Artificial intelligence is a scam

AI is not intelligent, that is what you have been led to believe. The big companies sell you AI as something with superpowers, but it is all a lie. If you genuinely think it is intelligent, I invite you to read this article in full.

AI does not think: it makes mathematical predictions

If you believe AI thinks and reflects like a human, you are very much mistaken. Basically, and to put it plainly, all it does is predict the next word or pixel based on the previous words or pixels (the context). An AI is trained on enormous amounts of data and, through mathematical models, learns patterns and calculates probabilities to predict which outcome is most likely in each situation.

For example, imagine someone completing sentences: "It is very ___ today". Your brain would probably say "hot". AI does something similar, but without understanding anything. It calculates probabilities:

• hot → 80%
• cold → 3%
• windy → 2%
• noisy → 0.1%

It picks the most likely one and keeps doing that over and over. Basically it finds: in text, the next word; in images, the next pixel; in video, the next frame; in music, the next sound. It all comes down to enormous mathematical calculations to predict what comes next. Language models are trained precisely to predict the next token (chunks of words, or words).

AI does not reason like humans

Chess is the best example there is for showing that AI does not reason. If we wanted to snapshot every possible game of chess we are talking about 10¹²⁰ games. There are 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe, to give you a sense of the magnitude. That means there are unexplored games and positions, and that many games are not inside the datasets the AI was trained on.

So some researchers set language models to play chess. At first they seemed to understand the game perfectly: they played known openings and reasonable moves. But in certain situations they started doing absurd things: illegal moves, pieces passing through other pieces, impossible rules. The problem was not that they had never read the rules; the rules were in the training data. The problem is that recognising movement patterns in games the model had not been trained on produced errors. While the positions resembled known examples they worked well; when the situation drifted from those examples, the AI failed and made illegal moves.

It is like a student who memorises thousands of exams: they look like a genius until you change the questions. Paper: openreview.net/forum?id=65R1Dbfwzk

It has no ideas of its own: it mixes existing ones

It is the opposite of being creative. You think AI is creative because it makes you a nice design you have never seen before, or a web page with an unprecedented interface. But what it is really making is a collage of components that already exist and are inside the dataset, which together look like something "new". This tends to homogenise results.

If you built 100 web pages using AI, you would notice it repeats the same patterns, the same transitions, the same button appearance. That makes nothing original, and if you are applying AI across every area of your business, you are killing originality and drifting towards looking just like the competition.

AI invents nothing new

There are headlines about new proteins being found or new medical cures being discovered. Is that actually false? Honestly, no. It is true that AI helps "discover" new things, but not because it was creative and generated something unprecedented. Rather, those patterns or data were already there, and humans had overlooked finding and identifying them.

The difference is that an AI does not have inspiration the way a person does. It does not wake up one morning and think: "What if I try this because I have a hunch?". What it does is analyse absurdly large amounts of information and find relationships that are practically impossible for us to spot. Where a researcher can review thousands of possibilities, an AI can review millions.

It is like looking for a needle in a gigantic haystack. The needle was always there; the AI did not create it. What it did was find patterns and connections hidden among enormous amounts of data.

What is genuinely revolutionary: a gigantic shared memory

This may be where the real revolution is. Not an artificial intelligence, but a centralised artificial memory. Imagine a library holding almost every book, almost every article, millions of conversations, images, videos, code and research.

We already had this with the internet, but all the information was "unsorted". We had to find it ourselves. Now we have all of it centralised, from a single chat, in seconds, and it can also find relationships across all that data. That really does change the world.

Should we call it "Centralised Artificial Memory"?

Perhaps a more honest name would be "Centralised Artificial Memory". Because it better describes what it does: store human knowledge, relate concepts, find patterns and return useful answers.

The word "intelligence" makes you think of consciousness, understanding, intent, independent thought and creativity. And that is infinitely far from what we currently call artificial intelligence.