There's no such thing as artificial intelligence

The more accurate term is ‘machine learning’. The difference in labelling is important as ‘AI’ pins the blame on machines rather than the people designing these systems when things go wrong.

- Parmy Olson

No one sells the future more masterfully than the tech industry. According to its proponents, we will all live in the “metaverse”, build our financial infrastructure on “web3” and power our lives with “artificial intelligence”. All three of these terms are mirages that have raked in billions of dollars, despite bite back by reality.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in particular conjures the notion of thinking machines. But no machine can think, and no software is truly intelligent. The phrase alone may be one of the most successful marketing terms of all time.

Earlier this month, OpenAI announced GPT-4, a major upgrade to the technology underpinning ChatGPT. The system sounds even more human-like than its predecessor, naturally reinforcing notions of its intelligence.

But GPT-4 and other large language models like it are simply mirroring databases of text – close to a trillion words for the previous model – whose scale is difficult to contemplate. Helped along by an army of humans reprogramming it with corrections, the models glom words together based on probability. That is not intelligence.

These systems are trained to generate text that sounds plausible, yet they are marketed as new oracles of knowledge that can be plugged into search engines. That is foolhardy when GPT-4 continues to make errors, and it was only a few weeks ago that Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google both suffered embarrassing demos in which their new search engines glitched on facts.

Not helping matters: Terms like “neural networks” and “deep learning” only bolster the idea that these programs are human-like.