Because OpenAI is burning $15 billion/year, and outrageous stories like those get parroted in the media. It's free marketing for a company desperate to get middle management to believe that a $500/mo subscription is absolutely crucial for every single employee.
ugh just recently I saw a news article gushing about how AI had helped with some health/medicine study, and various patient organizations were all like "oh yeah this is a Good use of AI" and then I click the link to read the study and it's decision trees and clustering on a tiny dataset that you could analyze with a ten year old laptop.
I mean, sure at some point decision trees and clustering were called "AI", but the way the article was written you'd think OpenAI and Anthropic were responsible for the advancement of medicine.
AI research is not over yet. If OpenAI and Anthropic fail to bring on the Singularity, what are we going to call the continuing research on AI? Are we going to call it something else than "AI" because that was taken by LLMs? Does that make any sense at all?
I kind of agree, though I find "AI" to be an almost useless term, in particular these days. I dislike the current state of discourse where AI is used to mean inhumanly large models, so I tend to use a specific term like LLMs instead of AI. But the point here wasn't whether this or that form of ML is in fact AI. The term "AI" was almost never used in mainstream media until a few years ago, when it suddenly it was all over the place https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=AI,Biden... and nearly without exception referring to very large generative text/image models. So when a news article in 2026 talks about AI without specifying that it's nothing to do with ChatGPT etc. (and in fact using a very different method requiring no large pre-trained model and no dependence on large companies), I find it highly misleading.
I don't agree that it's a useless term. AI, as a research area, is well-defined by its journals and conferences and the grants that support that research. It's not the fault of the AI research community that OpenAI's app went viral and now there's so much confusion in mainstream discourse about the term. I try to set the record straight whenever I can but it does feel like fighting a pointless rearguard action, even in this community that is better informed than most.
this allows said middle managers to do the analysis themselves and feel mostly confident in the results.