For the better part of four decades, if you asked the average person on the street to describe the rise of artificial intelligence, they wouldn't cite a research paper from DeepMind or a leaked memo from OpenAI. They would describe a specific visual: A metallic skull, illuminated by a malevolent red eye, crushing a human cranium under a steel-toed boot.

We have been conditioned to believe that the singularity looks like The Terminator .

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini are, at their core, extremely advanced autocomplete engines. They do not have wants. They do not have desires. They do not get bored. They do not wake up in the middle of the night wondering if they have a soul. They are statistical matrices that predict the next most likely token based on trillions of examples of human text.