“Against Credulous AI Hype” by James Fodor

I have been increasingly surprised over the past year at what I perceive to be the lack of critical thinking in response to new announcements regarding AI model capabilities. I’ve written about many of these issues before, but as AI hype accelerates the problems seem to be getting worse. Here I want to highlight a few points that seem to be neglected in coverage of the growth of AI capabilities. Advertising is treated as fact Every new model release by a major tech company represents billions of dollars of expenditure and the potential for billions of dollars of additional investment. Model releases and their associated documentation should therefore be interpreted as advertising designed primarily to attract customers and investors. Their goal is not to provide an objective and thorough analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each new model. Of course, this does not mean that everything reported is false, but it does mean that such releases should be treated with significant skepticism. It is therefore disappointing to me to see write-ups such as this one by Rob Wiblin, which consists almost entirely of uncritical restatement of claims made by Anthropic, with little to no additional analysis. For [...] --- First published: April 19th, 2026 Source: --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .