Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype. Breathless claims about AGI and new capabilities fall apart pretty quickly under scrutiny. In the past few months, we’ve seen breathless coverage of supposed breakthroughs, hacking incidents and claims of incipient superintelligence, mostly designed to market their software as powerful and incipient 'artificial general intelligence'.

Experts in the relevant fields have examined the claims and found a very different story, but one that gets less media attention. Regarding the 'hacking' incidents, cybersecurity experts say the story is more about negligence and failure to adopt basic, established security practices than about 'models gone rogue'. As for the mathematical results, mathematicians who were initially 'stunned' by OpenAI's press release have since realized that the results weren't as 'novel as first appeared'.

Claims of incipient, dangerous superintelligence are not based in good scientific or engineering practice. Rather, they are narratives based in ideologies of transhumanism, eugenics, and wishful thinking about imagined future digital humans. It’s worth thinking about why there is so much attention on computer programming and math as fields in which to apply large language models and related technology. Not only are they often elevated as the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement, but they involve problems where answers, once suggested, can be verified.

Mathematicians in particular have warned against corporations using their field in this way. A statement signed by hundreds of them says there is 'currently a strong commercial incentive on the part of the technology industry to overstate the capabilities of their products' and asks policymakers to 'consult with experts, including mathematicians, in forming policy decisions rather than relying on press releases or popular reporting of mathematical results'. We echo this call and note that the illusion of speed and urgency promulgated by the tech companies is also a ploy to misdirect both policymakers and the public.