Om Malik died recently. He was a keen observer of the tech industry, insightful and thoughtful. He was also an insider in that area; maybe that’s what gives his writing such power.
In his last published essay, on the meaning of the name “Mythos” that Anthropic has bestowed upon its best frontier model, he reflects on the ways that the company and its president Dario Amodei are using a constructive narrative to legitimize Generative AI.
The whole essay is really worth your time, but this observation in particular stood out to me.
[…]Dario has collected the two most powerful character references on the planet. The President gives temporal legitimacy. The Pope gives moral legitimacy. No other AI company has done both. That is no accident.
Augustus had the Senate and the priests. Dario had the Oval Office and the Vatican. The structure is the same. Two thousand years apart.
Plato would recognize this immediately. He spent his career distinguishing the philosopher who seeks truth from the sophist who manufactures persuasion. The sophist is not lying exactly. The sophist is selecting, sequencing, and presenting in ways that produce belief without requiring the audience to do the work. Mythos, for Plato, was the domain of poets and myth-makers. Useful for educating the young, dangerous when deployed as a substitute for rigorous argument among adults. He would look at Anthropic’s naming strategy and see sophistry wearing philosophical clothes.
That characterization of the frontier model as a form of sophistry… it feels like it points out something I’ve been missing. The model’s output, the process it uses, doesn’t denote understanding. The output is a summary or a distillation of others understanding. It masquerades as something that understands, but it doesn’t. It’s simply a very sophisticated mathematical process that guessed the next word or words in a preceding sentence.
That can be useful for some purposes, but it has profound limits – especially to those seeking truth.
Sophistry. That’s worth reflecting on at some length.
Do go and read the rest of his essay.
