The issue is that “AI” has become a marketing buzz word instead of anything meaningful. When someone says “AI” these days, what they’re actually referring to is “machine learning”. Like in LLMs for example: what’s actually happening (at a very basic level, and please correct me if I’m wrong, people) is that given one or more words/tokens, it tries to calculate the most probable next word/token based on its model (trained on ridiculously large numbers of bodies of text written by humans). It does this well enough and at a large enough scale that the output is cohesive, comprehensive, and useful.

While the results are undeniably impressive, this is not intelligence in the traditional sense; there is no reasoning or comprehension, and definitely no consciousness, or awareness here. To grossly oversimplify, LLMs are really really good word calculators and can be very useful. But leave it to tech bros to make them sound like the second coming and shove them where they don’t belong just to get more VC money.