[calf]

His intention is irrelevant, as is "trying to highlight a fact" as if it were the final say: all Chiang is doing here is using fancy white-collar words to argue the same argument leveled against Hinton and others regarding next-token prediction. And his audience, who have even less technical understanding, lap it all up unawares. Chiang is a writer and needs to stay his own lane, not RP as an expert; or, if he wants to do journalism on this topic then he should actually do the work and talk to more actual experts not just the ones cherrypicked for his opinion piece.

[hn_acc1]

Chiang has, in fact, written on this topic before - see "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", and has speculated about sentience in AI, etc. This is not a "one-off", "I need money" type of article. I dare say he has thought about this much more than most people here.

From Wikipedia: In 2023, Chiang was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in AI.

[calf]

That's the problem, he's a writer. He's not a research scientist like Hinton. If a writer uses his skills and stature to rehash a well-known argument about next-token prediction, then it is performative of his status and influence and doesn't contribute to shedding actual light on the debate/confusion.

Indeed it isn't a one-off. His last infamous article compared AIs to Xerox machine image compression. He convinces a certain type of crowd that is not technical enough to poke holes in his posturing.