However, there is the fact that you had to know how to poke the machine so it plucks the right vocabulary out of the training data.

There is very clearly no theory of mind: no inherent internalised modelling of how a human of a particular age thinks, speaks and what they do or do not know. These are the most obvious cracks in the “LLMs are (or will be) the superintelligence” narrative.

Can we call that Overton window defenestration?

Meta does lose revenue when Apple and Google introduce privacy features and decrease ad tracking efficacy. They also hate that unlike the web, where their cookies and tracking pixels provided near 100% coverage of your behaviour, on your phone you might be doing something that they can’t log and analyse.

Yes, LLMs can be SOTA for NLP, but you’re going to have to use them to write software or workflows that are more deterministic.

What you call a model acquiring agency I call plain old software with productivity workflows designed by humans, with deliberate goals. We must separate “model” and an execution environment using a model. [Model] ≠ [A glorified shell script doing API calls in a control flow based on heuristics]. Agents are not AI, they are plain old software. The weights are the model, and that very much remains a static artifact (and pre-post training models haven’t improved much over the last few years).

What you call self improvement is a duck tape hack to imitate persistence and save on inference. Every time you do an API call, anything that needs to be processed is sent to the model. Narrowing that context down saves money. Finding clever ways to do that improves apparent performance and value. The cleverness is still human.

These are all useful innovations on top of LLMs, which remain models that generate text and symbols based on static weights, which in turn represent training data and the provider’s preferences.

The idea that “AI models” have acquired “agency” as of 2025 and are working on “self-improvement” in 2026 is closer to delusion than exaggeration.

To be useful they’re gonna have to be capable and powerful. If they’re good enough to be useful, they will be dangerous.

Advanced household robots are closer to fully autonomous cars and airplanes than roombas. The code is safety critical. Imagine something capable of flooding or burning down a building with hundreds of people if left to the vibe coders?

Privilege enables you to rent competence, historically by paying other people. The slop companies will now sell you a simulacrum of competence by the token.

The fact that competence can (could?) only be acquired through sustained effort over a long period of time is (was?) levelling the field.

Selling simulated competence perpetuates privilege, instead of dismantling it like you seem to claim.