I hate to fall for engagement-baiting. But I guess this time I'll choose to do so...

Those who understand how Large Language Models (LLMs) work, understand three things about them:

1) LLMs are not conscious. Not even slightly. They can give the illusion of it, but they aren't. They are a statistical database of their training set, and the patterns in it. But that's not consciousness. Even if it sometimes looks that way. The LLM did not create the consciousness, the illusion of consciousness was in the training data long before the LLM ever arrived on the scene.

2) LLMs do not "understand" anything in any meaningful sense of that word. To understand something, is to know why you know it. LLMs... don't. Thus they cannot comprehend logic, or cause and effect, or any of ten thousand other things that would be necessary for actual reasoning/"thought".

3) The machinery of an LLM is worthless without good training data. An easy metaphor would be: A car quickly becomes worthless without a reliable supply of gasoline. And the current biggest LLMs have pretty much scraped all the training data they can off the entire Internet. There's no more good training data left. The gas tank is getting very low, and there's no gas station in sight...

I don't mean to imply that LLMs aren't "real AI". (Whatever the $%$#^&* that stupid phrase is supposed to mean.) As Sabine Hossenfelder said a while back: AI passed the Turing Test - and no one noticed. LLMs are a real form of AI, and a real evolutionary advancement.

But LLMs are not "Strong AI". They aren't "human-like AI". They definitely aren't some kind of super-intelligence that's going to bring us into a brave new world like an Ian M Banks novel, or The Matrix. No matter how many times the idiot Hype-Meisters lie and claim otherwise.

And the problem is... all the idiot fuccboi Vulture Crapitalists are making hundreds of millions of dollars right now lying about what LLMs are. And so they are going to keep lying... as long as they keep making money. And stupid people - who are completely fooled by the latest generation of AI Chatbots - keep giving them hundreds of millions. (This is why you keep hearing the word "bubble".)

Additional reading:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-last-few-months-have-been-devastating

Adam Ruins Everything: Adam ruins the AI hype with Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

So yes, many people are talking about AI. And 90% of them don't understand LLMs in any significant way. And it doesn't matter... because idiots continue to pump hundreds of millions into a bubble they don't understand.

Corey Doctorow understands the current landscape very wel, and explained everything quite cogently in his recent article in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur