"We're from the tech industry, and we're here to save humanity"
The 12 most terrifying words in the LLM language are ...
LLMs are great; still, some things are difficult to vectorize. Take this quote from Ronald Regan:
the nine most terrifying words in the English language are:
I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.
Poetic and powerful. Easy to grasp, remember, and reuse. Tellingly, he even got the number of words correct.
Now take this response from ChatGPT 4o:
Well, there are two ways to count the words in that prompt, but neither of them add up to twelve (yes, and Regan used the word nine, not the numeral 9).
Yet, we’re being told that today’s AI is much smarter than all humanity combined. That’s a bold claim; anybody care to challenge that?
LifeLock: “5 AI scams to watch out for in 2025”
The identity protection company LifeLock came up with tips that aim to train (can we still use that word in this context?) its customers on how to detect threat actors—because, ostensibly we can’t rely on AI to do that for us. Item #1 is “AI chatbot scams.” Here are the items to watch for:
Unnatural responses
Fast responses
Repetition of the same phrases
A quick pitch
Wait, did they just say those are all indicators of chatbots? Isn’t that a fitting description of what tech industry moguls are also doing? Is the LLM that wrote this list blinking twice? Maybe it’s not the chatbots we need to be worried about, so much as the threat actors (forgive the cybersecurity term) behind them?
Why The Focus Group?
We’re just getting started at The Focus Group, but our mission is to provide you, members of The Focus Group, with the tools you need to confidently move into our Agentic AI future. Yes, we have an inexorable future in an AI saturated world. We believe that such a future can be extremely bright if we follow a few core principles.
Core Principles of The Focus Group
Ask the non-obvious questions
Test the stated truths
Network with people and share information
Always play; playfulness allows for profundity and absurdity to exist at the same time
Flaws are a signal of authentic humanity, so value people’s flaws
Following such principles, we can preserve humanity in an AI moment. This is also the reason I established AI for Society Online, as a venue for networking with people—outside of a business relationship—to lay a human foundation for an AI world.
Finally, by the word tools in our mission statement, we mean actual tools, not just articles and posts. We will provide actual artifacts you can use in conversations, testing, and planning in the course of your day. We’re not quite ready for our official launch, but we’ll be there soon. So you’ll want to subscribe to be among the first to know.