> The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statisti

> The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. The problem might be that it cannot backtrack. When AI generates output, there is no backspace key for it - it uses "No, but wait!" all over instead, which is very different to human output. Subagents and/or branching conversations are presented as the solution to this - if you can't backtrack, then branch off a conversation to explore multiple paths (discarding the ones that didn't pan out), but this is a fix in the harness not a fix in the model. It's also literally how we made chess-playing engines back in the 80s: recursive path exploration with a fixed depth. Humans don't exactly work that way either, AFAIK. So we have this uncanny valley of intelligence: it's some sort of intelligence, but not as we know it.