Some Say AI Is the Greatest Invention of All Time. I Don’t Get It.

The conversation about artificial intelligence remains absurd, hype-ridden, and utterly out of touch with actual material reality. I could have written that sentence in 2024, 2023, or 2022, and it would have also been true. But it felt particularly true earlier this week, when America woke to the news that the stock price of Nvidia, a Silicon Valley company responsible for a lot of our AI breakthroughs, had tanked because a Chinese start-up had succeeded in quickly and cheaply making comparable models.

Many, many powerful people have said that artificial intelligence is one of the most important human inventions of all time. My reaction to them is: Wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.