The strongest argument for being able to get down there came from an MIT prof I listened to on a podcast a while a go, who believes the "reasoning" paradigm is the fundamental discovery we need to get to some kind of jobs-market-destroying AGI.

That "reasoning" paradigm used to be called "AI." It's recently shifted to being called "symbolic AI." And the shitty thing about "symbolic AI" is it's been five or ten years away since ELIZA. It doesn't scale. Throwing chips at it doesn't make it better. Throwing clock cycles at it doesn't make it faster. Throwing money at it doesn't make it more useful. This is why it was tossed aside for LLMs - when we were way back on the asymptote they appeared to scale like gangbusters! Even now you can get impressive results out of tiny models if you're willing to wait. And are willing to put up with them making shit up.

I realized recently that my primary disappointment with AI is how fucking boring it is.

What the fuck am I looking at? I honestly don't know. And that's the best part. AI used to surprise you. It used to show you things that had never been there before, made from things that were always there.

There was a time when the question was "where's it going to go." It's never been anything but an extraordinarily fancy index but for a while there, truly interesting shit could happen by interrogating that index in places it had never been parsed. That wasn't useful to sell for $5.99/mo Chinese test-taker API calls, though, so it got wallpapered over in fits and starts. Everywhere AI can be interesting has been cut out of the index in favor of everywhere AI can be eHow.

LLMs as originally implemented could give you insight into the uncharted territory between well-trod paths. LLMs as they are sold now have all that space wallpapered over with content calls. I mean, sure. fuck yeah math olympiad. But if it can't fuckin' figure out the Tower of Hanoi who fucking cares? And I mean... we had the Internet. We could look up solutions to the Tower of Hanoi. We could look up solutions to Math Olympiad proofs if we needed them. Now we can't even look that shit up anymore because it's all been poisoned with AI bullshit.

And that was the point, really. There was no way to crack Google's search dominance without turning the Internet into a Tower of fucking Babel. So Microsoft hired OpenAI to poison the shit out of it, OpenAI fundraised like a mutherfucker on the idea that search engines were people too, fuckin' Musk thinks the solution to all the angry incels is to build a waifu into his social network and the mufukkin' economy had chunks carved off of it because someone asked "hey siri give me a tarriff platform."