Mind the Readout: Why AI Gets Smarter When We Stop Worshipping the Output
The current AI industry has a strangely theatrical relationship with intelligence. We judge models by the visible performance: the answer they print, the image they reconstruct, the attention map they expose, the number of reasoning steps they perform, the architectural flourish in the diagram. If the output looks sophisticated, we call the system capable. If the output looks wrong, we assume the capability is missing. This is convenient, measurable, and often completely misleading. Naturally, it is popular. ...