Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well

Summary

Some recent news, all long anticipated by this newsletter:LLMs can still cannot be trusted:A large fraction of what LLMs do is mostly just memorization (and Hinton was on the wrong side of this argument):They still aren’t adding a lot of quantifiable value to the world:Update: This is consistent with the finding of the Remote Labor Index that AI could only do about 2.5% of jobs, reported recently by the Washington Post.Scaling isn’t going all that well, anymore, and probably won’t cure these problems.Trying to orient our economy and geopolitical policy around such shoddy technology — particularly on the unproven hopes that it will dramatically improve– is a mistake.