MILKEN INSTITUTE REVIEW: Behind the Hype: What "AI" Is & Isn't
In the summer 2025 issue of the Milken Institute Review. Silicon dreams & nightmares & the real sakes of the AI frenzy comprised of machine minds, human motives, & a lot of tangled hype…
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “Behind the Hype: What ‘AI’ Is & Isn’t”. Milken Institute Review. 58 (Summer). <https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/behind-the-hype?IssueID=58>.
The arrival of Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models threatens or promises to disrupt time-honored patterns of white-collar work, but it has already upended the entire calculus of Silicon Valley’s platform power plays. Platform behemoths spend tens of billions to defend their turf. Investors chase dreams of AI riches that may never materialize. This is not your grandfather’s automation. The battle is for control of the mammoth profits thrown of by the “info” side of the Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy we are now building. The rules are being rewritten in real time.
Those betting on the next AI unicorn need to first ask themselves if they are joining the real revolution real, or dreaming feverishly of a rerun of crypto speculation. With understanding of what it really is—and isn’t—they may save themselves from being the next casualty of tech’s latest gold rush: economics, illusions, and realities behind the most overhyped hype cycle thus far in this millennium.
Behind the Hype
by j. bradford delong
illustrations by thomas kuhlenbeck
brad delong is an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and creator of the blog Grasping Reality. He was deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration.
Published July 24, 2025
Less than three years ago, OpenAI, the nonprofit research organization focused on artificial intelligence, released what it viewed as a preview of incremental advances in the field along with a public demonstration of the technology. That’s not how the world received it, though. ChatGPT’s arrival was a cultural-financial-entrepreneurial-technological sensation, overnight conjuring our current AI-soaked (haunted?) world.
Stop a moment here to separate the signal from the noise. Recognize that the people who speak of AI as the keys to the universe are not trying to make you smarter. They are, for the most part, people trying to protect their own interests, which may or may not mesh with the public’s.
Reality Bytes
A half century ago Drew McDermott, the pioneering computer scientist at Yale, called the term “artificial intelligence” a misrepresentation. He preferred the term “wishful mnemonics,” which, of course, never caught on. A more neutral moniker back at the dawn of the digital age would have been “complex information processing.” Today, it would be more accurate to call the phenomena “modern advanced machine-learning models” or MAMLMs.
But whatever you call it does not change the fact that AI has revolutionary economic and social potential even if it never translates into artificial general intelligence that bypasses human capacity and sends white-collar workers shuffling toward the soup kitchen.
To get a more nuanced sense of what AI is and where it is heading, it’s important to understand the basics of two aspects of the evolving technology:
Natural-language interfaces.
Big-data, high-dimension, flexible-function classification analysis. (Yikes; but stick with me here.)
No less important, it makes sense to trace through the less-than obvious motives of the internet platform companies that are throwing tens of billions at AI.