AI's Holy War: When Silicon Valley Became a Religious Battlefield

Dr Mark van Rijmenam, CSP -

A Columbia dropout used AI to cheat his way into Amazon and Meta. Then raised $15M from Andreessen Horowitz to help everyone else cheat too. Welcome to tech's new holy war.

Meet Roy Lee: the poster child for AI radicalization. After using AI to fake his way through Columbia and ace Big Tech interviews, he dropped out to build Cluely—an AI that literally markets "cheating on everything." His pitch? Every white-collar job should already be gone. Andreessen Horowitz agreed with a $15M check.

This isn't just about one dropout. The entire AI industry has split into warring religions. Sam Altman declares the singularity has begun. Emily Bender calls chatbots "racist piles of linear algebra," while Gary Marcus compares them to calculators.

The battleground? Apple's "Illusion of Thinking" paper proved AI fails at basic puzzles—can't even stack blocks when the problem gets complex. Critics celebrated vindication. Believers mocked them with memes of robots destroying cities while humans debate "reasoning."

The real disruption isn't technical, it's ideological. Consider these battle lines:

  • AI zealots promise disease cures and economic automation while dismissing job losses
  • Skeptics predict the bubble will burst while OpenAI's new image generator reached 130 million users in its first week
  • Both camps spin identical evidence to support opposing worldviews

When innovation becomes religion and criticism becomes heresy, we've already lost the plot. Which side of this holy war will history vindicate? Which reality are you betting your career on?

Read the full article on The Atlantic.

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