Did The Tech Bros Trick Us?
They are now trying to push through trillion-dollar IPOsThey are paying an army of influencers to push this year’s IPOs for OpenAI and Anthropic just as they did with SpaceX.
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Is OpenAI Approaching the Valley of Death?
Overpromising is still a big problem; in any event, the fate of Netscape loomsOpenAI needs to show that ChatGPT is more than just the first publicly available LLM. It has not done that and maybe never will.
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Fearing the Terminator, Missing the Obvious
In Part 1 of my review of the new AI Doom book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, we look at how the authors first developed the underlying ideaBy 2020, authors Yudlowsky and Soares were already Doomers but the rapid success of ChatGPT and similar models heightened their worries.
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Different Bubbles, Different Methods of Detection: What of AI?
Circular financing is one of the signs. Even the media are beginning to catch onCircular financing is the last gasp for OpenAI and the cloud services. They need it to maintain the mirage of an economic boom despite big losses and small revenues for AI software.
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GPT 5.0 Doesn’t Understand But Is Eager to Please
Over a number of tries, it couldn’t get the labels on an illustration right because it does not understand what the words mean and how they relate to the imageThe test also shows GPT 5.0’s inclination to praise a user’s acuity, whether the user’s comment is correct or incorrect, intelligent of dumb.
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What Kind of a “PhD-level Expert” Is ChatGPT 5.0? I Tested It.
The responses to my three prompts made clear that GPT 5.0, far from being the expert that CEO Sam Altman claims, can’t address the meanings of words or conceptsIn an era where politicians, celebrities, and businesses can get away with blatant untruths with little or no consequence, will the same be true of LLMs?
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AI Is Impacting Our Culture — But Not As We Were Told To Expect
Okay, your boss is not a robot. Your doctor is not a chatbot. But here are some things that are actually happening that we might not have expectedOne change is that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT-5, seems to be acknowledging that the AI bubble might soon burst.
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Science Site: Is the AI Gold Rush Over? Has AI Just Plateaued?
The GPT-5 chatbot rollout has been so messy that serious questions are beginning to float above the seemingly automated hypeIf this is a tech Gold Rush, based on recent news, we might be better off selling shovels than investing in the gold.
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Preemptive Pardon in “Big Beautiful Bill” Protects Big AI
But is Big AI the new “military-industrial complex”?Common sense says AI companies need to be responsible for their product — just as if it was created directly and disseminated by a human.
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AI Productivity Hype: The New “Cargo Cult Science”?
Physicist Richard Feynman coined the term to describe imaginary scenarios for success based on simple misunderstanding of realitiesThe tech sector can push AI hype that resembles cargo cult science to its investors because of changes in media resulting from 30 years of the internet.
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LLMs Are Bad at Good Things, Good at Bad Things
LLMs may well become smarter than humans in the near future but not because these chatbots are becoming more intelligentAs people become attached to and dependent on their AI friends, they become less interested in their fellow humans.
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Large Language Models: A Lack-of-Progress Report
They will not be as powerful as either hoped or fearedLLMs are enormously expensive yet it is increasingly clear that they will never be reliable enough to be trusted in complex situations where mistakes are costly
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How Fruit Flies, Bees, and Squirrels Beat Artificial Intelligence
AI researchers assume they are on the path to intelligence, yet intelligence itself remains a mystery and many animals do better than current AIReal intelligence is embodied. It exists within a living system, interacting dynamically with an environment. AI, on the other hand, is an abstraction.
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The Hype and Limitations of Generative AI
On this episode, host Robert J. Marks concludes his conversation with economics professor and author Gary Smith about the hype and limitations of generative AI. Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Ponoma College and a frequent contributor to Mind Matters News. In this portion of the conversation, Smith and Marks explore the hype around artificial general intelligence Read More ›
Do High AI Startup Valuations Mean Great Success, or Desperation?
The answer is important but is not as clear as we might think. First, let's look at the backgroundConsider a recent news report: “Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion in a deal that would value it at $60 billion, more than triple its valuation from a year ago” says the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic’s last venture capital (VC) funding round, less than two months ago, raised $2 billion, bringing its total funding to $9.6 billion. OpenAI had raised $6.6 billion, last October just a year after it raised $10 billion from Microsoft the previous year and just months after it also raised funds on the debt and secondary markets. So that $6.6 billion round was the largest VC funding round ever, a little larger than the $6 billion that Elon Musk’s generative AI startup, xAI, raised in 2023. Read More ›
Hinton and Hopfield Win Nobel Prize in Physics
Hinton warns against neglecting AI safetyGeoffrey E. Hinton, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence responsible for helping develop “neural networks,” has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize alongside John J. Hopfield. The two scientists won the award for their groundbreaking work in machine intelligence, paving the way for a revolutionary new way to use computers. Hinton attracted attention just last year when he departed from Google and started warning the public about the potential dangers of new AI systems. He likened the AI revolution to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, only this time, it won’t be our physical capacities that get trumped by the machine, but our intellects. The New York Times reports, “It will be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” Read More ›
Sam Altman Was on My Favorite Writing Podcast. His View on Storytelling Surprised Me.
When we read, we want to hear from a human about what it means to be human.Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has garnered a fair share of criticism from the writing crowd for creating ChatGPT, a tool that on the surface seems to banish the need for human writers at all. However, Altman recently appeared on David Perell’s prominent writing podcast “How I Write” to talk about his own writing process, AI, and what he uses ChatGPT for. Altman and Perell talk about the importance of language for human communication, with Altman noting how he can’t imagine human life without language. AI, Altman says, is supposed to make language and the writing process “better.” In his view, that’s what computers have also sought to do: Create opportunities for humans to expand and deepen their capacities. But Read More ›
Are We Close to Peak AI Hype?
Outrageous statements are proliferating.Sanity might be about ready to return to the market. Just maybe, we have reached peak hype.
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Hype Distracts AI Engineers from Real Work
Who is going to solve AI's actual problems?One reason there wasn’t an emphasis on reducing hallucinations is because the problem is hard. Some argue that hallucinations are “baked into” AI chatbots.
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Scarlett Johansson vs. Sam Altman
OpenAI is trying to recreate a cautionary taleAltman said her voice could be “comforting” to people. She declined at the time, and so was naturally surprised to find that the new program, which was just released, sounded eerily similar to her own voice.
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