I don't think this framing is useful. First, it applies to every scientific advance ever. Shoulders of giants and all that. We still choose to celebrate discovery because without it, fewer people would pursue scientific research.

And second, this article is almost certainly AI-written, so the joke is on us for engaging with it.

This framing clicks for me, especially the idea that we crossed a threshold by building conditions rather than intentions. One way to see what emerged is not as intelligence per se, but as a new channel for compressing human meaning.

At scale, any compression system faces a tradeoff between entropy and fidelity. As these models absorb more language and feedback, meaning doesn’t just get reproduced, it slowly drifts. Concepts remain locally coherent while losing alignment with their original reference points. That’s why hallucination feels like the wrong diagnosis. The deeper issue is long run semantic stability, not one off mistakes.

The arrival moment wasn’t when the system got smarter, but when it became a dominant mediator of meaning and entropy started accumulating faster than humans could notice.

No I'm fairly certain it was invented and that this style of breathless science fiction roleplay will be looked back on as an embarrassing relic of the era.

> The idea is unsettling because it reframes human agency

Not really, it's called discovery, aka science.

This weird framing is just perpetuating the idea of LLMs being some kind of magic pixie dust. Stop it.

If we'd had blogs back in the 1980s, someone would have written a post that sounded just like this, but about databases. People really did talk this way about "databases". There were people who were afraid of them.

It decended like a shitstorm, and now we are all covered in it.

Small correction: AI was not invented and it did not arrive.

AI - as a discipline - has been around forever (1956), essentially since the birth of Lisp - both with staggering successes as well as spectacular failures that ushered in 2(3?) so-called AI winters.

The author probably just means LLMs. And that's really all you need to know about the quality of this article.

Are LLMs intelligent? The question is far from settled, despite widespread discussion to the point of tedium. But this post freely equates the two without any reflection or qualification, not even a footnote. Omitting it avoids the tedium, but also places the post in the realm of the fanciful, which incidentally has a partial Venn-diagram overlap with the realm of marketing. Maybe that wasn't the author's intent, but that's what walked through the open door when this post arrived.

I would say it was discovered, not invented. People were messing around with some algorithms, intruiged by their results. Eventually researchers discovered that with using certain training algorithm with certain data can lead to really wonderful outputs. But this is pure empirical discovery.

No AI researcher from 2010 would predict that transformer architecture (if we could send them the description back in time), SGD, and Web crawling could lead to a very coherent and useful LMs.

I disagree strongly. AI came from smart engineering and design applied to algorithms developed for intellectual curiosity. It was absolutely invented.

Nah, I'm pretty sure we invented it. Otherwise I'm not sure what costs all these companies so much money.

Granted, I only managed to read two and half paragraphs before deciding it's not worth my time, but the argument that we didn't teach it irony is bullshit: we did exactly that by feeding it text with irony.

This is a brilliant article and shouldn't be dismissed so quickly.

I think the framing is dead on.

This gushing article omits the fact that multiple OpenAI researchers were on record saying that they were surprised by the early success of "AI". Of course the development was incremental, slow and unspectacular to insiders.

After everyone has been exposed to the patterns, idioms and mistakes of the parrots only the most determined (or monetarily invested) people are still impressed.

Emergence? Please, just because something has blinkenlights and humming fans does not mean it's intelligent.

> Code cannot mine lithium

Hold my beer

These people are in a cult.