or "know" anything. It is honestly enchanting what these systems can output, but we all need to remember that this is really just predicting words based on its database of almost everything that has ever been written, and for that matter everything that could be written. The scale is hard to wrap your brain around which is why it feels like magic.

This is why I get worried when I hear people asking ChatGPT if it thinks AI is a bubble or who knows what else. It can't answer this question really because it doesn't think, it assembles words based on probability. AI agents, or "thinking" models basically just run the same thing on a loop of different parts to get a better result. Basically these models are only getting less efficient.

These models are so excellent and making mockups and concepts but because there is no thought behind the model, it can't actually develop products that actually hold up against use, get the executives of the world that do no actual work have been scammed into thinking this is the future after being shown demos of new working apps or websites spun together in hours like magic. This code was generated by auto complete. It isn't actually usable without more work by engineers. There already are reports of companies hiring "AI cleanup" engineers to fix code implemented by AI models that were buggy and too convoluted for any common human engineer to parse through, which is terrifying considering coding is basically the only idea anyone has come up with on how to make money with this thing.

Even though the media now admits this is a bubble, you still hear people say "AI is real" "AI is here", but I can't remember when someone said smartphones were real. They just were. I heard a prominent reporter say she knows it's the future because she used it to plan her vacation itinerary. I'm sorry but we have spent more on this than anything in history and that is what we've got? It's been trained on every travel itinerary that has been written or could be written so I should hope it was able to do that. If we think about what we've really gotten now that AI is "here", there isn't really much to show. It can generate some code that works sometimes, but it's basically useless in the real world because it doesn't actually follow a logical flow, and it can summarize things. This is what is currently holding up the entire US economy.

The AI labs have already admitted that hallucinations are never going away, and that is because you can't remove guesses from a guessing machine, yet we still have people who try and spread the idea that this will take your job or mature into a general intelligence. General artificial intelligence is not only science fiction, but this technology is not the stepping stone to get us there if it is in fact possible.

The reason we got here is because our economy runs on the idea of growth and we didn't really have any other ideas, so the lie was born that this will come for your job, it'll get so good it'll invent new ways to improve itself and change the world. Now it's getting harder to believe this isn't a pump and dump scheme every day. With every other bubble in history we were at least left with useful infrastructure to be sold for cheap, but there really is no other use for an AI data center. When AI companies finally start charging the real cost of all these "summaries" the whole thing will come crashing down and we'll end up with a lot of empty buildings. Unless you summarize emails for a living, this isn't coming for your job. The companies that survive the bloodbath will rehire, and the ones that drank the Kool-aid will die.

TLDR: AI doesn't actually exist, it's just an iteration of machine learning algorithms that is very good at mocking things up. It is not only not possibly profitable, but people will eventually figure out it can't actually do any work despite the fact that it is now holding up the entire US economy.