The illusion of Generative AI, the insanity of massive bets on hyperscaling, and the case for world models and neurosymbolic AI
Three excellent new interviews
Fabulous deep dive with Brian Greene / The World Science Festival:
Excellent brief but focused interview on the risks of massive bets on hyperscaling, with Zachary Karabell; keynote earlier this week at Web Summit:
More technical; also excellent: why we so badly need neurosymbolic AI and world models, and why software verification is more important than ever in the LLM era. A spicy fireside chat hosted by Will Wilson, CEO of Antithesis, from the lively conference Bug Bash 2026, “A conference on extracting reliable software from the slop factory”:
Bonus: Check out YouTuber Husk on using a GenAI-fueled to bargain on his behalf. LLM-powered AI agents are gonna be great! Watch to the end!
is there a good set of links on the assumptions hyperscalers have med about depreciation?
Great stuff, Gary -- you've been busy! (Also, great meeting you at TAIS in Oxford!)
I cover many of these issues (the fundamental cognitive inadequacy of LLM-based chatbots (and why this will never be fixed by scaling), the construction of fully-interpretable world models via continuous learning, and neurosymbolic architecture for AGI) in my paper "Gold-Standard AGI: Outer AGI Superalignment", which I have just submitted to the Springer journal AI & Ethics.
At 214 pages (including 534 references), I admit that my paper may be a little daunting to read -- considering the very high stakes (the future of all humanity for all eternity), I felt that I needed to address every sub-problem as clearly and thoroughly as possible. However, I do believe it’s possible to get at least the gist from reading the Introduction and Conclusion sections alone.
A preprint of the paper (which took me ~8 years to develop) is available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16876832. The next paper in the sequence (on inner AGI superalignment) is already in my head — I just hope it doesn’t take another 8 years! :-)