Why Elon Musk is so powerful.

Mr Musk has been a marvel for obvious reasons, but in the last few weeks his influence has gown out of proportions. The bromance with Mr Donald Trump, the President-elect, is certainly a factor, but that alone cannot explain the Musk phenomenon that is sweeping the globe now. 

Wise people have always argued that it is not that AI would take over humanity. It would rather be that humans empowered by AI would overwhelm people less fortunate. The Musk phenomenon, bolstered by his success in Tesla and SpaceX, was given the crucial boost by his purchase of twitter (now converted to X). The house-made Grok is always on X, and X is evidently the embodiment of AI-powered dominance of the world, at least somewhere on the roadmap. Mr Musk has been one of the founders of Open AI. With his new startup xAI and much beyond to come, together with the track record of serial successes, give Mr. Musk power in reality and in imagination. If he could win in choosing sides in the American Presidential election, probably he will win in this arms race of AI towards AGI and ASI, at least will be on the winning side, an educated guess will suggest.

So as Mr. Musk goes about the business of interfering with European politics, even suggesting to King Charles to dissolve the parliament, there is an image of a man stroking a trademark white cat. AI would not conquer humans. People smart enough to employ AI would conquer humans. Mr. Musk is at the right place at the right time with the right track record. How the rest will turn out to be history is yet to be seen.

We don't understand what the language game is.

In board games such as chess, go, and shogi, the AIs have beaten human champions. Indeed, today, nobody is in the doubt as to whether AIs have edge over humans. The battle between AIs and humans are over in these fields.

When it comes to Large Language Models, the situations is not so clear. Although people are generally under the impression that the Turing test is now probably moot, especially because you can formulate the arguments in any ways you prefer, there is no clear measure to judge whether LLMs are doing the job better than humans.

The fundamental problem is our lack of understanding of the nature of the language game. Although Ludwig Wittgenstein described it in a passing manner in his Philosophical Investigations, the description is far from adequate. To this day, we do not have a clear model of what the language game is.

We humans don't know what the language game is exactly, and yet we engage ourselves in it every day. The Large Language Models are being developed and employed without a definite idea of what cognitive function it is addressing.