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A metaphor: I've been thinking about AI as, vaguely, chemicals.
ML 2026 is like chemistry 1890.[1] Big deploy, small understand. The papers even have a similar vibe.
Talking to AI is like eating psychoactive chemicals.
AI psychosis, kinda like drug induced psychosis.
AI addiction, kinda like drug addiction. But different, because drugs go physically in brain.
etc.
But like, yeah, it's a metaphor. CC0 I guess or whatever.
(while mentioning I was going to post this, I heard Eli Tyre said something like this in reply to "what it feels like to be brain hacked by an AI")
- ^
We kinda sorta understand some empirical stuff, the tech is being scaled, but the theory of what's going on underneath is still resisting understanding. People who claim to have a grand theory are usually wrong, but sometimes someone finds a theory that does predict the empirical stuff. Most are mostly useful for doing more empirical stuff.
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