The KPI of Progress As you might have seen on the Internet, people didn’t take kindly to the unveiling of the newest plan for the Google browser, probably because what is viewed by the investors as a measure of success doesn’t translate at all to the language of normal human beings.

In the keynote video from the Google I/O 2026(https://io.google/2026/explore/google-keynote-1) conference, Sundar Pichai (CEO of Alphabet) shows a graph of how ‘the monthly usage of tokens across our surfaces’ grew from May 2024 to May 2026, with a big bold ‘7x of Y/Y growth’ and a blue line climbing straight into the sky of limitless possibilities (I presume). This is the measure of success. The KPI of progress. This number that is shown to investors tells a story of success, of the advent of the new era, the era of AI. [I must say that I don’t remember the last time when the advent of anything in the tech industry took so much time… We have been in this new world for a couple of years now, and we have yet to see anything useful and groundbreaking. I mean, even the ground under the data centres that are supposedly on their way and under construction, in many cases, hasn’t been broken yet.]

‘Over the past 12 months, over 375 customers have each processed 1T+ of tokens, representing incredible demand for AI across [the tech] industry.’ - according to Sandar.

Over 375 customers - that’s a specific number. Why is there a ‘+’ sign on the slide? Is it 376 customers? Then why not just say the number? Is the ‘+’ there to mean that the number keeps growing, that the progress is happening right at this moment? You should quickly join the crew before it’s too late and the raft sails without you on board, is that it? He also said that 5 of their products have more than 3 billion users each, though he didn’t specify how they arrived at this number. If I have a Gmail account and a YouTube channel, does it count as one entry? Is it only me who is stuck on the numbers, trying to make sense of them? Not sure, but everyone in the audience clapped and cheered, so it probably isn’t that important. The numbers are huge, and that’s enough.

‘It all starts with Search […]. AI Overviews in Search now has 2.5 billion monthly active users. And AI mode has been a revelation, our biggest upgrade in the Search ever. People love it. In just a year, it already surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. […] Today, more than 50 billion images have been generated with our Nano Banana models.’

Don’t get me wrong. I am sure that what he describes is correct, though to me it sounds like hell on Earth. Still, is 2.5 billion monthly active users for a platform like Google really that big? It's not in trillions like anything else these days. It no longer seems that impressive to me. You see, that's the trap of forever chasing the numbers. They lose meaning along the way. And the number clearly doesn’t take into account the generation of my parents. Do they even know they are using this AI Overview? Is it a conscious decision that they are making because they see an added value in it, or is it just because this thing sits at the top of the Search with no option to turn it off? If it’s the latter, then what exactly is represented by these numbers he is quoting? Is it the number of people who are held hostage by the fact that they are not tech-savvy enough to save themselves from AI Overview? Is that a measure of success?

Then he makes a joke by reading aloud what he describes as a real question asked by a person while using Ask Maps (I might be more similar to the older generations than I would like to admit, since I have never noticed that this option was there). Again, everyone laughs, though I must say I find it creepy to think that my plight might have been read aloud in front of a huge audience. And the fact that we don’t get to know this person’s name doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable about the way privacy is treated by the greatest harvester of human-related data that Alphabet surely is. But enough about the conference, the picture is clear now - LLMs will be the Search.

Here we arrive at my hypothesis. It’s simple and elegant if I do say so myself. I propose that we use this ‘Search to LLM’ conundrum as a litmus paper.

Historically speaking, Google’s modus operandi used to be like this:

• If there’s a backlash, they will move away from the idea, put it on hold, and try again in some time, meanwhile making sure that there is enough talk about it that people will slowly get used to it being a thing. That’s what they did with Google Glass, which was once very controversial, but is now returning on a shiny plate of LLMs.

So what I propose is to wait and see: if in the coming weeks Google does not crumble under the backlash, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t care about their customers (although it should be obvious by now that they don’t), it means that they are not able to back out, because they invested so much in this endeavour that they have no choice but to die on this hill. Which, if you think about it, might be the best outcome of the whole LLM debacle.

They also say that if a person knew beforehand that they would trip and fall, for sure they would have sat down instead.

Would they, though?

The world seems to be a crazy place governed by some rules that are hard to grasp, and I am not talking about gravity or the laws of physics.

If I had to name one law to rule them all, I would inevitably mention the spiral of absurdity, which is the only instance known to mankind when the purest form of a perpetuum mobile exists. You may not know what I mean when you read my words, but if you think about it, I am sure you will come to the same conclusion. And that is, that with the ever faster pace of our everyday lives, everything that truly matters changes into a blur or smudge similar to the view you can see outside of the car window when the said car is going fast.

And of course, you may say to yourself that it's not that bad since you are the one behind the driving wheel, and I would agree if not for the fact that the driver's point of view is usually the most limited one, always concentrating on things that are just around the corner and often failing to see those that are in front of them but slightly to the left or right.

In this complex world of deadlines and things that should have been done by yesterday, when tomorrow is often more important than now, although instinctively we all know that it may never happen, I find something serene and dreadful in the ever beautiful quote by Theodore Roosevelt:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Why the dread? Because I find it hard to accept the point of view in which I have to struggle my whole life for nothing more than the doubtful delight of the fight itself.

And yet, it seems that this is precisely how the world is. How we built it to be. How we unconsciously agreed that there is value in the struggle. That, as things are, the struggle is part of life, and it cannot be removed from it.

But this is not the noble struggle Roosevelt spoke about. No, it’s just the struggle of trying to keep afloat. Of not sinking to the bottom of despair. It’s this sluggish feeling of counting every minute to the end of the call, the meeting, the day. Then, count every second to the end of the week. Of reaching the weekend, only to realise that you won’t be able to accomplish anything of what you had planned for yourself. Not because you are weak-minded or not strong-willed enough. Not because you don’t have the spark of creativity in you. No. It’s because you already used up all your mana and HP on trying to get to the weekend. You used your magic on someone else’s endeavours. And now, you are simply tired.

So in a way, it is true that the point of view depends on where you are seated. But it’s not true that if a person knew that they would trip and smash their face into a concrete wall, they would have stopped beforehand and sat down. The world we built for ourselves does not promote sitting down. Nor does it promote stopping before it’s too late. Even if we instinctively know that our situation is hopeless, that the system is rigged, that it makes no sense to waste away our life and potential doing things that amount to nothing at all, we still cannot stop.

Or can we? Perhaps we are in this situation precisely because we accepted the great narration of the ever-present and never-ending progress. The cult of productivity, technology and innovation. This horrible mix of mythology, cult-like devotion and the imperative of forever going forward.

But going forward is not really a direction in nature, is it? In the wild, everything repeats itself, restarts, recycles. Every ending is a beginning of something new, but is it progress? Can it really be called that? Can you say that a fallen tree becoming a shelter for a myriad of insects is progress? Or is it just life?

Even if you believe that progress is a human-exclusive characteristic, I still struggle to feel this forward push as anything else but a fear-based dash straight into a concrete wall.

They say that if you don’t move forward with the times, you will be left behind. But I already know these muddy waters here, this bog of a reality. Why would I want to move forward if there is no rest in sight? Why would anyone want to be more efficient if this efficiency is just for the sake of efficiency?

Maybe I am getting old and thus unable to follow the logic of imagined progress. But when I look at the headlines, I do feel like I was transported into the Middle Ages, but on steroids. Even darker, even fuller of the zealot’s flame that burns anyone who does not subscribe to it.

And to be honest, there are many things I have to say on the topic of LLMs, most of them unflattering. To put it bluntly, in my humble opinion, LLMs are a total waste of everything (order is random and the list is meant as an example and not to be exhaustive):

• Time: because I wanted to learn something today, but instead I caught a glimpse of an article about how LLMs are so powerful that we all would have perished already if it weren’t for the heroic AI companies warning us about the RISKS, and it got my blood boiling.

• Attention: as I said, I had other plans for today’s evening, yet here I am furiously typing away to get my frustration out of my chest, or else I go up in flames; and this one is especially painful when you realise that we live our lives through attention, so spending it on something so utterly useless like LLMs seems awfully irresponsible.

• Earth: which by all accounts is the only thing in this universe that can actually sustain us, but of course, in this twisted turn of fate we are letting hyper-scalers destroy it to try and build even more data centers (this will not happen, luckily VC’s pockets are not that deep, but the environment will still be destroyed, even if all of these investments fail);

Let’s stop with these three examples. You know where I stand now.

Of course, we could say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and that is true, though most people probably don’t care deeply enough about the world they live in to even form an opinion that could be called their own. For better or for worse, people seem to be repeating statements made by others without much reflection. And because nothing keeps us going as much as an adversary (real or imagined) within all that division, the point is inevitably lost.

LLMs are a perfect example to illustrate this issue. There are scientists who actually believe that LLMs can be the gateway to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). There are scientists who believe that’s not the case. As always with science, there’s much faith to be had (probably much more than rationalists would like to admit). Then there are people who listen to the scientists from one camp or the other and take their opinion as a proof of… well, of something, nobody knows what is there to prove, because nobody can agree on what intelligence is.

For me, personally, you need to be a living creature to have intelligence, so no matter how advanced a computer program is, or how well it can impersonate my dead grandma (well, that’s not a good example, because she never posted anything online, so there are no cyber breadcrumbs to regurgitate and extrapolate from, but the image of a lovely old lady does its job here) I will never concede that it’s intelligent. And yes, that is a matter of belief, as many things in our modern world are.

Then we have all the tech people working inside AI companies (I apologise in advance if you are one of them, please don’t be mad at me: I have a close relative working in a company like that and we still managed to talk about LLMs, though admittedly some amount of alcohol was involved and we agreed to disagree in the end) who generally think themselves to be the experts on LLMs - which they are - unfortunately, in most cases only on LLMs - which is not enough, I am afraid. Indeed, they are the group that I would like to write about today.

On paper, people working on LLMs, with these algorithms, training them, testing them, etc., should be the ones you look up to for answers and guidance, shouldn’t they? They have the knowledge and skills necessary to judge whether a model like Mythos is really as dangerous as Anthropic says it is.

And let’s put aside the fact that not everyone needs to be this great, selfless person who always does what’s best for humanity. Let’s not even go there, because we would also have to point out that there are real financial incentives if you convince CEOs that your model will be able to halve the number of people they employ (you know how it is: human = cost, and cost doesn’t look great in the financial report). For the sake of this short piece, let’s even ignore the fact that LLMs do not yield anything. Really, if you need to spend 200$ on a subsidised subscription that at some point will cost you a 1000$ (or more), it would make more sense to invest in tomatoes. You will still need to use soil, water and energy, but on incomparably smaller scale, and if you play your cards right in a few weeks, you will be able to eat a tomato soup. That’s what I call a return on investment. And the friends you make on your way to the tomato soup? Priceless.

So let’s put all of that aside and just look at one of the many problems connected with or caused by LLMs: the sheer size of division in opinions when it comes to what LLMs are capable of.

The tech guys will always say that the normies simply don’t understand. They cannot imagine the possibilities (by the way, in this example, I am one of the normies). That if the normies knew what they - the experts - know, or could envisage how brilliant these models must be because they are already oh so very impressive, and we don’t even have access to the state-of-the-art models, if the normies knew, their minds would be blown away (either figuratively or in reality, because we all know that Mythos is coming for us).

Then, when this tech person meets a sceptical normie (indeed, the worst kind of human), they often come out on the other end of such a meeting deeply frustrated that their warnings are downplayed. They would blame the normie and think to themselves that they have the duty to go online and educate the rest of the population, so that maybe at least the legislators will understand how big and important the LLMs like Mythos are.

For quite some time, I couldn’t understand why the tech people who will go out of their way to lecture normies about their lack of understanding, how on earth do they not see their own biases?

They would argue with the world that every time an LLM model beats some sort of benchmark that was supposed to prove that it is intelligent, the benchmark is changed to something else. They will talk about the hypocrisy of normies who constantly move the goal post. They will burn with the brightest fire only a zealot's heart can produce, and argue to the end of time that we are on the cusp of greatness with these state-of-the-art models. All of that, while ignoring that the LLMs were trained on the information that is checked for in the said benchmark, and that the companies that built these models also test them on the benchmarks, and the results tend to be less impressive if an independent lab tests the same models.

And then I found this beautiful term - homophily - and everything became clear:

“Homophily is a concept in sociology describing the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others, as in the proverb ‘birds of a feather flock together.’ The presence of homophily has been discovered in a vast array of network studies: over 100 studies have observed homophily in some form or another, and they establish that similarity is associated with connection. The categories on which homophily occurs include age, gender, class, and organisational role. […] (Wikipedia)”

Apparently, specialists are not immune to homophily. What is the result then? Well, to put it simply, it means that you lose the ability to see the forest for the trees. Or more directly: because you mingle with people who share your background, convictions, and degree, you also share their point of view on different subjects, as well as errors in their logic.

That’s why I always have the feeling that I am losing my mind when I try to follow the LLMs debate (whichever facet of it happens to be currently trendy). For if you only listen to the tech guys, you will come to the conclusion that not only are LLMs AI, but also that they are on the cusp of becoming AGI. And once that happens, we will all lose our jobs. But worry not, for that will be the gateway to the Garden of Eden. In there, the all-powerful LLMs and/or ‘AGI Tree of Knowledge’ will grow right in the centre, very much reminiscent of the Yggdrasiltree.

And what’s next? - you may ask. Well, the Tech Bros are not too sure about that, but I guess it’s safe to assume that we - the peasants - will have to perform some sort of ritual to be able to partake in the riches that the few of the chosen ones may be willing to share with us.

The problem I have with this narrative is the following: if we skip the context or the ingredients that make up this whole endeavour, we end up only with a distorted image.

An image that is very similar to the one an LLM might create when you prompt it to extrapolate an image of a woman reading a book in the ruins of a temple under the full moon, surrounded by the creatures of the night (as in the case of the image I chose for this article - do try to find all the things that are wrong with it).

Or worse still, you will then ask it to change it to a short movie.

Truly, the context inevitably gets lost if we put aside all the things that make up life.