I am personally grateful that you and folks like Emily Bender, Ed Zitron, and others are sticking to ethical AI principles and the higher moral ground. It comes at a high personal and professional cost. Vindication has been rolling out slowly, and will continue to come as the burn through rate continues and investors realize diminishing if any returns. Sadly this may impact the broader field of AI.
I think that you mistake Newton's intent and guiding purpose. The job of a bloviator is not so much to he right as controversial and catch an emotion train. "There ain't no such thing as bad publicity," idea. It drives eyeballs to him and that makes him money.
Most journalists who succeed today do this to a significant degree, or they hitch their wagon to a political party, or take bribes for placements in name media (if they can). I've seen Matt Taibbi slide into the first mode, reading his public that supports him after making his name with the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity," article.
This Newton piece is blatantly of that kind, and I think it should inform you about other pieces he wrote. We have a tendency to accept verbiage of this kind as gold when it covers an area that we don't know so well. The slapdash and bullshit method of reporting and commentary is, in fact, the norm.
Following up on your Carol Kane quote which I got a kick out of - my reaction upon reading the article last night was either "Gary Marcus is the Root of All Evil" or a "Lonely Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness". I had 2 principal reactions to Casey's piece. First, I did not care for the attempt to divide folks into two extreme camps. One side is Gary Marcus and fools. The other is smart people who see how rapidly AI/LLMs (felt like he kept equating the 2) are improving and how many incredible things they already do (that list seemed pretty vague). I got the sense he's claiming the latest models are far superior to the old ones. I suspect there's a lot more disagreement on that than he was prepared to admit. I am somewhat burnt out on the endless stream of "AI...AI....AI" and also aggravated by how casually LLMs are equated with "AI" which then becomes AGI by implication. I know of people using LLMs for code development. After that concrete examples seem to get pretty nebulous. Or maybe I'm missing all the great uses in the stream of "Next Big Thing" stories. Having spent many years working for Fortune 30 corporations I have to chuckle at arguments that the execs wouldn't be spending enormous sums if they didn't have good reason to.
Today’s AI falls short and can often feel entirely artificial in a very real sense. I consider myself not just an AI skeptic but an AI realist—someone who acknowledges both its successes and its shortcomings.
Much of the progress in AI today is built on an illusion, a promise that is ultimately unattainable. I take a more extreme stance, asserting that AI fundamentally lacks understanding and intelligence—and this is simply the truth.
Human perception is a minefield, and the complexity of critical evaluation and the knowledge required often elude the majority. The Eliza effect and widespread anthropomorphism serve as sobering examples of this. And that’s without even considering the technical intricacies, the influence of social media, or the pervasive effects of groupthink.
Unfortunately, we are ill-equipped to counter hype with reason until it inevitably collapses under its own weight. Until then, enjoy the downfall.
In this article, I explore the signs of an impending AI winter.
That’s the core issue: the appearance of progress has deceived many. It’s a troubling reflection of the lack of intellectual honesty from OpenAI. Improvements on arbitrary benchmarks don’t equate to better LLM performance—a fallacy that has worked to their advantage but ultimately highlights a failure of critical thinking.
I don’t want to take too much attention as this is not the place. If you are interested in a discussion we can have it on my blog where I cover exactly this topic in depth and I can answer any further questions or clarification around benchmarks or CoT or similar points.
I think that there is the risk that you end up justifying lack of regulation on AI, but overall, I think that you've tried to be clear that the technology need not be GAWD-like to cause harm. Except for the Children of the Atom, I don't think that we pray to our Atomic God but it hasn't changed the fact that nuclear weapons are pretty damn able to harm us.
Right. Back to our regularly unscheduled nuclear war, that nuclear war that is imminent at any minute. You know the one that is taboo to report about? The one that Tucker Carlson did a good job of interviewing Lavrov? The sole series of articles on it was written by Newsweek, and portray a barking mad set of what are essentially lies, while being mostly technically correct.
(Just one example. The article that describes a silo attack launched from Russia that would hit Montana and Wyoming, with fallout. 1st, the only launch platform for a silo attack is submarines, because they can be offshore and get there fast enough to maybe kill the silo before the silo launched its missiles. 2nd, the size of the warhead is 100kt. This is bullshit. Russian warheads are in the 750 kt range. 3rd, a silo attack is only going to be part of a larger massive attack, they are the first missiles to strike. 4th, high yield nuclear weapons punch to the a stratosphere, lofting the fallout there. Fallout stays there for a few years, coming down after the hot material has aged out. This is why nuclear winter should happen. You can't have nuclear winter and massive ground level fallout. You have some, yes.)
I can tell you precisely the inside the beltway logic. That logic is: All-out nuclear war is unthinkable for all nations because of MAD. Therefore in the real world it's off the table, and not a real threat. Therefore it doesn't really exist and we can proceed on that basis.
I can tell you from direct observation that Russia is the most prepared nation on earth for nuclear war. They can put 40-60 million people into shelter. They live in concrete, steel and stone. We live in wood. They will come back afterwards. We will not.
MAD isn't symmetrical at all. Russia knows it. Our venerable assclowns do not. This is why they are ignoring all intel. This is why they have cut off all contacts with Russia. (For 2 years Russia has had no official contact with the Biden administration. And before that it was dismissal. ) In their minds only Russia's conventional arms matter, and we are wrecking that capability.
In the real world outside of the Blinken fantasy world, which is the fantasy world of neoliberal thought, as Russia's conventional weapons are destroyed, nuclear weapons become the only option. Russia will not be conquered. They will pull that switch. The redline of NATO is real.
Our 4th estate is broken. We are, in fact, in the last days of our doom if we do not look up. Incineration from above.
Nuclear war isn't going to happen and even if it does, its a recoverable catastrophe because nukes don't have baby nukes, while AI does self-reproduce and in lab experiments, already did.
And there it is folks. The conventional "wisdom" of the idiots. When the flash so bright you can see through your arms comes, thank this guy and the morons of doltism he parrots.
And of course, his proof will be, if the Ukraine war ends, and we are not incinerated, then obviously he was right.
Do learn to read better child.
You learned a form of engagement that can be summarized as TL;DR. Come now, is reading comprehension really so hard you can't handle a few paragraphs?
Nuclear war is the real annihilation threat today. This minute. AI is a possible threat years in the future.
I wonder if reading comprehension is such a challenge that you couldn't click on a link? It comes with pictures!
BTW, I think you also missed the central point. AI is on route to being superhuman, not "godlike" yet but it has already caused substantial harm and likely will cause substantial harm, even extinction level, at that level
Just a technical note. The forums I frequent that have real software developers, don't use AI all that much. There's the copyright and lawsuit problem, there's the AI being buggy for things not in the training set, there's the weirdness of some of it, and the difficulty of figuring out where the error is.
And there's the problem of AI kiddies who don't learn to program, can't code their way out of a wet paper bag, and "trust the AI".
I occassionally listen to Hard Fork, and sometimes I enjoy it, but the level of credulity is really off-putting. Particularly from Newton. So this piece doesn't surprise me. A few things to note:
1. Most of the items on that list of "AI achievements" would have been called "machine learning achievements" 3 years ago. The technology being used to assist drug research and reconstruct ancient texts is more similar to boring old statistical regression than it is to GenAI, which is the actual thing being hyped to death right now. Sam Altman is not trying to sell us logistic regression or random forest classifers.
2. Newton complains that critics of LLMs only focus on the things they can't do. Yeah, we're doing this in response to the incessant pronuncements of "OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG AGI IS AROUND THE CORNER IT SOLVED MY RIDDLE HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE????????" that are put into the world by the likes of Sam Altman (well, in this case Geoff Hinton) and amplified by the likes of Casey Newton. Us critics will happily stop mocking dumb LLM mistakes when hypesters stop pointing to LLM scores on IQ tests as evidence the world is about to change.
3. Newton cites the increased cyber-attacks on Amazon from GenAI as "blind spot" of the "AI is fake and it sucks" crowd. No, you dolt, this is the very thing we're constantly complaining about! Those "cyber-attacks" take the form of fake login screens and phishing emails created by human fraudsters using LLMs. No one is denying that GenAI is a useful tool for fraudsters. Our complaint is that this real-world harm, being caused by actually existing technology today, is getting short shrift because the hypsters all demand we gaze into the future and let our imaginations run wild.
4. Not surprised at all to see Newton quoting one of these AI deception stories from an OpenAI "system card". Every single one of these stories goes like this:
- Researcher: "Hey ChatGPT, pretend to be an evil robot"
- ChatGPT: "Raahr, look at me, I'm an evil robot raahr"
- Reseacher: "OMG AN EVIL ROBOT!!!!"
5. As always, we are asked to just imagine a future in which this technology delivers amazing benefits to humanity and/or enslaves us all. The evidence? Statistical models designed to mimic what they're fed turned out to be good at mimicing what they're fed, therefore our lives are all about to change dramatically.
Nice to see you crediting Ed. Perhaps he'll return the gesture one of these days 😄
The duality of "genAI is mostly bullshit" and "genAI is dangerous" is something I'm constantly criticized for too. Critical thinking isn't what it used to be.
Quite apart from his criticism of you, I was stunned by this passage from his essay.
"...CEO Sam Altman and three of his researchers explained that the latest version of o1 is faster, more powerful, and more accurate than its predecessor. A handful of accompanying bar charts showed how o1 beats previous versions on a series of benchmarks."
Do journalists now believe anything a corporation claims if it comes in the form of a bar chart?
Being a (gen) AI skeptic is fun in the way that telling your friend that the guy she’s dating who says he doesn’t want a serious relationship probably doesn’t want a serious relationship. She blames you instead of him, and being right when your friend is miserable is no fun.
I can’t take Newton that seriously since he admits to using LLMs to do research daily, and insisted that autonomous cars are already safer than human drivers because there hadn’t been a fatal accident in San Francisco. Completely ignoring that the number of autonomous cars at the time was far too small to make that assertion.
Hard Fork is entertaining, but the two hosts spend most of it raving about a new tool before admitting that it doesn’t work (yet!) but won’t it be fantastic when it does.
Self-driving cars are not judged by the total number of miles driven, but by the accidents per mile driven, as compared to humans.
They are also not only in San Francisco, but in Los Angeles, Phoenix. 30-40 million miles driven by now. Enough to compare with people driving same number.
It is good if your own assertions are accurate when criticizing other's estimates.
Newton has always been overly optimistic about AI; I’ve been listening for a couple years. Kevin tends to tamp down the enthusiasm. You made an easy, salient single figure due to the recent WSJ article. This too shall pass.
In my own view, ML has been very useful, AI not so much. As you correctly point out, there’s a real lack of nuance in how the majority of people use these terms, journalists and otherwise.
Newton has always been like this. Even when he was writing on "Facebook's threat to democracy" his takes were so lukewarm and uninteresting that Mark Zuckerberg himself did an interview with him. That kind of seals the deal for me: to what extent is he always positioning himself to be the friendly journalist? To me, he's not even communicating his opinions - he's just doing what he thinks his sources and potential interviewees want to hear from a journalist that deserves the opportunity to kiss the ring on occasion. It's "manufacturing consent" as described by Chomsky et al - just executed by the false panache of a useful marionette!
There are billions of dollars at stake and AI skeptics are the folks pointing out that the emperors have no clothes.
I am personally grateful that you and folks like Emily Bender, Ed Zitron, and others are sticking to ethical AI principles and the higher moral ground. It comes at a high personal and professional cost. Vindication has been rolling out slowly, and will continue to come as the burn through rate continues and investors realize diminishing if any returns. Sadly this may impact the broader field of AI.
When I hear about the $$$, I started to fear for his life 😬
I think that you mistake Newton's intent and guiding purpose. The job of a bloviator is not so much to he right as controversial and catch an emotion train. "There ain't no such thing as bad publicity," idea. It drives eyeballs to him and that makes him money.
Most journalists who succeed today do this to a significant degree, or they hitch their wagon to a political party, or take bribes for placements in name media (if they can). I've seen Matt Taibbi slide into the first mode, reading his public that supports him after making his name with the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity," article.
This Newton piece is blatantly of that kind, and I think it should inform you about other pieces he wrote. We have a tendency to accept verbiage of this kind as gold when it covers an area that we don't know so well. The slapdash and bullshit method of reporting and commentary is, in fact, the norm.
Following up on your Carol Kane quote which I got a kick out of - my reaction upon reading the article last night was either "Gary Marcus is the Root of All Evil" or a "Lonely Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness". I had 2 principal reactions to Casey's piece. First, I did not care for the attempt to divide folks into two extreme camps. One side is Gary Marcus and fools. The other is smart people who see how rapidly AI/LLMs (felt like he kept equating the 2) are improving and how many incredible things they already do (that list seemed pretty vague). I got the sense he's claiming the latest models are far superior to the old ones. I suspect there's a lot more disagreement on that than he was prepared to admit. I am somewhat burnt out on the endless stream of "AI...AI....AI" and also aggravated by how casually LLMs are equated with "AI" which then becomes AGI by implication. I know of people using LLMs for code development. After that concrete examples seem to get pretty nebulous. Or maybe I'm missing all the great uses in the stream of "Next Big Thing" stories. Having spent many years working for Fortune 30 corporations I have to chuckle at arguments that the execs wouldn't be spending enormous sums if they didn't have good reason to.
Today’s AI falls short and can often feel entirely artificial in a very real sense. I consider myself not just an AI skeptic but an AI realist—someone who acknowledges both its successes and its shortcomings.
Much of the progress in AI today is built on an illusion, a promise that is ultimately unattainable. I take a more extreme stance, asserting that AI fundamentally lacks understanding and intelligence—and this is simply the truth.
Human perception is a minefield, and the complexity of critical evaluation and the knowledge required often elude the majority. The Eliza effect and widespread anthropomorphism serve as sobering examples of this. And that’s without even considering the technical intricacies, the influence of social media, or the pervasive effects of groupthink.
Unfortunately, we are ill-equipped to counter hype with reason until it inevitably collapses under its own weight. Until then, enjoy the downfall.
In this article, I explore the signs of an impending AI winter.
https://ai-cosmos.hashnode.dev/is-another-ai-winter-near-understanding-the-warning-signs
Highly doubtful. O1 was a step change in improvement for many metrics. But yes, a slowdown would be welcome especially for regulation.
That’s the core issue: the appearance of progress has deceived many. It’s a troubling reflection of the lack of intellectual honesty from OpenAI. Improvements on arbitrary benchmarks don’t equate to better LLM performance—a fallacy that has worked to their advantage but ultimately highlights a failure of critical thinking.
https://ai-cosmos.hashnode.dev/the-illusion-of-reasoning
The benchmarks are not arbitrary. They are incomplete. They need to be much larger and more reflective of real-world usage.
Step-by-step reasoning is the right approach, but there has to be honest validation where possible rather than LLM itself judging its progress.
I don’t want to take too much attention as this is not the place. If you are interested in a discussion we can have it on my blog where I cover exactly this topic in depth and I can answer any further questions or clarification around benchmarks or CoT or similar points.
I think that there is the risk that you end up justifying lack of regulation on AI, but overall, I think that you've tried to be clear that the technology need not be GAWD-like to cause harm. Except for the Children of the Atom, I don't think that we pray to our Atomic God but it hasn't changed the fact that nuclear weapons are pretty damn able to harm us.
Right. Back to our regularly unscheduled nuclear war, that nuclear war that is imminent at any minute. You know the one that is taboo to report about? The one that Tucker Carlson did a good job of interviewing Lavrov? The sole series of articles on it was written by Newsweek, and portray a barking mad set of what are essentially lies, while being mostly technically correct.
(Just one example. The article that describes a silo attack launched from Russia that would hit Montana and Wyoming, with fallout. 1st, the only launch platform for a silo attack is submarines, because they can be offshore and get there fast enough to maybe kill the silo before the silo launched its missiles. 2nd, the size of the warhead is 100kt. This is bullshit. Russian warheads are in the 750 kt range. 3rd, a silo attack is only going to be part of a larger massive attack, they are the first missiles to strike. 4th, high yield nuclear weapons punch to the a stratosphere, lofting the fallout there. Fallout stays there for a few years, coming down after the hot material has aged out. This is why nuclear winter should happen. You can't have nuclear winter and massive ground level fallout. You have some, yes.)
I can tell you precisely the inside the beltway logic. That logic is: All-out nuclear war is unthinkable for all nations because of MAD. Therefore in the real world it's off the table, and not a real threat. Therefore it doesn't really exist and we can proceed on that basis.
I can tell you from direct observation that Russia is the most prepared nation on earth for nuclear war. They can put 40-60 million people into shelter. They live in concrete, steel and stone. We live in wood. They will come back afterwards. We will not.
MAD isn't symmetrical at all. Russia knows it. Our venerable assclowns do not. This is why they are ignoring all intel. This is why they have cut off all contacts with Russia. (For 2 years Russia has had no official contact with the Biden administration. And before that it was dismissal. ) In their minds only Russia's conventional arms matter, and we are wrecking that capability.
In the real world outside of the Blinken fantasy world, which is the fantasy world of neoliberal thought, as Russia's conventional weapons are destroyed, nuclear weapons become the only option. Russia will not be conquered. They will pull that switch. The redline of NATO is real.
Our 4th estate is broken. We are, in fact, in the last days of our doom if we do not look up. Incineration from above.
Nuclear war isn't going to happen and even if it does, its a recoverable catastrophe because nukes don't have baby nukes, while AI does self-reproduce and in lab experiments, already did.
https://bgr.com/tech/chatgpt-o1-tried-to-save-itself-when-the-ai-thought-it-was-in-danger-and-lied-to-humans-about-it/
Truly. "... and even if it does, it is recoverable..."
Nuclear war is not recoverable by the United States. Period. Full stop. This idea is asinine beyond belief.
And there it is folks. The conventional "wisdom" of the idiots. When the flash so bright you can see through your arms comes, thank this guy and the morons of doltism he parrots.
And of course, his proof will be, if the Ukraine war ends, and we are not incinerated, then obviously he was right.
Do learn to read better child.
You learned a form of engagement that can be summarized as TL;DR. Come now, is reading comprehension really so hard you can't handle a few paragraphs?
Nuclear war is the real annihilation threat today. This minute. AI is a possible threat years in the future.
It's tough to take you seriously when a few days ago you were commenting to me in some kind of half-assed Jamaican accent.
I wonder if reading comprehension is such a challenge that you couldn't click on a link? It comes with pictures!
BTW, I think you also missed the central point. AI is on route to being superhuman, not "godlike" yet but it has already caused substantial harm and likely will cause substantial harm, even extinction level, at that level
Just a technical note. The forums I frequent that have real software developers, don't use AI all that much. There's the copyright and lawsuit problem, there's the AI being buggy for things not in the training set, there's the weirdness of some of it, and the difficulty of figuring out where the error is.
And there's the problem of AI kiddies who don't learn to program, can't code their way out of a wet paper bag, and "trust the AI".
It's a great deal of it hype.
I occassionally listen to Hard Fork, and sometimes I enjoy it, but the level of credulity is really off-putting. Particularly from Newton. So this piece doesn't surprise me. A few things to note:
1. Most of the items on that list of "AI achievements" would have been called "machine learning achievements" 3 years ago. The technology being used to assist drug research and reconstruct ancient texts is more similar to boring old statistical regression than it is to GenAI, which is the actual thing being hyped to death right now. Sam Altman is not trying to sell us logistic regression or random forest classifers.
2. Newton complains that critics of LLMs only focus on the things they can't do. Yeah, we're doing this in response to the incessant pronuncements of "OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG AGI IS AROUND THE CORNER IT SOLVED MY RIDDLE HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE????????" that are put into the world by the likes of Sam Altman (well, in this case Geoff Hinton) and amplified by the likes of Casey Newton. Us critics will happily stop mocking dumb LLM mistakes when hypesters stop pointing to LLM scores on IQ tests as evidence the world is about to change.
3. Newton cites the increased cyber-attacks on Amazon from GenAI as "blind spot" of the "AI is fake and it sucks" crowd. No, you dolt, this is the very thing we're constantly complaining about! Those "cyber-attacks" take the form of fake login screens and phishing emails created by human fraudsters using LLMs. No one is denying that GenAI is a useful tool for fraudsters. Our complaint is that this real-world harm, being caused by actually existing technology today, is getting short shrift because the hypsters all demand we gaze into the future and let our imaginations run wild.
4. Not surprised at all to see Newton quoting one of these AI deception stories from an OpenAI "system card". Every single one of these stories goes like this:
- Researcher: "Hey ChatGPT, pretend to be an evil robot"
- ChatGPT: "Raahr, look at me, I'm an evil robot raahr"
- Reseacher: "OMG AN EVIL ROBOT!!!!"
5. As always, we are asked to just imagine a future in which this technology delivers amazing benefits to humanity and/or enslaves us all. The evidence? Statistical models designed to mimic what they're fed turned out to be good at mimicing what they're fed, therefore our lives are all about to change dramatically.
Christ I can't wait for this shit to die.
Nice to see you crediting Ed. Perhaps he'll return the gesture one of these days 😄
The duality of "genAI is mostly bullshit" and "genAI is dangerous" is something I'm constantly criticized for too. Critical thinking isn't what it used to be.
I thought you were more balanced in your article than I would have been if it had been me who had been targeted by Newton
Unfortunately people who are "influencers" without any particular expertise tend to have influence beyond their capabilities.
Quite apart from his criticism of you, I was stunned by this passage from his essay.
"...CEO Sam Altman and three of his researchers explained that the latest version of o1 is faster, more powerful, and more accurate than its predecessor. A handful of accompanying bar charts showed how o1 beats previous versions on a series of benchmarks."
Do journalists now believe anything a corporation claims if it comes in the form of a bar chart?
They are called "journalists" because "credulous stenographers" was already taken.
Well, there are still many very good journalists, so it’s important not to tar them with the same brush.
Being a (gen) AI skeptic is fun in the way that telling your friend that the guy she’s dating who says he doesn’t want a serious relationship probably doesn’t want a serious relationship. She blames you instead of him, and being right when your friend is miserable is no fun.
I can’t take Newton that seriously since he admits to using LLMs to do research daily, and insisted that autonomous cars are already safer than human drivers because there hadn’t been a fatal accident in San Francisco. Completely ignoring that the number of autonomous cars at the time was far too small to make that assertion.
Hard Fork is entertaining, but the two hosts spend most of it raving about a new tool before admitting that it doesn’t work (yet!) but won’t it be fantastic when it does.
Well said but just a note to use 'crash' and not the industry-led 'accident' - these are deaths and road violence built into the system that we tolerate - https://newrepublic.com/article/166004/invention-accidents-car-crash-deaths-jessie-singer-book-review
Self-driving cars are not judged by the total number of miles driven, but by the accidents per mile driven, as compared to humans.
They are also not only in San Francisco, but in Los Angeles, Phoenix. 30-40 million miles driven by now. Enough to compare with people driving same number.
It is good if your own assertions are accurate when criticizing other's estimates.
I’ve done the math, and I’m not wrong, but okay 👌
Newton has always been overly optimistic about AI; I’ve been listening for a couple years. Kevin tends to tamp down the enthusiasm. You made an easy, salient single figure due to the recent WSJ article. This too shall pass.
In my own view, ML has been very useful, AI not so much. As you correctly point out, there’s a real lack of nuance in how the majority of people use these terms, journalists and otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#/media/File:AI_hierarchy.svg
A good response to a very poor article. Just to note, it’s Catherine Flick, not Fink :)
To avoid being caricatured, it is good to have measured takes on topics.
It is refreshing to visit this blog and see a careful analysis and issues with current methods pointed out.
I don't think the vast field of deep learning is hitting a wall. AI assistants have their uses, and will get better, than than being 'dud'.
While some correction is likely needed, I don't think it is all going to crash down. In particular, the investment continues to be strong.
Newton has always been like this. Even when he was writing on "Facebook's threat to democracy" his takes were so lukewarm and uninteresting that Mark Zuckerberg himself did an interview with him. That kind of seals the deal for me: to what extent is he always positioning himself to be the friendly journalist? To me, he's not even communicating his opinions - he's just doing what he thinks his sources and potential interviewees want to hear from a journalist that deserves the opportunity to kiss the ring on occasion. It's "manufacturing consent" as described by Chomsky et al - just executed by the false panache of a useful marionette!