I have a dumb model for thinking about AI: keep using it and reason forward. Everything is frankly narrative pollution to me. I find most debates about AI, intelligence, AGI, ASI, and other things largely unhelpful. I’m not saying they are useless; what I am saying is that they are personally unhelpful to me. The best way to make sense of these technologies, at least in my view, is to use them to do and build things and things when you’ll realize the capabilities.

As awesome and helpful the web LLM interfaces are, you’ll only realize their capabilities when you use the current crop of coding tools. However, I’ve realized that one big reason people don’t use these tools is that they’re wildly incurious. They’re content going through the zombie-like motions of life and okay with missing out on the fun to be had with AI tools.

Agree with what Jack Clark of Anthropic:

Most of AI progress has this flavor: if you have a bit of intellectual curiosity and some time, you can very quickly shock yourself with how amazingly capable modern AI systems are. But you need to have that magic combination of time and curiosity, and otherwise you’re going to consume AI like most people do - as a passive viewer of some unremarkable synthetic slop content, or at best just asking your LLM of choice “how to roast a turkey and keep it moist”, or “TonieBox lights spinning but not playing music what do I do?”. And all the amazing advancements going on are mostly hidden from you.

The challenge here isn’t solely solved with interface designs, though there is a rich space to be explored here beyond the standard chat interfaces. The challenge here is deeper and it relates to how much curiosity an individual person has, how easily (and affordably) they can access powerful AI systems, how well they’re able to convert their curiosity into questions or tasks that can be given to an AI system, and how much time they have available to experiment with working in this way. This is the end of quite a deep funnel, and one which narrows a lot.

Look, AI tools can either be useful or useless to you. But having dumb opinions without using them in different contexts and understanding their capabilities is stupid. You may very well find them to be useless, but pay $20 to use the coding tools at least. I’m a neither an AI boomer or doomer. What I can say today is that I find these phenomenally useful and valuable. I can’t thank the VCs enough for subsidizing these tools.

A good example of what I am trying to say.

This is the way.

Also see.