such wow doge
AI WOW
Published on

AI is great when I'm a noob, but not when I'm a world expert

Authors

AI is great when I'm a noob and close to useless in domains where I'm a top 1000 domain expert.

Nicely put, Vitalik.

This may explain why some of my sharpest friends and acquaintances are disappointed with conversational assistants like ChatGPT and Claude.

If you're new to using LLMs, and you want easy wins, you should start with quotidian but high leverage tasks, e.g. "help me plan my week", or "help me do a personal finance review", "teach me about $UNFAMILIAR_AREA" or simply "tidy these call transcripts".

As you use LLMs more, you'll get a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses, and find ways to get notable helps even when you're working on domains where you are a top expert.

For example:

  • If you're doing cutting-edge AI safety research, you may need to do a bunch of mundane technical tasks. Proficient use of Claude Code could take that from days of work to hours, perhaps even minutes.
  • Google Deepmind is accelerating science.
  • People say that LLMs are bad at writing. But I know a world-class copywriter who gets great value out of them. Skill issue.

But sure, if you're trying to think through tradeoffs between zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs, then maybe not.

What is the most efficient way to help world experts attain the kinds of AI fluency that'd accelerate their core endeavours? I don't know, but it's a key question for me over the next weeks.