I’ve spent hundreds of hours listening to AI podcasts, reading books, interviews, technical papers, and watching demos. I’ve followed every twist in the rapid rise of large language models and machine learning systems that now generate text, code, images, video, music, and more. And while I’m consistently amazed by what these systems can do, I find myself returning to the same conclusion:
AI is intelligent — but not in the way humans are. Not even close.
We use the word “intelligence” for both a child solving a puzzle and a model like GPT-4 summarizing a legal brief. But the two are so different in nature that calling them by the same word borders on absurd. It’s like calling both a hurricane and a wristwatch “complex.” Technically true, but the comparison doesn’t help.
The Intelligence Illusion
Modern AI systems now do things that, not long ago, would have seemed impossible:
- They beat grandmasters at chess and Go
- They generate essays, poems, software
- They predict protein structures and propose new materials
- They create realistic art, music, and even video on demand
By every outward metric, this looks like intelligence. But it’s intelligence without experience. Without understanding. Without memory in any human sense. Without context, embodiment, or even the faintest flicker of awareness.
It’s intelligence as output — not as insight.
A human understands why a joke is funny, why a story is tragic, or why a friend’s tone sounds off. AI can mimic all of that — and still have no idea what anything means.
A Very, Very Good Calculator
If I had to describe modern AI in a single phrase, I’d call it this:
A very, very good calculator.
And that’s not an insult. Calculators are among the most powerful tools humans have built. They’ve transformed everything from engineering to finance to space travel. But no one ever thought a calculator had a mind.
Modern AI — especially models like GPT-4 — are supercharged calculators. Not for numbers, but for language, images, patterns, and code. They manipulate symbols with extraordinary fluency. They recombine and remix human data in ways that feel intelligent. But they don’t understand what they’re doing. And they don’t care.
The AGI Mirage
Which brings us to AGI — artificial general intelligence — the hypothetical future in which machines can reason, plan, and understand the world like humans (or beyond).
I don’t buy it.
Not in five years. Not in fifty. Maybe not ever.
Because as of now, there’s no roadmap to AGI. In fact, there’s not even a clear definition. The term “AGI” gets thrown around constantly, but it’s used to mean different things by different people: human-level reasoning, conscious machines, broadly capable assistants, artificial minds. Without a shared definition, the entire conversation becomes speculative noise.
And the more you understand how today’s AI models actually work — the vast statistical pattern-matching, the lack of grounding, the absence of any inner world — the less plausible AGI seems.
It’s not on the horizon. It’s not “just around the corner.” And we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Smarter Than Us — and Yet Infinitely Dumber
Here’s the paradox:
AI is both far more capable than humans and far less intelligent.
It can access more knowledge than any individual ever could. It can process and generate with speed, consistency, and scale we can’t touch. In some domains — like Go, search, translation, and scientific modeling — it’s already beyond us.
And yet, it has no understanding. No goals. No model of the world.
So is it intelligent?
Yes.
And also no.
And that contradiction lies at the heart of the confusion around AI.
Why This Matters
AI is going to reshape the world — drastically. It will change how we work, learn, create, communicate, and solve problems. It’s already doing so.
But we need to stop pretending that today’s models think like we do — or are on the verge of becoming “like us.” That fantasy doesn’t just create confusion. It invites hype, fear, bad policy, and wishful thinking.
It also distracts from what makes these tools actually powerful — and from the real limits we need to understand.
We don’t need to dream about AGI to be amazed by what AI can do. But we do need better language, clearer thinking, and a more grounded conversation.
Let’s stop using one word — “intelligence” — to describe things that are fundamentally incomparable.
If AGI Comes… It Won’t Look Like Us
Maybe, someday — a hundred years from now, maybe longer — something we might call AGI will exist. But if it does, it won’t be anything like human cognition.
It won’t think or feel. It won’t “understand” the way we do. It will be a system built from different principles, shaped by different constraints, operating in a different way.
It will be intelligent — but not human. Not emotional. Not conscious. Just something else entirely.
And that’s exactly why we should stop pretending it’s just around the corner.
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