“Large Language Models are — and always will be — incapable of reasoning or consciousness, and while Sam Altman is desperate for you to believe that AI agents will soon run your apps, there’s little evidence that these agents will ever exist in a form that resembles a “supersmart assistant.””
Our reading:
There is little evidence that AI agents will ever exist in a form resembling a 'supersmart assistant'.
Assessment: Can’t be checked
What happened
Not graded on evidence
Outcome: Can’t be checked
An opinion, a recommendation, or too vague to test. Listed, not scored.
Evidence up to . Checked .
Why
The claim says there is 'little evidence' that agents resembling a 'supersmart assistant' will 'ever' exist, and that LLMs 'always will be' incapable of reasoning or consciousness. It sets no threshold for how much evidence counts as little, no capability bar for the assistant, and no deadline. Grading it against current agent benchmarks would test a different claim from the one he made, as earlier reviewers noted. The reasoning and consciousness clause is permanent and rests on contested definitions. No dated observation can show this graded judgment about an open-ended future to be true or false, so it is not adjudicable.
Caveats
- A narrower forecast, such as 'no reliable assistant agent by year X', could be graded, but the speaker did not make one.
Evidence (0 items)
Claims like this aren’t scored, so there is no evidence to show.
How we judged it
- Kind of claim
- Observation
- Deadline
- None given. We don’t add one.
Where we had to interpret
- The normalized proposition is a judgment about how much evidence exists for an open-ended future event ('will ever exist').
- 'Little' has no threshold. 'Supersmart assistant' has no defined capability bar. 'Ever' has no deadline.
- The companion clause that LLMs 'always will be' incapable of reasoning or consciousness is permanent and depends on contested definitions of reasoning and consciousness. It cannot be settled by dated evidence.
- Recasting the claim as a test of present agent capability would replace the speaker's words with a different claim. Earlier reviewers flagged that as unfair.
We don’t grade claims like this. We only check the quote and who said it.
We found 29 claims in this post. See them all.
Full record
Source and dates
Where's Your Ed At, Expectations Versus Reality, paragraph 62.
- Said
- We read the source
- live page, full text, public
- Evidence up to
- Checked
We read this wording on 2026-10-28. The post may have been edited after 2024-05-13.
Where it was said (1)
Said once in the posts we read.
: Where's Your Ed At, Expectations Versus Reality
Large Language Models are — and always will be — incapable of reasoning or consciousness, and while Sam Altman is desperate for you to believe that AI agents will soon run your apps, there’s little evidence that these agents will ever exist in a form that resembles a “supersmart assistant.”
- Where
- paragraph 62
- Published
- 2024-05-13
- We read it
- , live page
- Access
- full text, public
History
Versions
- Current: Can’t be checked. Evidence up to 2026-10-28.
What happened to this record
PublishedBy us
Published after both AI reviews and the final check passed.
Held backBy us
A reviewer said our test wasn’t fair to what was actually said.