Phillip Rhodes' Weblog

AI is not magic

I have a T-shirt I wear sometimes, that reads "AI is like magic... but real." It's a nice bit of quirky, harmless fun. I wear it because it amuses me, and as a conversation starter. But it's a joke. AI is NOT magic.

Why is this an important observation? Simply because too many people get caught up in the hype, and start to think that they can just cast the magic incantation "Use AI" and all of their problems will be solved. But it does not work that way. Building systems using AI is still hard work and still requires (depending on exactly what you're building) a lot of knowledge, expertise, and engineering talent. Not to mention a healthy dose of patience.

Even in this modern world of LLM's, to build a system that does something moderately complicated can require very complex code, and intricate engineering tradeoffs that trade between, say, token usage, and answer quality. Latency is another factor that can really ruin your day if you're not careful.

When you're knee deep in building one of those things, you may find yourself having to choose between a prompting strategy like "Chain of Thought" or "Tree of Thought" or "Skeleton of Thought" or "Chain of Feedback" or "Chain of Draft" or... anyway, you get the idea. And it's not just choosing the strategy, it's everything else implied that that choice. For example, using the Skeleton of Thought pattern implies writing additional code to process the "skeletal" answers and then make additional subsequent LLM calls (possibly in parallel) and to assemble the final answer. This isn't something you just knock out in five minutes without serious consideration.

And the same basic premise applies to so many aspects of AI... or really, to digital technology in general. In fact, this whole essay could probably have been written 15 years ago with "Message Queues are not magic" as the title, and 20 years ago with "XML is not magic" as the title, and so on.

If anything, this is a plea to stop, take your time, look beneath the surface, and understand - and truly internalize - the idea that "the Devil is in the details."

Posted at 06:31PM May 14, 2025 by Phillip Rhodes in Artificial Intelligence  |  Comments [0]