It’s upsetting to watch so many people be led to believe a software feature created from human exhaust is an alien intelligence. It’s a psyop. LLMs are a clever way to compress and search large databases with patterns. They have now inhaled effectively all of human knowledge. From this point, there will be spikes of improvement in narrow areas, but the big models are already collapsing from inhaling their own exhaust. The core technology is at least 40 years old. Neural networks are nothing new. We’re just attaching obscene amounts of computing and data to them. The physical nature of an LLM is literally just a database of tokens (word parts) and weights (relationships) that can be queried. It is not magic. It can be made deterministic by setting the entropy aka temperature to zero. It is a clever way to store an immense amount of data and retrieve it through token predicting. “Agents” are just LLMs being queried in a loop. They take exponentially more energy and suffer the same problems as chatbots—hallucinations and sycophancy—but exponentially more complicated to solve. In reality, it’s all a category error. It’s a mirage created by the desire of a small group of elites to build a technological and financial moat around themselves. “AGI” is the McGuffin, the plot device, to serve as the messiah that will deliver people from the toils of everyday life. The broligarchs are trying to sell us our own replacements. According to them, we won’t have to drive, or work, or think anymore. The robots and AI will all do it for us. It’s the oldest con there is: magic beans. Your chatbot is not your Jesus or your girlfriend. Your Claude instance is not intelligent. It’s a search engine for human knowledge stolen from the internet and the destruction of physical books. So please understand. You are witnessing the biggest financial bubble in all of human history based on deceptive marketing, astroturfing, and cult dynamics. You are not witnessing the birth of a new intelligence. Unfortunately, that’s a battle we’re losing.