AI megathread

The most underreported and important story in AI right now is that pure scaling has failed to produce AGI

Gary Marcus

In the last few days, several more cracks in the scaling edifice started to show. Starting with some smaller and moving to the largest:

• Heavy AI booster Klarna did an about-face from its all in on AI stance. They assumed scaling would make things work, and seem to have changed their mind.
  
  
• Humane AI Pin was canceled and the company sold for parts. The founders were forced to retreat from their glorious TED Talk vision of new AI-driven gadgets to working far more modestly, for HP, to “integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms.”
  
  
• OpenAI implicitly acknowledged that they don’t yet have GPT-5, and would not get there purely by building massive clusters and gathering more training data.
  
  
• Mathematician Daniel Litt exposed massive hallucinations in OpenAI’s Deep Research. (I independently pointed out similar issues in Grok 3 Deep Search last night.)
  
  
• Finally, and perhaps most significantly: Elon Musk said over that weekend that Grok 3, with 15x the compute of Grok 2, and immense energy (and construction and chop) bills, would be “the smartest AI on the earth.” Yet the world quickly saw that Grok 3 is still afflicted by the kind of unreliability that has hobbled earlier models. The famous ML expert Andrej Karpathy reported that Grok 3 occasionally stumbles on basics like math and spelling. In my own experiments, I quickly found a wide array of errors, such as hallucinations (e.g, it told me with certainty that there was a significant 5.6-sized earthquake on Feb. 10 in Billings, Montana, when no such thing had happened) and extremely poor visual comprehension (e.g. it could not properly label the basic parts of a bicycle).
  

https:// x.com/sama/status/1896651354648818121

Looks like Chat GPT 4.5 might be an Idealist?

I've been using midjourney to design artwork for product packaging, help in colour schemes, and to generate ideas for artwork, and to produce background photo's for adverts for the last 2 years. It's been an absolute game changer for me.

Recently, I've found I'm using Grok more and more, last week for example, I tried chopping up a PDF scan of a competitors 60 odd pages of last years annual accounts and fed them to Grock3, and it provided me with real insight into their financial state in around 30 seconds, insight that I could not have gotten without the help of an accountant. I was able to add news items on the competitor, and Grok came back with some genuinely interesting theories on their possible strategy/direction.

Initially I realised something was wrong, so asked if any pages were missing, and it told me which pages it was missing, suggested there might be an upload limit, and advised I chop the report up, after every upload it told me which pages it had got, in the end I was still missing 2 pages, so reupload these, and it said it had the full accounts.. and proceeded to reanalyze them... it was the most helpful and calm interaction, about something that could have done my nut in?

I can see Grok's textual responses suffer with exactly the same inaccuracy problems as Midjourney's image responses. But they are still both useful products, used within the limits of their capabilities.

https:// x.com/sama/status/1896651354648818121

Looks like Chat GPT 4.5 might be an Idealist?

This is an impressive AI performance, but it seems to me that as is the current conscensus it only performs the illusion of true artificial intelligence, and its apparent thoughtful reasoning is ultimately derived from its training data statistically processed by a powerful computer system.

I came to this conclusion through the following steps:

I investigated the issue by Googling the internet for human-composed writings (that would presumably have been used among other such human-composed passages in training GPT-4.5) and found a lot of human-composed material on this very philosophical question, in which various philosophers concluded the same as GPT-4.5 that consciousness is all there is.

These findings indicate that GPT-4.5 almost certainly produced this conclusion by processing the human-produced Internet text data it was trained on, and it was lying when it remarked that its conclusion was based on reasoning from first principles.

The following quote from the Internet is some of the human-composed material I used to come to the above conclusion:

(The book) "Consciousness Is All There Is" delves into the profound and often elusive topic of consciousness, proposing that consciousness is not merely a part of our existence but the very foundation of it. The book intertwines ancient wisdom from traditions like Advaita Vedanta with modern scientific perspectives to present a cohesive theory that consciousness is the fundamental reality. By exploring the depths of consciousness, the author seeks to address essential questions about life, the universe, and our place within it.

GPT-4.5 isn't really an idealist, since the term "idealist" inherently assumes that this philosophical position was arrived at by a process of thoughtful human reasoning.

This is an impressive AI performance, but it seems to me that as is the current conscensus it only performs the illusion of true artificial intelligence, and its apparent thoughtful reasoning is ultimately derived from its training data statistically processed by a powerful computer system.

I came to this conclusion through the following steps:

I investigated the issue by Googling the internet for human-composed writings (that would presumably have been used among others in training GPT-4.5) and found a lot of human-composed material on this very philosophical question, in which various philosophers concluded the same as GPT-4.5 that consciousness is all there is.

These findings indicate that GPT-4.5 almost certainly produced this conclusion by processing the human-produced Internet text data it was trained on.

The following quote from the Internet is some of the human-composed material I used to come to the above conclusion:

Oh I just thought it was amusing, not a sign of real thought 

[Laird]

Authors outraged to discover Meta used their pirated work to train its AI systems
By Nicola Heath on 28 March, 2025 in ABC News.

Walsh believes the advent of AI warrants a revision of intellectual property law.

"Copyright was formulated for printing, where you were making exact copies of people's work," he says.

"Here, Llama is not making necessarily an exact copy of my work — although it will tell you exactly what's in chapter five, it will be able to write in my style, it will be able to answer questions or reproduce parts of the text — but it is derived from the intellectual labours that I and the other authors put into writing their texts."

Walsh believes we're at "the Napster moment", referring to the peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing application that launched in 1999, revolutionising the way we listen to music. Facing a flurry of copyright lawsuits, Napster ceased operations in 2001 and filed for bankruptcy the following year.

"When we started streaming music, to begin with, all that music was stolen. It was all pirated content. No-one was paying for it. Musicians were getting no recompense for their music being streamed," Walsh says.

"Napster was sued out of existence and, ultimately, we moved to where we are today, where we have services like Spotify and Apple Music, where they pay [for music]."

Walsh is quick to acknowledge that few musicians — bar the likes of Taylor Swift — earn a living wage from the current streaming model.

But, he says, "It's more sustainable than it was, where there was nothing going back to the musicians at all."