No One Knows Anything About AI
August 13, 2025
I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point toward two very different conclusions.The first narrative notes that Large Language Models (LLMs) are exceptionally well-suited for coding because source code, at its core, is just very well-structured text, which is exactly what these models excel at generating. Because of this tight match between need and capability, the programming industry is serving as an economic sacrificial lamb, the first major sector to suffer a major AI-driven upheaval.
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But, if you read a different set of articles and quotes from this same period, a very different narrative emerges
The celebrated Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman, writer of such classics as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Princess Bride,” famously quips about Hollywood that nobody knows anything.
That’s something I’ve said once or twice myself about our current wave of generative AI. And Cal Newport has been thinking something similarly as well.
His conclusion?
My advice, for the moment:
Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric.
Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI—read widely and ask people you trust about what they’re seeing.
Beyond that, however, follow AI news with a large grain of salt. All of this is too new for anyone to really understand what they’re saying.
AI is important. But we don’t yet fully know why.
