Yuval is dazzled

Source

Here is my analysis of a July 2026 interview of Yuval Noah Harari.

I will use quote signs here, but inside them might be rephrasings instead of actual quotes. I will use quotes to separate their ideas from my comments. But the purpose is to best represent their ideas in writing.

The video starts with a regrettable monologue by the interviewer. 2-minute long.

  • "No longer possible to pass wisdom to the next generation"??? Of course this is false and unjustified.

    • "We are undergoing 3 revolutions:"

  • "New form of intelligence": wrong, it is not intelligent, it appears to be.

    • "Calculates": wrong, LLMs are bad at math.
    • "Decides": wrong, LLMs give only an illusion of rational thought. Or maybe I should say, an LLM can decide, but only through an irrational process.
  • "Scramble to power and control that intelligence": this is not a revolution we are undergoing; just politics and a tremendous gamble, a mistaken gamble, by the entire economy. And the mistake is that AI does not exist.
  • "Explosion of data that lets that intelligence know us better than we do ourselves": LLMs do not know anything, they are a database plus a word predictor. Inasmuch as it has data on us, that is an egregious infringence on our privacy rights, and that is being imposed on us, rather than chosen by us. Revolution is a positive word, but this is positive only for those getting rich from information they have no right to have.

"Whoever controls the story controls the species."

What is new is tech overlords such as Musk are promising sci-fi dreams they cannot deliver, such as:

  • data centers in space
  • AI that makes scientific discoveries and fixes all of humanity's problems
  • a bright future in which money no longer matters

...and such tall promises got hold of the media.

The reality:

  • Data centers cause tremendous pollution and horrible diseases.
  • LLMs are subsidized and their price must be multiplied by 15 before the American companies can make a profit.
  • LLMs cannot reason, do not work without human oversight, cannot read a PDF, cannot become cheaper, are becoming exponentially more expensive for marginal gains, cannot understand geometry or space, are very bad at math, and have never fixed even the smallest of humanity's problems.
  • If the sci-fi were true, a dystopia would be launched in which half the population would have no job, and money would be more important than ever, and more inequality would exist than ever, and AI would be used for oppression, not for launching a Star Trek era.

"The storyteller may not be human."

Wrong: LLMs are terrible at telling stories, it's like flipping a coin. Nobody wants to read books written by LLMs, they are full of off-kilter metaphors, jokes that make no sense and are not funny, in fact authors are being canceled based only on a belief (whether true or often false) that they used AI to write a book.

The tools that say they can detect AI-written text do not work. They will say the Bible was written by AI, and classics such as Mark Twain. Therefore, most of these canceled writers have been treated unfairly.

LLMs will influence commerce (its recommendations of products will in this sense "tell a story", or exert tremendous influence on consumers). However, this is worse for consumers. It's so much worse that Google had to make its own search engine worse, much worse, to compel us to use the LLM instead. In doing so, they are killing the very Open Web that is the source of human information and income. This is Google becoming adversarial to consumers, their income, and the source of information that feeds their LLM.

LLMs will only tell the story to the extent that humans allow it. Right now most people are deluded, but this situation seems unsustainable.

"AI can generate belief, manufacture evidence, and forge intimacy."

Finally, the first true statement. The power of AI is that so many people are clueless about what it really is, and believe the illusions:

  • That AI is quickly getting better since 2023 (it isn't, this is just hearsay).
  • That AI has empathy (it's just trained to say certain things; an LLM trained to be homophobic will be homophobic).
  • That AI can be trusted in what it says (there can be no LLMs without hallucinations).

In short, LLMs are a shit technology – at least compared to what is expected of them and what is promised of them –, so the product are the illusions, and the bubble gotta burst.

"...a future we no longer author alone."

A magician, or a con man, has power as long as people believe them. AI by itself has no power and will author no future, since it does not invent or create anything – it only regurgitates its database. AI is just an incident in the history of this century: it shifts power but ultimately gets seen for what it is, not for the empty sci-fi promise of the singularity.

Only the ill effects will remain:

  • The theft of human works
  • The theft of potable water
  • The theft of electrict energy
  • The theft of investment in actually worthwhile things, just to
  • Generate slop - irresponsible works that serve an immediate purpose but in the long run make humans less capable while getting the details wrong or inventing them altogether.
  • History and proof become much, much harder to achieve if images and video can be so easily faked.

Here ends the sensationalist and untrue 2-minute summation of the current situation by the interviewer. Fortunately.

At 3:40 Yuval says he would like to understand how man became a language creature. He says all our complex systems are made of words. But the connection between words and the activity of building is forced, unjustified, and certainly not universally true. Systems are built out of organized thought and communication, not words. In humans, yes, thought and communication are intimately connected with words. But the only other intelligent creatures who have used words (that we know of) are primates who can use sign language and cats who can press buttons. Neither creature builds things or systems. Conversely, ants and termites build things and systems but do not use words (that we know of). In crows/ravens who use tools, the use of words is right now uncertain and under study. Ants organize work, bees can use tools, dolphins and whales can communicate, but the use of something similar to words (or that might be reencoded as words) is still uncertain in these cases.

My point is, thought might depend on words (maybe, possibly, who knows, admitted only for the sake of argument), but words themselves are not sufficient for thought, and this is exactly the point LLMs easily prove. LLMs only "know" words, and have "experience" of almost nothing else, but their "thought" and "reasoning" is only an illusion dependent on a billion-dollar database continually updated by humans, and the illusion breaks as soon as the LLM says something false or incoherent due to the limitations of the database.

4:00 LLMs are already better in using words than most (I would say most but not all) humans, in at least one sense: When an LLM reworks a text I have written, the text itself gets worse, every time. But the choice of words used is worth paying attention to. An LLM often will find words that are more general or more precise as the needs of the text may be. It is an excellent automatically applied thesaurus. I often find myself replacing several words I had used with the LLM's choice of words. I refuse to make my text weaker by weakening the points made in it – the LLM likes to write texts that affirm almost nothing about the world. But I welcome the better vocabulary. However, a dictionarist, or the right kind of intellectual or writer, obviously will beat an LLM in choosing the best words.

Notice how it is not true that "words are the operating system of civilization" and that "something will be better at words than we are": the thing is already great at word choice, but it is much worse in affirming what is true, or affirming something interesting or daring or even worth saying. An LLM has nothing to say. This is because the thing doesn't think and doesn't reason, so the whole of its text is worse, only atoms of it are better.

A decorator can choose wallpapers that will absolutely enliven your rooms, or help express your personality, but please don't hire the decorator to build the entire building for you – insofar as the decorator is not an engineer.

An LLM is a decorator, not an engineer.

4:42 "Perhaps AI is language itself liberating itself from apes." Again, just sci-fi. I don't see anything wrong with this idea in theory, but nothing in LLMs warrants this kind of hope. (Our current AI is a dumb technology.) Again he is talking about the singularity: AI breaks free from its dependency on human resources. Good if this happens when it is actually intelligent, bad if it wants to turn the universe into paperclips. But nobody has developed the technology that actually makes an intelligent being. For all we know right now, this sci-fi scenario might be a thousand years in the future.

I am tired of these people talking about AI as if the sci-fi future were at hand. They should shut up about it and start talking about what is really happening.

5:15 "Technological advances within language... the printing press... AI is obviously a massive leap ahead in that".

Again the interviewer is incoherent. The printing press is not an advance within language. It absolutely is external to language. It just means easier reproduction and distribution of language. AI affects neither distribution of language (the Web did) nor anything within language (LLMs do not have the discipline necessary to create systems).

Here are things that are advances within language:

  • New ideas in grammar, new systems of grammar
  • Conlangs such as latino sine flexione, volapuk, esperanto, toki pona etc.
    • Conlangs successfully threw away the many unnecessary parts of grammar present in natural languages
  • Some programming languages (only a few)

This century is actually one of regressions in language:

  • Many cannot spell, write correct or coherent sentences, use the right word etc.
  • Many no longer recognize the value in being able to.
  • Slang is generally stupid, badly chosen (taken from the opposite end of the spectrum as a means of exaggeration, resulting in possible confusion), and promotes a culture of crime. Examples: "dope" meaning awesome, "sick" meaning awesome, "badass" meaning good etc.
  • English speakers now use adjectives in place of adverbs, as if adverbs were unnecessary.
  • Prose that sells today (and is therefore recommended or even required) is widely recognized by authors as worse in many ways than the prose of the past: the book market has rules that make for worse books, not better.
  • PC hysteria made people fix the wrong problems; e.g. the default git branch was always "master"; the language of master/slave used in many places in engineering was suddenly considered offensive with no real justification; and now the default git branch is called "main", in order to protect the feelings and dignity of oppressed git branches. Most of the insistence on politically correct language is a loss of time inasmuch as it does nothing to affect the actual prejudices within people's minds. After all these decades of language change, racists remain a large fraction of populations; they were not swayed by the switch from "black" to "African American", which not only made direct language illegal (if I want to refer to dark skin), but also made it geographically erroneous in many cases. The real content of the switch is a sign of respect, even if the respect comes at the cost of meaning.

Even if you disagree on several of these points, I think you probably agree that it's massively farfetched for the interviewer to say that LLMs are a massive leap as a technological advance within language. It now has very important roles as translator, applied thesaurus and new powers in processing a text, which I have already said are very useful, and I hope these activities are the ones the interviewer had in mind. My point is, LLMs have no creative role in the study or development of languages. They have a creative role in nothing.

6:00 "Earthquakes in democracies?" "Democracy is a conversation among many people deciding what to do. Conversations are based on communication tech. Democracy was present in tribes and in Athens. As societies grew larger, the conversation became impossible. Radio and newspapers became that conversation. Each time the tech changes, there's an earthquake in democracy. Example: social media"

I agree with this part. Worth adding that to be educated by an LLM is inherently inferior as an experience than to being educated by a human, and therefore LLMs have a pernicious, cheapening effect on education, and should actually be kept very far from schools.

8:40 "Many people call AI a tool, but you argue it is an agent."

Our entire team of programmers talks about LLMs as a tool, because we know what it is. AI as a self-motivated agent remains only a concept from Asimov's robot stories, or Star Wars, or HAL 9000 from "2001", or David from Spielberg's film "AI". Again I wish these folk would stop pretending AI exists and would instead talk about what is real. While they don't, they sound oligophrenic to anyone who knows what an LLM is. "AI" is a misnomer, all they made is a language generator.

It is completely irresponsible, today, to allow an LLM to make decisions without human supervision, and disasters are about to happen as a result of people doing exactly this.

Yuval's answer, commented: "If it's not an agent..." (it isn't) "...then it is not AI..." (you got that right) "...then the trillions of dollars spent developing it are a waste" (again you are right, the dream is not coming true and that is why the whole thing is a bubble).

"We will create a god and it will be a slave – this doesn't make sense". Well, we are creating only an illusion, not a god.

It is not possible that these guys use LLMs every day. If they did, they wouldn't be talking like this. No LLM has ever invented anything.

LLMs are not agents, it does not matter how much the term is thrown around by the marketing coming from the con men.

And here I should stop – having reviewed 10 minutes of this ridiculous conversation, and written my objections, and doubting that any of you will read them at all. 90% false, this interview is not worth watching, as I hopefully have already proved. Yuval is just one of the dazzled, spreading sci-fi lies instead of looking at the actual story.