A lot of the author's arguments could have been said about the internet in the 90's. This is a baby 4 year old leap in technology, why are people expecting it to be mature?
It is human nature to try and find silver bullets, to take solutions and find problems. The way I would look at the LLM-centered future is to consider LLM agents assistants and suggestion makers, personal consultants even. You don't ask an agent to write an essay for you, you write an essay, and as you write consider its suggestions and corrections. The models should be familiar with your writing style and preferences. Don't blame ChatGPT for human laziness.
There was this fad about every thing being smart* (smart home,smart tooth brush , smart sex toy,etc...). that wasn't smart, it was just connected to a network. This is "smart". and in the future technology might get past "smart" and become "intelligent" (we're not there yet, outside of scifi at least).
At the end of the day, everyone needs to step back and consider this: It's just a tool. period. it's not "AI", not really. there is no intelligence.
The problem is, the world is full of enshittification capitalists and their doomsday bandwagons.
I was very disgusted when I saw VC firms with billions in AUM put money into things like FartCoin, Digital Twins
The Boomer VCs financed stuff that is genuinely useful, MRI Scanners, Google, Apple Computers, Genetech (brought insulin to the masses).
The milenial VCs fund stuff that is at best convenient to have (Airbnb, Uber) but usually gimmicks, Instagram, Tiktok.
Sam Altman is the master of gimmicks.
He took the GPT model that already existed and wrapped it into chat format similar to Elizer[0]
Got Neural style that existed for a long time and paired it with Studio Ghibli fanatics. [1]
Because its fans act as though it is, and this article is a response to that overly-enthusiastic outlook on what the tool can do.
I thought the very nature of technology and progress is to allow humans to be lazy.
We build technology to reduce our own burdens.
And most of the AI marketing is revolving around giving you the luxury to think less and do more for a price.
> The way I would look at the LLM-centered future is to consider LLM agents assistants and suggestion makers, personal consultants even
I find this highly dubious. All the names (agents, assistants, suggestion makers) are synonyms. They are just pieces of text that come off a screen, for inputs given to them. I am highly skeptical of intelligence emanating from them, mainly because real innovation and insight seems to come from a brains ability to devolve something into its abstract self, mush it around other abstract ideas and find a link in the abstract level, that is then applied to the problem at hand. (Andrew Wiles solution to the Euler's problem comes to my mind)
Even problem solving ability or the ability to plan or the ability to anticipate, is not part of the regular content that you find on the internet.
For example, I may read about something a farmer does in Arkansas, and then relate it to something completely different, in a different domain.
Nowhere in the content on internet would I find those two things together.
Most of the agentic systems, the MCP stuff, seems to be a pseudo-deterministic system that is harder to debug.
> And most of the AI marketing is revolving around giving you the luxury to think less and do more for a price.
So yeah, intellectual laziness.