This post was originally published on the main website on Apr 28 2026. I am reposting it here for SEO reasons and enabling humble bumble discussions with the DEV community. Feel free to engage with this post and i am available to respond during weekends. Sorry about the spam posting all the blogs in one day. I forgor about my dev account <3!
Hey everyone 👋,
I have been building toward this post for a long time, longer than any of the others, and I want to start by being honest about why it took so long. The claim I am about to make is uncomfortable. It goes against something that feels intuitive to most people, including to me for most of my intellectual life. But I have reached a point where I cannot keep writing around it, cannot keep softening it with caveats and qualifications, because the evidence has accumulated past the point where softening it is still honest. The claim is this: knowledge and intelligence are mutually exclusive in a very specific and very important sense. Not completely, not forever, not in every possible world. But in the way that matters most for building genuinely intelligent machines, the way that matters for understanding what happened when a language model fails, the way that matters for explaining why scaling alone will never produce real understanding, knowledge and intelligence point in opposite directions, and you cannot have both at the same time without knowing exactly which one you have and where each one ends.
