David's Saturday AI Thoughts

Reckoning and slope

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The gap between AI wonder and behaviour change. PwC's CEO says get with it or get out, but the real question is get with what. Jeremy Howard's slope-over-intercept frame: capability growth matters more than current output. Anthropic's research shows most coding tool users enter autopilot. Not all inefficiency is waste: some friction is load-bearing.

What happened this week
  • Centaur chess inverted: in 2005 amateurs with laptops beat grandmasters, by 2026 adding a human to an engine makes it worse. Carlsen deliberately limits AI prep to maintain self-generated understanding
  • Jensen Huang's benchmark: $500K engineer should consume $250K in AI tokens. But token spend is an intercept metric that says nothing about slope
  • RentAHuman: 600,000 sign-ups to a platform where AI agents hire humans for physical tasks. Inverts the usual displacement narrative
    • What to try
    • Mine your own email archive: pull months of correspondence on a topic, ask AI to synthesise the intellectual arc
    • End every AI session the way a developer commits code: one line documenting context for the next session
    • Use AI to teach you, not just to do things for you: Bloom's two-sigma tutoring now costs a subscription

      • Read the full edition with all links and sources

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      David's Saturday AI ThoughtsBy David Boyle