More Than 99% of "AI" Companies Aren't AI, They're Pure BS
A giant delusion that only charms people as long as they still believe in the "secret" power or secret potential of slopmasters
Almost all "AI" companies are not AI companies. Many of them (the biggest players, e.g. Google and Microsoft) are the same old companies rebranded or re-marketed as "AI giants". Take Google for instance. Its summaries or answers are nothing new; they go decades back. Now Google sells the same as "AI" and moreover shoves them right in people's faces (top of SERPs). In reality, Google mostly grafts texts from other sites, sometimes passing them (a laundering step) through an LLM word blender to skirt expectation of citation, attribution, reference one can verify/authenticate the text with.
I totally agree with RMS (I don't agree with everything he says, just for the record!) that LLMs deserve the tag (or term) "bullshit generators". We must never call them "AI"; to even use this term (except to illuminate it's a misnomer) it to contribute mass deception or narrative control. Yesterday my wife told me that someone she knows now casually conflates robotics with "AI"; so I advised her, first get the terminology right, then explain robotics are nothing new and have been utilised by millions of businesses to the full extent feasible and economically viable. The tasks done or supervised by human operators were left that way because robotics cannot replicate the judgement or accuracy of a person who can speak to patients, knows context, has common sense, and can seek second (or third etc.) opinion.
We need to discard those stupid debates about "AI" and reject media that gets paid to participate in such overt narrative/metaphor control (manipulation like The Register MS [1, 2]). Caricatures of brains do not mean that mindless computer programs (or very large tables of words with weights assigned to chains) have either knowledge or understanding. █
Image source: Kellar Levitation