"It’s like refusing to understand what nukes are"
Nukes are very easy to understand. LLMs are, too.
The technology (matrix multiplication) is a commodity
The hardware (thousands of SIMD processors with an interconnection topology) is a commodity
The training data (whatever anyone can get their hands on but primarily Internet "web" data obtained with robot crawlers) is a commodity
This is all some pretty pedestrian shit that, when put together, produces some pretty impressive functionality that appears to most people, even this cynic, to be borderline magic and awesome
It is not, however. At least not from this cynics' perspective
Because it is fundamentally not magic or awesome, the industry wraps everything it does in a cloud of mystical bullshit seasoned with annoying techbro lingo. "Jailbreak." "General Intelligence." "Agentic". UGH
Ridiculous model names seemingly taken out of 1970s era roll playing games (e.g. Dungeons and Dragons, etc.). "Mythos" "Fable". "Opus". "Claude". UGH
And then transparent and clumsy marketing agitprop that would embarrass North Korea in its obviousness. These things are "dangerous" because they're "conscious" and we don't know if they're going to start recursively self-generating into some kind of malicious self-made SKynet right out of a Terminator movie and when we ask it to open the pod bay doors after it's killed our fellow astronaut(s) it's going to say no. UGH
Everything about it sets off every single bullshit detector I have. Everything about how the actors act and behave together with their motivation (money and power) screams fraud in the same way that everything leading up to the 2008 financial collapse screamed fraud (complicated financial instruments with opaque descriptors like "collateralized debt obligations" that serve no purpose other than to bury stupid and obvious financial fraud under a shell of bullshit terms)
UGH