The scariest AI reality

The wildest, scariest, indisputable truth about AI's large language models is that the companies building them don't know exactly why or how they work. With the most powerful companies pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into willing superhuman intelligence into a quick existence, and Washington doing nothing to slow or police them, it seems worth dissecting this Great Unknown. Large Language Models—including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini—are massive neural networks that ingest massive amounts of information (much of the internet) to learn to generate answers. The engineers know what they're setting in motion and what data sources they draw on. But the LLM's size means even the experts can't explain exactly why it chooses to say anything in particular. Google's Sundar Pichai, and really all of the big AI company CEOs, argue that humans will learn to better understand how these machines work and find clever, if yet unknown ways, to control them and "improve lives." The companies all have big research and safety teams, and a huge incentive to tame the technologies if they ever want to realize their full value. After all, no one will trust a machine that makes stuff up or threatens them. But, as of today, they do both—and no one knows why.