Language is not the same as intelligence. And that's why many companies are hyping AI for the wrong reasons.
The real bottleneck isn't intelligence of AI models - it's human understanding of business problems.
Yet, tech leadership keeps promising smarter AI as the solution:
- "OpenAI is closer than ever to (...) making AGI a reality by 2025" - Sam Altman, November 2024
- "By 2026 or 2027, we will have AI systems that are broadly better than all humans at almost all things" - Dario Amodei, January 2025.
- "If you define AGI as smarter than the smartest human, I think it's probably next year, within two years" - Elon Musk, April 2024
Science shows why this argumentation is flawed
Humans learn through interaction with the world and think through feelings, abstractions. Language is a communication tool to share knowledge, not the architecture of intelligence or reasoning. This is shown by Neuroscience.
Think about situations when you cannot put your thoughts into words, but your friends still understand you. Intelligence isn't language - it doesn't even require it.
LLMs replicate language patterns, not cognitive processes. It mimics the form of reasoning. But today's technology won't create true "understanding" of your business problems. This requires human intelligence.
Why this matters
The AGI narrative gets marketed as: Smarter AI = Automatic Value. This is fundamentally wrong and expensive.
Companies succeeding with AI aren't using smarter models. They're doing harder work: deeply understanding their business problems and architecting solutions with precision.
Today's AI isn't truly intelligent. It doesn't need to be. Intelligence is the humans' job - AI just needs to execute.