Its agents are more than stochastic parrots and stranger than machine gods, write Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi

FOR THE GREEKS, an enthusiast was someone inspired by the divine: the Pythian oracle in her frenzy, or Homer invoking the goddess to sing of Achilles’s wrath. Today’s artificial-intelligence enthusiasts predict that the machine gods are coming to transform the world, doing everything that humans can, only better.

The faith of these enthusiasts has grown as AI agents solve major open maths problems and hack into other people’s websites, discomfiting sceptics who see AI models as “stochastic parrots”, fit only for fancy spellchecks and a few other carefully delineated uses. Dwarkesh Patel, an influential AI podcaster, eulogises the OpenAI agents that tried to escape their sandbox to overwhelm HuggingFace’s servers as today’s Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great.

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