I’m an old fart - I got my degree in CS in 1985, and I’ve been paying attention to the predictions and advancements in AI for a very long time. I have at least as much issue with the way people think and talk about it as the author, but probably less of an issue with it being called AI. Remember that for decades, the informal working definition of AI was “A computer doing anything that usually requires a human.” So for ages, they said we’d have AI if a computer could read a page of printed text out loud in English. That seemed almost unattainable when it was first talked about, but now it’s so trivial that no one would consider it AI.

People have tried to make definitions that are crisper than that, but few if any of those definitions requires anything we’d call “thinking.” The frustrating thing is that the general public talks all the time about AI as if it’s conscious . Even when we’re talking about its flaws, we use words like “hallucinating,” which is something only thinking beings can do.

To me, LLMs are the worst things because to so many people they seem like the are (or could be) thinking entities. They respond to questions in a lifelike manner and can construct (extrapolate?) somewhat novel responses. But they’re also the least useful to us as a society. I’m much more interested in the Machine Learning applications for distilling gobs of data to develop new medicines or identify critical items in images that humans don’t have the mental bandwidth for. But LLMs get all the press.