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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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Sigh. I've been getting increasingly tired of arguing with the skeptics, at least on this site. Not all of them are equally as bad, of course,

I hope I am not in this grouping in your mind. I am not a skeptic on AI per se, I am a skeptic on LLMs. Entirely for technical reasons related to training data availability. LLMs perform great on any task that has a large corpus of training data available to. Multi-headed Attention really is a great technique. I think you made the same mistake Dase makes, you think AI == LLMs when really LLMs are a subset of AI, not the whole pinata.

I exist however in a field where there aren't large corpuses of data. There aren't millions of samples on what an IED does to the human body, in a wide diversity of situations, or how a combat medic should respond to various injuries, or the secondary and tertiary blast effects of a nuclear warhead on different locals with different burst patterns, yield dynamics, etc. To date nobody has been able to create reliable wargaming material on actual simulated conflicts that display actual tactical and strategic insights, and trust me they have tried...

We will achieve a super intelligence eventually, and while I am skeptical on a "singularity" (tm) it's probably possible eventually, I just don't think LLMs without serious modifications are really it, and I don't believe brute force scaling is going to achieve it.

You should be happy to hear that I genuinely don't think you're an unreasonable skeptic. I make no strong claims that current LLM architecture (without major breakthroughs) can scale to ASI, I'm mostly agnostic on that front. But I think Mythos is a strong hint that there's a lot more juice to squeeze out of them, which can lead to RSI or at least a productivity boost significant enough to make the next great leap forward feasible. And that's leaving aside the ridiculously large investment of money and brains into the project of eventually creating a "true" AGI and ASI.