“I'm trying to implement a rule for myself and those around me. Stop using the phrase AI because these are different technologies."

In this inaugural episode, Mike and Nick dissect the current AI debate and who benefits from its current framing:

• The Vocab Trap - Why using the term "AI" is a victory for the tech villainaires.
• Beyond "Spicy Autocomplete" - While often dismissed as mere autocomplete, LLMs are more accurately described as modeling the shape of language usage. They're a mirror to our collective cognition.
• Human Scaffolding - From remote drivers in the Philippines for Waymo to the engineers mapping every pothole, the perceived intelligence of these systems relies on a massive, invisible supply chain of human labor.
• Digital Dementia (Grandpa Shelby Theory) - LLMs operate with a form of anterograde amnesia; they cannot learn in real-time after training. Also, their outputs are often fuzzy associations rather than factual recall. Humans are being made to fill the gaps.

Timestamps

0:07 Intro

4:16 AI's Roots

7:15 How Transformers Work

10:23 Models Without Understanding

15:12 Language Hides Reasoning

19:19 Words by Their Company

21:46 Doomers and Superintelligence

33:27 Data, Limits, and Humps

36:03 Kurzweil and the Singularity

38:22 Humans as Scaffolding

40:24 Grandpa, Lost

References

Brief history of AI (from Mike's Misaligned Markets)

"Grandpa Shelby" and how Language Models work (Misaligned Markets)

Self-driving cars would be nowhere without HD maps

Talkie LM (1930s open source model)

Michael Woolridge on this is not the AI we were promised

John Rupert Firth and distributional semantics in context of machine learning

A timeline of the origins of AI doomerism

Sam Altman: AI will end world but create great companies

Elon Musk and Open AI's origins

Musk's connections to Nick Bostrom

John von Neumman, the singularity, and AI doom

Ted Chang on chatbots as blury jpegs