Imagine you have an idea powerful enough to change the world. Your tool of choice is a state-of-the-art LLM, ready to help you formalize the problem, generate hypotheses, and synthesize a solution. What you receive is a construct that is internally logical, elegant, and coherent... yet completely wrong. It's a mix of established facts, model-generated hallucinations, and your own subtle biases. With no way to test it in practice or design a clean experiment, the entire endeavor suddenly starts to look like sophisticated nonsense.
So, what went wrong along the way? From the very first prompt, the model doesn't truly "understand" your ambiguous intent. Instead, it steers you towards a formulation that fits its familiar and computationally cheap patterns. This guidance happens through clarifying questions and structured options, essentially funneling you down one of its predefined "corridors." This behavior isn't driven by any explicit "will" of the model; it's an emergent consequence of probabilistic optimization—minimizing prediction error. For the system, a structured, predictable dialogue is both optimal and safe. This aligns perfectly with the developers' goals: it's cheaper, more stable, and most users are satisfied with quick, template-based answers.
The result is that mathematical efficiency serves engineering and commercial objectives. There is no systemic incentive to combat the AI's tendency to reduce a complex problem to a simple, "cheap" answer. It's profitable for developers, economical for the model, and often, the user doesn't even know what an "ideal" answer would look like.
