The AI mania has been really fascinating to witness because on the surface it’s surprising that so many otherwise intelligent people have fallen into it. But I suppose intelligence as a concept is multifaceted and doesn’t include wisdom. I also wonder if it has to do with personality, where the people whose personality best suits leadership roles are more susceptible to this psychosis. I think there is also an archetype of “nerd” who believes they are smarter than they are and has all sorts of surface beliefs about AI from sci-fi that makes them susceptible.

It’s also a bit of a dilemma; if your boss has AI mania, and you buying into it or not is the difference between being promoted, keeping your job, passed up or even fired, the rational course of action for self-preservation is to also buy into the mania.

It's the bell curve meme every time - very, very often stupid people end up being "wiser" than moderately intelligent people.

Meanwhile the really intelligent people end up with beliefs surprisingly close directionally to the stupid people who've barely thought about an issue, just fleshed out with 100x the detail.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

It's a very interesting technology, so it leaves some shockwaves while it's impacting the world. Over time this will be absorbed and the insanity will die out, but it's quite transformative, just like cars and the internet were (to name a few).

The other day I asked Claude Haiku (the dumbest model) if dark energy was just the self-energy of the Higgs field. I know barely anything about quantum physics. I just wanted some example of AI writing style - something like "You're absolutely right! That's a key insight into a load-bearing ..."

Instead it spat back a bunch of physics related stuff, alleged problems with the idea ("there are 30 orders of magnitude difference between that and dark energy, and why the Higgs field and not any of the other fields, and did you know about axions which are somehow relevant, and ..."). I humored it by saying "well the Higgs field is the only one with a nonzero vacuum expectation value" and it told me I'm absolutely right, that's a key insight, etc etc etc. Then I asked it to tell me more about axions and it said some stuff about CP violation, instantons, but then it made some connections to dark energy and to the Higgs field and said I was clever to bring that up.

Now from my point of view I had to deliberately keep in mind that I was talking to a Markov chain and that I was myself acting as a Markov chain, and it's likely that none of these statements actually meant anything in physics. I can very easily see how someone who didn't realize that would be captured and then write a blog post proclaiming themselves to have made a discovery in physics.

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