The Hidden Boundaries of Modern AI (opens in new tab)

The first mistake we make with AI is not technical. It is linguistic. We say the model reads the prompt, then we build systems as if that sentence is true. It is not. The model does not consume text as a human-readable object. AI does not receive strings as self-interpreting objects. It operates on encoded, tokenized, embedded, and runtime-shaped representations whose meaning depends on the contracts around them. We have a dangerous habit of translating the world into human language too quick...