The modern trend is to think intelligence is generative “like compression” or “predicting next in sequence” rather than iteratively reducing uncertainty, like those fault tolerant humans.
No one ever in comp sci says artificial intelligence is "like compression", they correctly state that "artificial intelligence IS compression". It's absolutely known and accepted that artificial intelligence (defined as predicting outcomes with a measure of certainty and taking chosen actions towards goals using those predictions) has equivalence to compression in a very hard science way. The hardest part of artificial intelligence is compression and the remaining part, the choice of actions based on predictions is just a tree search to a goal.
AI can be just like compression but currently the compute power is no match for details.
Finally these reality details need consideration in any successful implementation. Which means the implementator needs to be aware of the details and successfully relate them to everything else in the model.
I think anyone surprised by these things is not fully engaged with what they are doing.
The harnesses get better, but I haven’t seen much experimentation on long term stability, at least since the “let the LLM run the candy machine” papers from a while ago.
Because the thing missing, even with the largest agentic swarms, is independent intelligence, where it’s given something to own, like say “end to end data quality as we add more clients” (for a SaaS) and it just figures out what that means at each time, mutating its role and solutions to fix the external world, without getting silly.