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Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster. A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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Whoever thought that this machine that can predict next word in a sentence, next sentence in a conversation etc. should be used in place of all human intellectual work... should have his elderly care taken over by LLM.
That's what is wild about it. At any given point in time, the model is wholly consumed only with the very next token. Maybe that token is a running narrative of 'reasoning' or directly in the output, either way, the AI does not have anything to model anything beyond the very next token. It doesn't have a destination in mind and is just finding the words to get there, it's building it up word by word. The overall 'meaning' is an emergent property of just picking the very next token and seeing what happens.
Honestly, it's shocking it works as well as it does. More shockingly, there are AI enthusiasts that argue that's how the human brain works, which I can't imagine someone going through life with every thought rooted in building it up word by word.
its not that simple. whatever opinion you might on llms have you have to agree this is oversimplifying at best.
Its just a ball rolling down a hill trying to find the lowest point, but its like a super fancy ball with a ton of rules, and the hills are really detailed with like little walls and bridges and stuff.