Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I don't know. I struggle with this question, because I'm thought of the lawyer looking at ChatGPT. So, the stuff that I would do that I would automate are sort of precise information retrieval task, which is precisely the thing that this is kind of worse at. And that's not a criticism, it's just an observation. The kind of stuff that I would want a machine to do for me is the stuff that AI I can't do for me very, very, very well at the moment. I use it for proofreading, I use it for images, I used it redecorating my apartment, that worked fantastic, you're aware at that. Here's a picture of this room, repaint it at this light and this table and this rug. No change color of the rug. There's a kind of class of stuff where it works. But I mean, a couple of years ago, somebody said AI is good at stuff that computers are bad at and bad at stuff that computers are good at. And I struggle to find many examples of those where I need it. But then I'm kind of a unique, weird job. I sit at my desk all day trying to synthesize a whole bunch of other stuff into a whole bunch of new ideas. That's not particularly common way for people to spend their time. I struggle to find AI use cases. I am the accountant looking at the spreadsheet and thinking, "Well, that's very clever, and this is clearly going to completely transform everything, but I actually don't make spreadsheets every day." I went to a standup comedy show of Pete Holmes, I don't know if you know him. And he made this joke that we want AI to clean the poop off the street and do all these hard things that nobody wants to do, but instead it's like, "Oh, let me help you write. Let me help you create imagery." It's like this bohemian. It's like, "No, I don't want to do all these ugly things. I want to be creative, make art." Yeah. Well, I mean, there's variations of all of this. It's like I don't want the AI to do the stuff I do for fun. I want it to do the boring stuff that I don't do for fun. And finding that mesh. I mean, joking apart, this is going to come back to my chatbot point, that the chatbot is a blank screen in a jagged edge. And what am I supposed to do and what will work? And that's a big problem. And the solution to that problem is to wrap it in use cases. Part of it is also like AI just disappears. So most of what I write now I dictate. I dictate as a voicemail, and that's automatically transcribed. Is that still AI or is that just voice recognition? There's probably an LLM in there. Okay. So maybe that's AI. Well, okay. So what? At a certain point, it's just automation.…

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