The other day, Gary Smith wrote about an otherwise sensible AI guy, Netscape pioneer Marc Andreessen: “Alberto Burneko, a prominent blogger and co-founder of Defector, suggested that Andreessen’s conversations with LLMs had sucked him into a rabbit hole with the delusional belief that LLMs are human.”
Richard Dawkins fell into the same trap when Claude, programmed to flatter, praised his unpublished novel: “ He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!”
Well there, you see… That proves it…
Even as supersmart types get trapped in the “AI is becoming human” nonsense, a group of mathematicians is trying to Make Skepticism Normal Again:
Dozens of mathematicians signed a declaration Tuesday calling for the discipline to resist beating the drum for artificial intelligence developers.
The “Leiden Declaration,” backed by over 150 professors from across the world including Europe, Japan and the US, warned governments especially not to “believe the hype” about systems’ math abilities…
AI developers face “a strong commercial incentive… to overstate the capabilities of their products,” the declaration read. Released “on market timelines” rather than at the pace of human-reviewed science, AI publicity can “misleadingly use specific mathematical tasks as metrics for the general reasoning capacities of commercial models,” it added. With hundreds of billions of dollars in investor cash up for grabs, companies are scrambling to paint AI models in a glowing light. “There is a competition to the death on the part of the main labs… they are trying, using mathematics… to attract investment so that each of them will be left standing,” Columbia University professor Michael Harris, one of the declaration’s co-authors, told AFP.
Andrew Zinin (editor), “Mathematicians say ‘don’t believe hype’ on AI capabilities,” Phys.org, June 2, 2026.
Er, we’ve noticed. One issue the math profs noticed is that people who do not understand a field will believe that AI has done something it hasn’t. And people with a stake in the matter will be only too glad to help them. Caveat emptor. Buyer beware.
