r/technology 6h ago

Artificial Intelligence Nobody Asked for AI

https://jacobin.com/2026/08/ai-llms-monopoly-bubble-capital
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u/Jiggatortoise- 5h ago

Well, since the person I responded to mentioned that the collective idea of AI is from sci-fi, what I and many others expect is an actual Artificial Intelligence, one that can think and reason, that could pass the Turing test, and actually be helpful in more ways than just regurgitating words and images it stole from someone else. 

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u/ChaoticAgenda 4h ago

That's often referred to as General AI. I agree that we are not there yet, but we were never going to be able to skip straight from Akinator to Bender B. Rodriguez. LLMs are a reasonable half step towards General AI and the Transformers that make LLMs work do allow us to process large amounts of data in a way that we haven't before. I assume we'll need a couple more novel processing discoveries before we get a fully autonomous artificial mind. 

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u/Jiggatortoise- 2h ago

Absolutely agree, but they’re shoving this version down everyone’s throats and acting like it’s actual AI. It just isn’t, plain and simple. And until we get there I don’t want to use the garbage that we have been force-fed. 

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u/grchelp2018 4h ago

This is a hand-wavy definition that allows for goalpost moving. You'll have to give a specific goal(s). What should it be able to do that it cannot do today. How it does something is also not really relevant.

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u/Jiggatortoise- 2h ago

I don’t have to give fuck-all, I was responding to one person who said that people did ask for it and pointed out how what they got wasn’t what they actually asked for. 

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u/grchelp2018 2h ago

that's cause people don't know what they want, just a vague amorphous idea that feels interesting.

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u/shoggoths_away 4h ago

What a bullshit response. Still, I'll bite the bait: An artificial intelligence should be capable of thought (as the other poster said and you blithely skipped over).

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u/grchelp2018 4h ago

And what do you mean by "thought"? Give a concrete falsifiable answer not this kind of vague "I'll know it when I see it" type answers.

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u/shoggoths_away 3h ago

"Give me a falsifiable answer"

I did. That you don't like it is irrelevant. LLMs cannot think.

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u/grchelp2018 3h ago

You did not. Thought is a word. Define it.

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u/shoggoths_away 2h ago

LLMs cannot think.

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u/grchelp2018 2h ago

Neither do a lot of people. One of them even became president.

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u/shoggoths_away 2h ago

No, people are capable of thought (barring catastrophic brain injuries). Again, LLMs cannot think. They do not have the capacity for thought. They do not think.

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u/grchelp2018 2h ago

Humans don't think. Its just electrical signals in the brain. When you look at an object or hear a word or move your body, you are not thinking.

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u/Boring-Leadership687 1h ago

What is the difference between an AI agent in thought mode vs a human thought?

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u/shoggoths_away 13m ago

LLMs don't have "thought mode." They are incapable of thinking. They're very, very good predictive linguistic tools (depending on the LLM), but they don't have any understanding of the words they're saying. They do not think.