Awesome shit on the Internet #2
Han Lee's "The AI Great Leap Forward"
Even if you disagree with everything written in this essay, it's still a wonderful piece of writing: The AI Great Leap Forward.
The backyard steel of 1958 looked like steel. It was not steel. Today’s backyard AI looks like AI. It is not AI. A TypeScript workflow with hardcoded if-else branches is not an agent. A prompt template behind a REST endpoint is not a model. Calling these things AI is like calling pig iron from a backyard furnace high-grade steel. It satisfies the reporting requirement. It fails every real-world test.
The essay draws parallels between the current AI push and Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward"; these parallels require, perhaps, a touch of mental gymnastics to embrace—will the AI obsession really lead to 30,000,000 deaths?—but then you read articles like Wired's OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters, and suddenly "a touch" seems a very fair qualifier.