The AI Bubble Explained

Four huge misconceptions in the AI space, told not very briefly: First misconception: AI is just doing math. There’s a quote making the rounds about how an algorithm can never gain consciousness because it’s just math describing a thing, and this would be like the formulas for gravity suddenly exerting force on mass. This is a bad take for a few reasons. To start with, we don’t know how consciousness works (or gravity for that matter), but we do know neurons work a lot like logic gates in CPUs. There are voltage differences, inputs and outputs, and emergent properties that are much more complex than its simple components. We know that increasing the number of neurons leads to vast differences in cognitive potential, and increasing the size of LLM training data did something similar. We’ve also gotten to the point where we are performing Turing tests dozens of times a day in our normal lives, asking of everything, “Is this AI?” Math has never made us ask, “is this human or synthetic?”…