AGI's New Clothes
- Karl Johansson
- 21 apr.
- 4 min läsning
Why isn't the media more critical of AI companies and their fantastical claims?
The more research I do into Artificial Intelligence (AI) the more disillusioned I get with American tech as an industry. I’ve made the case plenty of times that American tech companies are not our saviours, but rather companies like any other. I am gearing up to do a long form project akin to the essay I posted in November last year on the subject of AI and Silicon Valley’s hunt for what I call the ‘Next Big Thing’. AI is the perfect example of a ‘Next Big Thing’: a cool breakthrough in computer science with limited practical applications which the Tech industry and associated media ecosystem imbue with unlimited hype. I’ll give more in-depth explanations and arguments in the essay itself, tentatively titled ‘No Acoustic Guitars in Silicon Valley’. In this post though, I want to give a taste of what is to come by discussing the biggest contributor to the AI hype: a pliant media.
The main source of inspiration for this project has been Ed Zitron and his newsletter ‘Where’s Your Ed At’ where he regularly discusses the flawed business model of AI. He is the only person I have seen attempt to dive into the unit economics of AI – which at the moment seem to contradict OpenAI’s claims of becoming profitable at some point in the near future. Tech, business, and finance journalists all have good reasons to delve into the numbers on OpenAI, and yet few have, or if they have it has failed to gain widespread notice. Why is that? I say because of media bias.
In a Trumpian and nativist age bias is a contentious term but I use it in its original meaning. Bias is an unconscious and slight preference for a side rather than an intention to deceive. Because of how stage managed most tech events are common sense questions like: how do you expect to become profitable when you lose money on all users, including paying ones? are not welcome, so journalists who want to continue having access to big and important companies do not ask them. They rely on others, a step removed, to be critical but the seeming concurrence between tech insiders and the journalists who cover tech imply that there is a consensus on what the tech and the companies can do, leading few to feel the need to be critical.
The hyperbolic and deeply strange way in which AI boosters claim that AI radically transforming the world is a when rather than an if makes it harder for a reasonable person to come to a nuanced understanding of what the technology is and what its limits are. For example, let’s look at a recently released “report” about what AI will be able to do in the coming decade from a non-profit called the AI Futures Project. It starts off well and tries to establish credibility: “We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.1 It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.2” But it quickly becomes a pitch for a sci-fi novel rather than anything approaching a serious prediction grounded in fact. Here’s what the report “predicts” will be the leading AI’s capabilities by the end of 2025, i.e. eight months from now: “The same training environments that teach Agent-1 to autonomously code and web-browse also make it a good hacker. Moreover, it could offer substantial help to terrorists designing bioweapons, thanks to its PhD-level knowledge of every field and ability to browse the web.” By 2029 the report “predicts” that: “There are cures for most diseases, an end to poverty, unprecedented global stability, and the Dow Jones just passed one million. Some people are still scared or unhappy, but their options are limited. They can either enjoy the inconceivably exciting novel hyper-entertainment on offer, or post angry screeds into the void. Most choose the hyper-entertainment.”
And it is far from the only such “prediction”, indeed as I’ll delve into more in the coming essay the CEO of OpenAI’s biggest rival Anthropic is also writing low effort sci-fi which gets passed off as expert opinion. “Thus, it’s my guess that powerful AI could at least 10x the rate of these discoveries, giving us the next 50-100 years of biological progress in 5-10 years.14 Why not 100x? Perhaps it is possible, but here both serial dependence and experiment times become important: getting 100 years of progress in 1 year requires a lot of things to go right the first time, including animal experiments and things like designing microscopes or expensive lab facilities. I’m actually open to the (perhaps absurd-sounding) idea that we could get 1000 years of progress in 5-10 years, but very skeptical that we can get 100 years in 1 year. “
When that passes for grounded prediction all contact with reality has been severed. How insecure do you have to be about AI to accept hatstand ideas like AI ending poverty and moving the frontiers of biology forward by a century in 10 years? It feels desperate to put out such nakedly implausible prediction to keep the AI hype train going. Still, there are few reporters challenging these obviously fantastical claims. I am not categorically opposed to the idea that AI might be useful, just exhausted with the way the industry lies about how good it currently is and shamelessly passes off sci-fi fantasies are predictions. The fact that the media has not done a good job at challenging the tech industry on its AI claims directly enable these kinds of grandiose descriptions of just how wonderful the patterns and exotic the fabrics of the AI emperor’s new clothes are.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about how Liberation Day was allowed to happen here or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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Cover photo by George Shervashidze from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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