AI is Magic... Sort of

“Magic doesn’t fool you because you’re stupid,” Penn Jillette said on the Jonathan Ross show in 2019.Magic fools you because it’s stupid. … The human brain wants to have beautiful, wonderful experiences. So, if you want to fool somebody, you come up with something really, really stupid.Jillette then brough comedian Rebel Wilson onto the stage and through misdirection and sleight of hand, managed to perform an illusion that was transparent to everyone in the room and even to everyone at home, but not to Rebel Wilson. As Jillette put it, Wilson got to see the magic. We got to see the stupid.Jillette wasn’t offering commentary on the state of large language models (or large reasoning models) in 2025, but he might as well have been. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chapainsights.substack.com/subscribe