Why might you feel that the empowering effect of AI isn’t obvious, and that you still haven’t grasped this new wave of productivity?
- Ability to connect to AI tools: IP restrictions and the need for stable accounts have stumped countless people.
- Ability to subscribe to Plus versions: The willingness to pay, the financial means, and the payment channels have stumped countless more.
- Ability to figure out model selection and features: Faced with a dazzling array of models (currently 8 model options and 6 feature options) and features like memories, Projects, reference all chats, and connectors, countless people are bewildered.
- Ability to do prompt engineering: Customizing models, setting project instructions, and managing the context of each conversation have stumped countless people.
- Ability to form a habit of using AI: Making it a first instinct to ask AI, using AI to solve problems in life, academia, or engineering, and accumulating a long history of AI conversations have stumped countless people.
- Ability to ask good questions: The required academic taste, engineering intuition, and one’s own cognitive abilities have stumped countless people.
- Ability to build one’s own AI applications: Local deployment, API calls and hyperparameters, building custom applications, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and framework selection have stumped countless people.
All I can say is, this has already become a technology with significant barriers to entry, far from being a mere toy or something for students. When used well, it’s no exaggeration to say it can make one unparalleled below the PhD level. A “PhD-level AI” might be a bit of an overstatement, but a person amplified by the super-leverage of AI? That’s a completely different story.