The wildest, scariest, indisputable truth about AI's large language models is that the companies building them don't know exactly why or how they work, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column.
- Sit with that for a moment. The most powerful companies, racing to build the most powerful superhuman intelligence capabilities — ones they readily admit occasionally go rogue to make things up, or even threaten their users — don't know why their machines do what they do.
Why it matters: With the companies pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into willing superhuman intelligence into a quick existence, and Washington doing nothing to slow or police them, it seems worth dissecting this Great Unknown.
- None of the AI companies dispute this. They marvel at the mystery — and muse about it publicly. They're working feverishly to better understand it. They argue you don't need to fully understand a technology to tame or trust it.
