No one sells the future more masterfully than the tech industry. According to its proponents, we will all live in the “metaverse,” build our financial infrastructure on “web3” and power our lives with “artificial intelligence.” All three of these terms are mirages that have raked in billions of dollars, despite bite back by reality.
Artificial intelligence in particular conjures the notion of thinking machines. But no machine can think, and no software is truly intelligent. The phrase alone may be one of the most successful marketing terms of all time.
Last week OpenAI announced GPT-4, a major upgrade to the technology underpinning ChatGPT. The system sounds even more humanlike than its predecessor, naturally reinforcing notions of its intelligence. But GPT-4 and other large language models like it are simply mirroring databases of text — close to a trillion words for the previous model — whose scale is difficult to contemplate. Helped along by an army of humans reprogramming it with corrections, the models glom words together based on probability. That is not intelligence.
