Promises are cheap

Nope. This is not an essay about Elon Musk. It’s also not about how in 2019 he promised a million robotaxis in 2020.

Or even how he eventually walked that back to 2026 (which also won’t happen).

Nope, it’s about Microsoft’s AI CEO who (following Elon’s playbook) just made big promises to the FT:

who happens to also be this guy:

Now, as far as I know, LLM hallucinations are still a serious problem. And as far as I know, a lot of lawyers who use LLMs are having problems with hallucinations. (When I wrote about them less than a year ago there were 112 documented cases with lawyers who got called out in Damien Charlotin’s database; now there are 914. That’s 8x growth in less than 12 months!)

Do you want to use an accountant who hallucinates? Or who has the kind of pervasive troubles with reasoning that researchers at Caltech and Stanford just documented? Back on planet earth, according to December’s Remote Labor Index, only 2.5% of human “online tasks” (physical tasks were excluded) could be done by AI.

A decade ago, Geoff Hinton, then working for Google, said “We should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” (In fact, the number of radiologists keeps growing, and in some communities there is a shortage.)

Promises are cheap. And all the big tech CEOs have come to realize that making them costs them nothing. (Some CTOs have caught too; Suleyman’s colleague Kevin Scott hinted that GPT-5 would blow away PhDs, and be vastly better than GPT-4; in reality the improvements were far more modest.)

Tesla trades at nearly 400 times earnings not because they have ever made all that much money, but because Elon is a master of hype. Others like Altman and Amodei and Suleyman have taken note, and play the same game.

It would be nice if places like FT would refuse to play along, providing more context (about conflicts of interest and past prediction track records). It would also help if they would more regularly seek independent outside opinions. Instead, too often media companies platform predictions from people who stand to gain immensely from their narratives, with too little skepticism.

The public has not been well served by this practice. If the whole thing collapses, as many people fear, the careless repetition of hype by editors who love the “everything is about to change” narrative (always good for clicks) may well turn out to have been an important contributing factor.