Why the AI Renaissance Keeps Not Arriving

Why the AI Renaissance Keeps Not Arriving

Every brainstorm is the same brainstorm-shaped object and every essay has the same skeleton. Put simply, the outputs are locally excellent and globally identical.

I call this manifold collapse. The model never explores the whole landscape of possible ideas. It circles a small, well-worn region of it, and inside that region it travels what I think of as latent grooves, a few deep and reliable paths it falls into no matter how you phrase the request.

A system trained to satisfy consensus hands you the median of everything humanity has tried, instantly. That feels like genius exactly once.

If AI is lifting your quality and not just your efficiency, then you might have been below average before.