Linus Sebastian

Linus Sebastian (born 1986 in Surrey, British Columbia) built Linus Tech Tips from a camera-in-a-warehouse product channel into Linus Media Group, the biggest tech-review operation on YouTube, with tens of millions of subscribers across its channels and the long-running WAN Show podcast. When LTT takes a position on a technology, a sizable chunk of the PC-buying public hears it.

“AI is a Lie” — but machine learning isn’t

His June 2024 video “AI is a Lie” is the clearest statement of his position. The target is marketing, not the technology: he argues that most of what gets sold as “AI” — smartwatch features, “AI” thermal paste, Tesla’s perpetually-imminent full autonomy — is narrow machine learning dressed up in sci-fi language, and that companies “want you to buy into their hype, they want you to buy into their stocks.” Today’s models, he says, are “decent summarization engines and lukewarm guessing machines.”

But the same video defends the substance: machine learning is no dead end, having been deployed “very effectively” in medicine and other data-dense fields — and the video itself cheerfully used GPT-4 Omni to write one of its own paragraphs as a demonstration. LTT continuously reviews AI hardware and tools, and Sebastian applies the same debunking energy to specific products, spending a July 2024 WAN Show segment on how Google’s AI Overviews push “misleading, overly salesy product info.”

The result is a working reviewer’s stance rather than an ideological one: use the tools where they work, name the vendors who lie about them, and reserve the word “intelligence” for something that can actually reason.