Debates are everywhere about the power and limitation of AI. Some fall into wild hype. Others are too conservative. Here, phenomenologist Harald Wiltsche, and philosopher and lead for Responsible AI at Microsoft Ken Archer, argue that AI is doing something truly powerful and is really intelligent — just not in the way we usually think. Language, maths, logic, and code, allow the structures of thought and meaning to exist outside of the organisms that produce them — and there, they take on a life of their own. AI continues this trajectory, extending the relational power of meaning out into the world outside the human head.