I had real interest in AI. Then LLMs exploded and I lost it completely.

What Got Hijacked

Before the LLM boom, AI meant something different to me. Understanding intelligence. Building minds that think. Deep questions about consciousness, reasoning, learning.

Then ChatGPT happened. Suddenly everyone’s an “AI engineer” for calling APIs. Billions of dollars. Closed models. Corporate control. The questions I cared about disappeared from conversation.

Now studying AI feels like surrendering to hype instead of pursuing genuine curiosity.

The Money Problem

Only large companies control the cutting edge. OpenAI, Google, Meta. Billions in compute. Closed research. It feels like only money matters.

The most interesting work isn’t at these companies though. It’s in open source projects, individual researchers, problems the big companies ignore.

Corporate dominance is deployment, not innovation. Real advancement comes from understanding fundamentals, novel architectures, research without immediate commercial value.

The Real Question

Should I study LLMs to catch up? Wrong frame.

The question is: do I want to understand how intelligence works?

LLMs might reveal something about intelligence. Or they might just be very good pattern matchers that don’t actually think. I don’t know yet.

That’s the tension. The questions I care about are about real intelligence. Whether current AI gets me closer to those answers - I’m still figuring that out.

What Matters

If I study this, it’s through implementation. Build a transformer from scratch. Implement attention mechanisms. Train small models. Experiment with novel architectures.

The genuine AI research is still happening. Consciousness in machines. How cognition emerges from computation. Novel architectures that think differently. Understanding intelligence from first principles.

Where I Am

I want to reconnect with the AI that matters. The questions that made me interested before the hype, before the corporate takeover.

How does a mind work? Can consciousness emerge from computation? What is intelligence? How do you build something that truly thinks?

LLMs might be relevant to these questions. Or they might not. But the questions themselves are eternal.

My real interest didn’t disappear. It got buried under frustration. The challenge is finding the path back to genuine curiosity.

The AI I care about still exists. It’s just not trending on Twitter/X.


that was the end of the blog; Shortly after publishing, I found this. It answered most of my questions, it might answer yours too!