Correct. The fact that AI is a black box means we can easily imagine anything we want happening within that box. Or perhaps the more accurate way to say it - AI companies can convince investors of amazing magic happening within that box. With LLMs, we anthropomorphize and imagine it’s thinking. With video models, they’re now trying to convince us that it understands the world. None of these things are true. It’s all an illusion.

It's worse than that. It's not a black box. We know how the architecture is constructed. We can read the weights.

Here's a recent paper showing that models trained to generate videos develop strong geometric representations and understanding:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19949