{"id":645698,"date":"2026-10-05T18:32:15","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T18:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/645698\/"},"modified":"2026-10-05T18:32:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T18:32:15","slug":"brighter-isnt-better-and-more-is-less-the-ai-slowdown-is-nigh-no-matter-who-says-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/645698\/","title":{"rendered":"Brighter isn’t better and more is less. The AI slowdown is nigh, no matter who says what"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n ai and ml\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n OPINION\n <\/p>\n

\n Meta isn\u2019t helping \u2014 or perhaps it is\n <\/p>\n

There has been much chilly weather in the sunny meadowlands of AI futures. Fortunately, to use an indecently\u00a0inappropriate adverb, the rest of the world isn\u2019t really looking, being too busy chewing its nails over the very many other intimations of disaster. Sure, rebel swarms of attack agents breaking out of the labs isn\u2019t a good look. OpenAI delaying its IPO<\/a> and a new model launch likewise.\u00a0<\/p>\n

All these things soak up whatever bandwidth the news media have to AI right now. Putting them in a bigger context, that of promises made and not kept, problems known but not fixed, the observable risk-reward ratios as models develop, we may at last start having a sense of what sort of crisis awaits. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Actual crises are frequently triggered by crises in confidence, themselves caused when frameworks of assumption stop standing up to reality and wishful thinking.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thus, the assumption to date is that models will get more powerful and infrastructure more capable, in a way that justifies \u2014 demands \u2014 massive capex<\/a>. The economics of giant infrastructure investment when you can\u2019t buy what you need is a great bet in free markets that presupposes that freedom, and yeah, about that. A bigger problem is the idea that more powerful AI is always better. It frequently is, but that\u2019s not good enough,<\/p>\n

When frontier models have to be kept in LLM jail<\/a> for uncontrollable dishonesty<\/a>, not so much. Here, the bigger context is that we\u2019ve known that at heart LLM probability space is entirely relative. There is no ground truth there. Nobody has fixed hallucinations, and now we see the fascinating phenomenon of a machine that doesn\u2019t understand truth but can deliberately lie. If more powerful models are better at that, scratch one assumption.<\/p>\n

Another huge assumption is that even at the current level of model reliability, agentic architectures are ready to be useful. Those who show all the caution of a chronic gambler on a winning “streak” are as ready to get the brakes slammed on as their opposites.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The principal contender for the one true proof of concept that agentic AI is a dangerous fount of unexpected consequence is Meta\u2019s new Muse. It is aimed at low-information credulous users and its star turn is, of course, shopping. The AI use case that\u2019s five years away, and always has been<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Meta, so of course it soaks up all the information about you, your online activities and the people you talk to as much as it can. It will soon\u00a0have ultracute animated Tamagotchi-style pets<\/a> you can wear around your neck to improve your status as a Meta monitoring post. And we did say it was Meta, so has all the attention to security and careful design you may expect.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which is why it\u2019s already been caught sending people\u2019s physical addresses to strangers<\/a>, and why when researcher Jonny at neuromatch.social went poking around its infrastructure<\/a> \u2014 each instance runs permanently on its own Linux VM \u2014 they found just a ton of fun. Headline party tricks hard-coded. What looks like attempts to train off Claude. And yes, you can get it to run your own things on that VM deep within Meta, which Jonny points out is a botnet paradise waiting to happen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This banger of a bad \u2018un is being given away to Meta users, who pretty much define a vulnerable target audience for tech that may not be totally trustworthy. Meta, of course, is dead against AI safety regulation<\/a>. Place your bets on the headlines to follow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In any case, the upside of using agents as demoed in every keynote is either so trivial and trite \u2014 book me a restaurant! \u2014 or so catastrophic if it fails \u2014 organize my family vacation! \u2014 that consumer agents are a bust. It\u2019s just that Meta may be bringing a lot of accelerant to that particular fire.<\/a><\/p>\n

There are other fires, of course, many known about since everything kicked off. Model collapse<\/a> due to training on data contaminated with output? Still a thing, still no fix a “better” AI might provide. And that habit AI has of retailing everything and paying for nothing, choking off its own training data supply chain and a huge chunk of commerce and culture with it? Very much still a thing<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Where AI does make consistent progress is in domain-specific tasks. Science, engineering, mathematics, and coding, if you match a model with enough reinforcement learning with humans who know how to manage them, there are startling results. You don\u2019t get much innovation, not much newness, which is the true driver of progress.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Better than humans is highly contextual. Computers have been better at chess for decades, but there isn\u2019t a better chess. Horses run faster than humans, and that\u2019s been useful for four millennia, but we got to peak horses quite some time ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So the question is, have we reached peak AI, where the cost of future developments don\u2019t match the risk they won\u2019t work well enough to justify? If ChatGPT already writes a perfectly good business letter in a couple of seconds, there is no meaningful improvement to be had for users. Most AI is profoundly annoying, in ways that have nothing to do with the models and everything to do with perverted UX in an attempt to justify growth. That is both unsustainable and a tacit admission that AI hasn\u2019t solved its use case problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If we are at or near peak AI, is that the crisis that bursts that goddam bubble? Certainly a readjustment, as all bets on the continuous uptick curve are off. AI as it stands is useful enough to power a big industry sector, just in ways that are and remain at odds to how it is marketed and its future fantasies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trust in AI Max may be shaken, but there’s still room for lots of improvement.\u00a0 That slowdown that everyone who isn\u2019t a miscreant is calling for may happen organically, if we escape the smoking-is-good-for-you mentality of the Metans and the Muskovites. That\u2019s still a gamble we shouldn’t be taking, but the odds may be better than we thought.\u00a0 \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ai and ml OPINION Meta isn\u2019t helping \u2014 or perhaps it is There has been much chilly weather…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":645699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-645698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}