Ways to think about machine learning — Benedict Evans

The Mythology Of Conscious AI

This superb essay by Anil Seth won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition.

The future history of AI is not yet written. There is no inevitability to the directions AI might yet take. To think otherwise is to be overly constrained by our conceptual inheritance, weighed down by the baggage of bad science fiction and submissive to the self-serving narrative of tech companies laboring to make it to the next financial quarter. Time is short, but collectively we can still decide which kinds of AI we really want and which we really don’t.

Against the protection of stocking frames. — Ethan Marcotte

I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that LLMs haven’t measured up to any of the lofty promises made by their vendors. But in more concrete terms, consumers dislike “AI” when it shows up in products, and it makes them actively mistrust the brands that employ it. In other words, we’re some three years into the hype cycle, and LLMs haven’t met any markers of success we’d apply to, well, literally any other technology.

In new AI hype frenzy, tech is applying the label to everything now

Today’s AI promoters are trying to have it both ways: They insist that AI is crossing a profound boundary into untrodden territory with unfathomable risks. But they also define AI so broadly as to include almost any large-scale, statistically-driven computer program.

Under this definition, everything from the Google search engine to the iPhone’s face-recognition unlocking tool to the Facebook newsfeed algorithm is already “AI-driven” — and has been for years.

To have “true AI,” we need much more than ChatGPT - Big Think

LLMs have never experienced anything. They are just programs that have ingested unimaginable amounts of text. LLMs might do a great job at describing the sensation of being drunk, but this is only because they have read a lot of descriptions of being drunk. They have not, and cannot, experience it themselves. They have no purpose other than to produce the best response to the prompt you give them.

This doesn’t mean they aren’t impressive (they are) or that they can’t be useful (they are). And I truly believe we are at a watershed moment in technology. But let’s not confuse these genuine achievements with “true AI.”

The Technium: Dreams are the Default for Intelligence

I feel like there’s a connection here between what Kevin Kelly is describing and what I wrote about guessing (though I think he might be conflating consciousness with intelligence).

This, by the way, is also true of immersive “virtual reality” environments. Instead of trying to accurately recreate real-world places like meeting rooms, we should be leaning into the hallucinatory power of a technology that can generate dream-like situations where the pleasure comes from relinquishing control.