We've been told time and again that the massive large language models trained by companies like

Open AI and Anthropic are poised to utterly transform our world. We've been told that huge

percentages of existing jobs are soon to be automated. We've been told that skills like

writing and photography and filmmaking are all about to be outsourced.

And we'd be told if we're not careful, the systems built on these models might someday soon

become sentient and even threatened the existence of the human race.

But here's the thing.

One of the AI pioneers who helped usher in this current age is not convinced.

His name is Jan Lacoon, and he's been long arguing that not only will LLM-based AI fail to deliver all these disruptions, but that it is, and I'm quoting him here, a technological dead end.

People have started to listen.

Earlier this month, a syndicate of investors, including Jeff Bezos and Mark Cuban,

along with a bunch of different VC firms, raised over a billion dollars to fund Lacoon's new

startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, which seeks

to build an alternative path to true AI, one that avoids LLMs all together.

After all of the hype and stressed and hand-riguing around LLM-based tools like CHAP, GPT,

and Cloud Code, is it possible that Jan Lacoon was right,

that those specific types of tools won't change everything?

And if so, what's going to come next?

If you've been following AI news recently, you've probably been asking these questions,

and today we're going to seek some measured answers.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is the AI reality check. Okay, so here's the plan. I've broken down this discussion into three

sub-question. Sub-question number one, what exactly is Jan Lacoon up to and how does this differ from what the existing major AI companies are doing?

...