Lately I've been wondering if these types of posts about AI are misguided.

The pattern I have seen over the years is some showman selling his wares over-sells the tech. AI in this case. Its framed in a way that is complete bullshit. Serverless is an example. The name would trip people up. Dude, there's always a server. Next.

People would ignore something because of surface level nonsense instead of the actual tech. This happens with bitcoin by the way...

With AI many of us, including me have responded in reaction to people like Scam Altman lying about it. We didn't know how it worked but we knew it was BS. We see it struggle to do things like count letters in words. Many completely discount the whole thing for this reason. This is a mistake.

This is like discounting the early Internet because it was slow. Or bitcoin because it is slow. The example you describe here is a common and frankly old problem with LLMs. LLMs don’t “see” text as a sequence of individual letters, they break it into tokens (chunks of text) based on patterns in the training data. There are ways to get the correct answers using a programming language. You can usually add something like use python for the math and show your work. It may still fail. Here's the deal. We don't need AI to do this crap. We have tons of tools that can do it much better.

So yeah, AI sucks at many things. It uses tons of power and the business model hasn't been proven. I've written all this stuff before. But what is more important?

People don't care about all these math things. A massive number of people can be tricked into thinking chatbots are actually artificial life. Its nonsense of course but its gonna spread.

To be the shortest way to explain AI is that its a prediction algo. Its pretty amazing at guessing what we want to get fed back to us. It doesn't know anything. Its guessing based on trading and data. People need to be red pilled on this aspect. That's my take