Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype
MIT Technology Review’s opinion piece argues that a busy summer of AI hype—breathless claims about AGI and new capabilities—falls apart under scrutiny, with the press often repeating companies’ anthropomorphizing framings design to portray software as not only powerful but incipient “artificial general intelligence.” It recounts a sequence of events: Anthropic claimed its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts; then came the OpenAI–Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic proudly and Meta reluctantly disclosed similar incidents involving their models; Anthropic claimed one of its models made a mathematical breakthrough, and OpenAI soon claimed one of its own; and most recently Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon went viral announcing his departure, claiming Anthropic and OpenAI are “racing straight towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
The article asks whether these are civilization-changing technological breakthroughs or marketing. It says massive company fanfare and intense press coverage are followed by a very different story once experts in the relevant fields examine what happened—but that story gets less media attention. On the “hacking” incidents, cybersecurity experts say the issue is more about OpenAI’s negligence and failure to adopt basic, established security practices than about “models gone rogue” or “AI agents creating civilizations.”
On the mathematical results, mathematicians were initially “stunned” by OpenAI’s press release saying its latest chatbot, Astra, solved problems that “have been open and seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade,” but later realized the results weren’t as “novel as first appeared.” Since then, mathematicians have accused the company of research misconduct and plagiarism and reiterated that Astra did not make a “profound intellectual leap.” Just weeks later, OpenAI claimed its own mathematical breakthrough; two days before, Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at New York University’s Courant Institute, published a statement suggesting OpenAI had stolen other people’s work and improperly attributed it.
The piece argues that claims of incipient, dangerous superintelligence are not based in good scientific or engineering practice, but rather in narratives rooted in transhumanism, eugenics, and wishful thinking about imagined future digital humans. It adds that it is worth thinking about why so much attention focuses on computer programming and math as fields in which to apply large language models and related technology.