ChatGPT and the False Alarms of Singularity
| Article | |
|---|---|
| Title | ChatGPT and the False Alarms of Singularity |
| Author(s) | David de Hilster |
| Published in | NLU Global |
| Date | 2023-10-26 |
| Subject area | Artificial Intelligence |
| Topics | artificial intelligence, natural language processing |
Read online | Read the full article |
Archived copy | Archived version |
| Retrieved | 2026-07-23 |
"ChatGPT and the False Alarms of Singularity" is an article by David de Hilster published on 26 October 2023 on NLU Global. Writing from nearly forty years in natural language processing, de Hilster argues that the alarm raised over ChatGPT belongs to a recurring pattern rather than to anything new: each generation of AI research produces a technology that is announced as the threshold of the singularity, and each time the threshold recedes.
His argument is one of historical pattern recognition rather than technical dismissal. Having examined what the system actually does, he concluded it was not different in kind from the earlier waves he had lived through, and notes that colleagues who initially disagreed with him have since moved toward his position.
The piece sits alongside de Hilster's work on NLP++, a rule-based approach to language understanding that stands apart from the statistical methods underlying large language models.
Read the full article at NLU Global →