Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. Last month, I wrote a piece here in Big Think suggesting that the public is in denial over the emerging power and associated risks of AI. Many people reacted defensively, insisting that today’s AI systems are nothing more than “stochastic parrots” that regurgitate memorized information and are structurally incapable of emergent reasoning. I appreciate that many people want this to be true, but it is an outdated narrative based on a 2021 paper that was widely misinterpreted. I want to clear up this misconception because I worry it is giving the public a false sense of security that superintelligence is not an urgent risk to society.  To address this, let me update our collective mental model: Like it or not, there is increasing evidence that frontier AI systems do not just store text patterns as statistical correlations, but also build structured internal representations (i.e., “world models”) that abstract the concepts described in the ingested …