Magazine says AI Industry is a Scam

It is funny to see people trying to predict AI. Some experts say:

We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.

Eliezer Yudkowsky says it will kill us all.

The Atlantic is a dopey magazine own by a billionaire widow and edited by Jewish Trump haters. It says AI is a con:

Her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, is part Silicon Valley exposé, part globe-trotting investigative journalism about the labor that goes into building and training large language models such as ChatGPT. It joins another recently released book — The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, by the linguist Emily M. Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna — in revealing the puffery that fuels much of the artificial-intelligence business. Both works, the former implicitly and the latter explicitly, suggest that the foundation of the AI industry is a scam.

To call AI a con isn’t to say that the technology is not remarkable, that it has no use, or that it will not transform the world (perhaps for the better) in the right hands. It is to say that AI is not what its developers are selling it as: a new class of thinking — and, soon, feeling — machines. ...

These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets ...

These folks have a funny idea of intelligence. The magazine could already be written by ChatGPT or another AI LLM.

The foundation of the AI industry on benchmarks that are widely replicated. The models do exactly what is claimed for them. People who complain about them nearly always misunderstand them.

Here is the real reason the Atlantic hates AI:

At a companywide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model. ...

“Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” Thompson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We have to develop new strategies.”

The rapid development of click-free answers in search “is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated,” said William Lewis, the Washington Post’s publisher and chief executive. Lewis is former CEO of the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones.

They may have to start offering content worth paying for.