“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - Arthur C. Clarke

Today I’d like to talk about LLMs. But first, I’d like to talk about an impressive invention from the late 1700s.

The Mechanical Turk

The Mechanical Turk - or “The Turk” as people called it - was an autonomous chess-playing machine. Built in 1770, it went on tour across parts of the world for 84 years as a robot playing chess against human opponents.

Have you heard the news?

• AI is replacing all developers next week - or in 3 or 6 or 12 or 18 months!
• And somehow at the same time, AI is helping developers get jobs by “cheating” in tech interviews!

Don’t those two things directly oppose and contradict each other? But I digress.

The thing is, AI replacing developers is straight up impossible, at least in the currently deployed LLM architectures. The idea is nonsensical. I need to write a blog post detailing both why it’s impossible and why people continue to shout it from the rooftops, and I think I’ll do that next.