Do AI Models Think?
"AI can’t solve a problem that hasn’t been previously solved by a human." ~ Arnaud Bertrand
Arnaud Bertrand has the best explanation of what AI is at its core. It’s not a thinking machine, and its output’s not thought. It’s actually the opposite of thought — it’s what you get from a freshman who hasn’t studied, but learned a few words instead and is using them to sound smart. If the student succeeds, you don’t call it thought, just a good emulation.
According to the Machine Learning Research department at Apple:
. . . AI models, even the most cutting-edge Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), are no more than very gifted parrots with basically no actual reasoning capability.
They’re not "intelligent" in the slightest, at least not if you understand intelligence as involving genuine problem-solving instead of simply parroting what you’ve been told before without comprehending it.
That’s exactly what the Apple paper was trying to understand:
- Can "reasoning" models actually reason?
- Can they solve problems that they haven’t been trained on but would normally be easily solvable with their "knowledge"?
The answer, it turns out, is a clear and unequivocal "no".
The Monster AI
AI will bring nothing but harm. As I said earlier, AI is not just a disaster for our political health, though yes, it will be that (look for Cadwallader’s line "building a techno-authoritarian surveillance state"). But AI is also a disaster for the climate. It will hasten the collapse by decades as usage expands.
(See the video above for why AI models are massive energy hogs. See this video to understand "neural networks" themselves.)
Why won’t AI be stopped?
Because the race for AI is not really a race for tech. It's a greed-driven race for money, a lot of it. Our lives are already run by those who seek money, especially those who already have too much. They've now found a way to feed themselves even faster: by convincing people to do simple searches with AI, a gas-guzzling death machine.
For both of these reasons — mass surveillance and climate disaster — no good will come from AI. Not one ounce.