{"id":201884,"date":"2026-07-21T14:32:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T14:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/?p=201884"},"modified":"2026-07-21T14:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T14:32:11","slug":"beyond-a-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/?p=201884","title":{"rendered":"Beyond A.I."},"content":{"rendered":"

Intelligence does not have to be artificial.The goal of this field was always to reproduce what a brain does. Somewhere along the way \u201cartificial\u201d stopped meaning inspired by the real thing<\/em> and started meaning nothing like it<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200aenormous, power-hungry, and\u00a0opaque.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re tired of AI launches and IPOs? So am I. Every week there\u2019s a bigger model, a longer context window, another benchmark nobody outside the lab can reproduce\u200a\u2014\u200aand underneath it, the same machine doing the same thing a little faster and a lot more expensively<\/strong>. I mean, just looking at my emails these days is making me nauseous. I do not even check my social media anymore, and even less the stock\u00a0market.<\/p>\n

But, instead of complaining and be satisfied with the status quo, I decided to look at the problem from a different angle.<\/p>\n

The main problems everybody knows without knowing\u00a0it\u2026<\/p>\n

AI is expensive (yet, it does not have to\u00a0be)<\/h4>\n

The cost problem<\/em><\/strong> isn\u2019t separate from the design. It falls out of four choices that the field made early and never really revisited.<\/p>\n

1- It reasons in the dark<\/em>. Which makes hallucination or fake generation very hard to catch, yet to fix. Hidden states are well,\u00a0hidden.<\/p>\n

2- Scale is not intelligence.<\/em> The reflex has been to make the model bigger and hope understanding shows up (it never will, the bigger the model, the more \u201clinks\u201d it can do between concept and give the illusion of understanding). Scale = $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.<\/p>\n

3- Biology as the last of their concern.<\/em> The brain runs on about twenty watts, and that number is a challenge, not a footnote. While we cannot make an AI that works on 20watts we can definately reduce the amount of energy consumption.<\/p>\n

4- The root of it is profit. Not science. <\/em>Even OpenAI leader is confirming it by saying that AI will eventually be sold like electricity and water\u200a\u2014\u200aby companies like OpenAI. Article link: https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/sam-altman-ai-utility-electricity-water-openai-2026-3<\/a><\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s talk about what it was supposed to be from the\u00a0start<\/h4>\n

The goal of this field was always to reproduce what a brain does. Somewhere along the way \u201cartificial\u201d stopped meaning inspired by the real thing<\/em> and started meaning nothing like it<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200aenormous, power-hungry, and\u00a0opaque.<\/p>\n

I think we need to take the biology seriously instead of metaphorically: real neural mechanisms, a memory that consolidates the way a hippocampus does, a neurochemistry that actually modulates behaviour, learning that happens as the system runs rather than only in an offline training run. Those are design constraints, not decoration. And will lead to the \u201csecond generation\u201d of\u00a0AI.<\/p>\n

The myth of\u00a0AGI<\/h4>\n

a very convenient one if what you need is a reason to keep raising\u00a0money.<\/p>\n

While I have been plain, here\u2019s where I don\u2019t stand: AGI. The industry\u2019s favourite three letters do a lot of quiet work\u200a\u2014\u200aa general, human-beating machine, forever a few years and a few hundred billion away. It\u2019s a wonderful story\u200a\u2014\u200aor a frightening one, depending on where you stand\u200a\u2014\u200aand a very convenient one if what you need is a reason to keep raising money. It\u2019s a poor description of what these systems actually are, and a worse goal to organise a field\u00a0around.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a poor description of what these systems actually are, and a worse goal to organise a field\u00a0around.<\/p>\n

And the way today\u2019s models are built won\u2019t get there\u200a\u2014\u200anot for lack of ambition, but for reasons you can put numbers on. Large language models improve along a scaling curve, and that curve has a shape: the returns diminish. Each new increment of capability takes not a little more compute but multiples more; the graph everyone cites bends the wrong way, flattening as the bill climbs. Every training run costs more than the last and buys less than the last one did. That isn\u2019t a detail better engineering erases. It\u2019s the shape of the method\u00a0itself.<\/p>\n

Every training run costs more than the last and buys less than the last one did. That isn\u2019t a detail better engineering erases. It\u2019s the shape of the method\u00a0itself.<\/p>\n

Now set that against a hard limit: power is finite<\/strong>. You can\u2019t answer a curve of exponentially rising cost with an infinite supply of energy, because there isn\u2019t one.<\/strong> A method whose only real lever is \u201cmake it bigger\u201d runs into a wall that isn\u2019t philosophical\u200a\u2014\u200ait\u2019s thermodynamic<\/em><\/strong>. Somewhere on that curve the next run stops being affordable, then stops being physically possible, long before it stops being merely better at\u00a0text.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t get a different kind of thing by making the same thing\u00a0bigger<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the deeper point: what scales here is fluency, not understanding<\/em>. A model trained to predict the next word learns the statistics of language extraordinarily well. It doesn\u2019t thereby acquire a grounded model of the world, a cause it can reason about<\/em><\/strong>, or a memory it can update\u200a\u2014\u200aand no amount of the same training conjures those out of more of the same text. You don\u2019t get a different kind of thing by making the same thing bigger. You get a costlier version of the same thing. A transformer is, underneath, a very good text generator; scale it and you get a better text generator\u200a\u2014\u200anot a mind that understands, and not consciousness quietly emerging from the weights. Fluency is not comprehension, and no quantity of the first ever becomes the second. Something like general intelligence, if it\u2019s reachable at all, will come from a different design\u200a\u2014\u200agrounded, able to reason step by step, able to learn as it\u00a0runs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The point of this work was never to conjure a\u00a0god<\/p>\n

The point of this work was never to conjure a god. It was to build something genuinely useful\u200a\u2014\u200athat reasons, remembers, and helps\u200a\u2014\u200aand to run it on hardware people can actually afford<\/em><\/strong>. Intelligence doesn\u2019t have to be general to be worth having, and it certainly doesn\u2019t have to be a superbeing to earn its keep. Chasing AGI is how you end up with the bill<\/strong> on the other pages. Building something useful, efficient, and yours is how you\u00a0don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

What a discovery is for, and how it gets used, stays a human call\u200a\u2014\u200athe machine widens what we can see; the judgment is still\u00a0ours.<\/p>\n

None of this means the tools are useless\u200a\u2014\u200athe opposite. An AI can read across billions of documents and surface a link between two of them in seconds, connections no person would ever stumble on alone. That is a genuinely powerful research instrument, and we build with it every day. But it won\u2019t know what to do with what it finds unless someone told it beforehand what to look for and why. Finding is not deciding. What a discovery is for, and how it gets used, stays a human call\u200a\u2014\u200athe machine widens what we can see; the judgment is still\u00a0ours.<\/p>\n

The danger isn\u2019t the\u00a0tool<\/h3>\n

If one ever goes autonomous and causes genuine harm, it will be because a person somewhere pointed it that way\u00a0\u2014<\/p>\n

Some people will tell you AI is the real long-term danger. We\u2019d put it the other way around: the danger is us<\/em><\/strong>. A model does what it is built and instructed to do. If one ever goes autonomous and causes genuine harm, it will be because a person somewhere pointed it that way\u200a\u2014\u200awrote the objective, wired it to something it should never have touched, or pulled out the guardrails that other people had put there in the first place. Even the runaway story needs a human at the start of it: someone to build it, aim it, and take it off the leash. Even if it escapes, a human had to set it loose or dare it\u00a0to.<\/p>\n

That isn\u2019t a reason to be careless<\/strong>\u200a\u2014\u200ait\u2019s the opposite. It means the responsibility is ours and stays ours, which is exactly why we should keep the reasoning legible and the controls somewhere a person can see them. A tool you can read is a tool you can hold to account. That matters far more than pretending the machine has a will of its\u00a0own.<\/p>\n

Now time for a little shameless self-promotion\u00a0\ud83d\ude09 I built Grillcheese Research Laboratory exactly to study, learn and solve those problems and share how to do it with as much people as possible. I invite you to check the link to our website if you are curious. https:\/\/grillcheeseai.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Let me know in the comment what you think and if you have more ideas \/ different views \/\u00a0links.<\/p>\n

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day!<\/p>\n

Yours, Nick<\/p>\n

Beyond A.I.<\/a> was originally published in Coinmonks<\/a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intelligence does not have to be artificial.The goal of this field was always to reproduce what a brain does. Somewhere along the way \u201cartificial\u201d stopped meaning inspired by the real thing and started meaning nothing like it\u200a\u2014\u200aenormous, power-hungry, and\u00a0opaque. You\u2019re tired of AI launches and IPOs? So am I. Every week there\u2019s a bigger model, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":201885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201884"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/201885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}