Sam Page
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We call it Artificial Intelligence.

Emerging tech and AI1 min readSam Page

But “intelligence” is misleading.

An Atari just beat ChatGPT at chess.
That says a lot.

I couldn’t help smiling when I saw that a 1MHz Atari from 1977, a wood-panelled master piece, beat ChatGPT at chess.

It’s a cracking reminder of something easy to forget in all the AI hype:

AI isn’t intelligence.
It’s pattern recognition.
It’s knowledge at scale.

But it’s not reasoning.
Not wisdom.
Not understanding.
(Not yet, anyway.)

And yet it's easy to treat it like it is.

This wasn’t a one-off either.

Apple’s recent study backs it up, LLMs still stumble on basic reasoning, even when they sound fluent and confident.

It’s tempting to believe the hype.
But impressive pattern-matching isn’t the same as insight.
And mimicry isn’t the same as mind.

As we give these tools more influence - across hiring, healthcare, education - that distinction really matters.

Because if we forget what AI is not, we risk misusing what it is.

What do you think: are we overestimating AI’s intelligence, or underestimating its risks?

First published on LinkedIn.

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GEThttps://sam-page.com/thinking/we-call-it-artificial-intelligence.mdtext/markdown; charset=utf-8

---
title: "We call it Artificial Intelligence."
url: https://sam-page.com/thinking/we-call-it-artificial-intelligence
date: 2025-06-11
author: Sam Page
type: Post or article
categories: [Emerging tech and AI]
reading_time: 1 min
summary: "But “intelligence” is misleading."
first_published: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7338454824192995328
---

# We call it Artificial Intelligence.

But “intelligence” is misleading.

![](https://sam-page.com/img/thinking/we-call-it-artificial-intelligence-li1.webp)

An Atari just beat ChatGPT at chess.  
That says a lot.

I couldn’t help smiling when I saw that a 1MHz Atari from 1977, a wood-panelled master piece, beat ChatGPT at chess.

It’s a cracking reminder of something easy to forget in all the AI hype:

AI isn’t intelligence.  
It’s pattern recognition.  
It’s knowledge at scale.

But it’s not reasoning.  
Not wisdom.  
Not understanding.  
(Not yet, anyway.)

And yet it's easy to treat it like it is.

This wasn’t a one-off either.

Apple’s recent study backs it up, LLMs still stumble on basic reasoning, even when they sound fluent and confident.

It’s tempting to believe the hype.  
But impressive pattern-matching isn’t the same as insight.  
And mimicry isn’t the same as mind.

As we give these tools more influence - across hiring, healthcare, education - that distinction really matters.

Because if we forget what AI is not, we risk misusing what it is.

What do you think: are we overestimating AI’s intelligence, or underestimating its risks?