This is very true, but I don't think this is an AI-only problem. It is fundamentally a human problem.
There are so many things happening around us, and one of the biggest things that separates people is knowledge. A non-technical person who puts in the effort to learn technology becomes a technical person. The only way to become good at something is to actually do it and practice.
Someone who still doesn't know what AI is also doesn't know what is possible in the world today. My mom is a good example. She comes up with a lot of ideas and tells me about them on calls. Recently I told her, "Just tell ChatGPT. It can probably build a lot of what you need." But even that sentence isn't enough for her to understand what I mean, because she doesn't yet have a mental model of what AI can actually do. She simply isn't aware of its capabilities.
I'm going home in a few days and will be staying with her for a couple of weeks. I'm actually going to try an experiment: teach her some of these tools and see what happens. Can someone with essentially no technical background learn to use AI effectively and actually build something meaningful within a few weeks?
She already has a good job and doesn't really need to become technical, so there is no practical necessity for her to do this. But I think it would be a fascinating experiment.
That’s the gap between a skilled AI user and everyone else. Take a non-technical marketing person and someone fluent in agents and tool use. The agent-fluent person can watch the marketer work for an hour and immediately see a dozen things to automate, delegate, or reinvent, including things the marketer hasn’t even tried yet. But put the most intelligent tool in the world in front of the marketer, and they’re staring at a blank prompt, unsure what to type. All that intelligence, and no way to see it.
The author perfectly describes non-technical people who are AI skeptics. Most of them hang out at r/BetterOffline.
The author seems to describe a person who doesn't know the specific tool we're talking about, but this is no way exclusive to AI. Life is filled with people doing things the "non-optimal" way, or missing huge shortcuts to better quality with less work, and similar stuff, it's all over the place once you start looking for it.
> Most of them hang out at r/BetterOffline.
Top submission right now: "Anthropic science lead: There's a >10% chance our product will kill all humans"
Is there any subreddit/forum/community that kind of sits in-between all these extremes? You either have LocalLlama which is astroturfed by all the AI labs and individuals singing the praise of Q2 quant of Qwen 3.8 27B, or places like BetterOffline which contains hyperbole the other way. Is there really no community that is at least pretending to be level-headed about all this stuff?
Does it really? Or is it that they're all pretty much good enough and so you just go with what's cheapest or what you're used to?
For example, in IntelliJ I can switch between maybe a dozen models with a drop-down but the only time I do it is when whatever model I'm currently using has an outage.
Another example, our product has some ai features (not coding related). I use spring-ai and so I can change models just in the config file. But I stick with deepseek because it's more than good enough and is super cheap.
It’s pretty well established by now that harness matters as much as a model. Even if a model is smart enough to work around harness’ limitations, it may take it way more time, context and money.
Can you not just tell them: Imagine you are chatting with a very knowledgable person who knows answers to most questions, and can do many computer-related things for you ?
Same when sometimes you talk about AI with people and they say ChatGPT is absolutely horrible, gets everything wrong and never can keep track of more than 3-4 messages and so on.
Then it turns out they were on the free logged-out version, writing the most obtuse, confusing and contradictory prompts, and they're trying to do "real work" like this.
We're all having very different experiences with AI right now, and when people talk to each other about it, we're not nearly specifying what environment, tools, weights, etc are used, for these discussions to actually be valuable, because people are comparing apples to oranges everywhere.
The biggest problem with “AI” is that big corps are shoving it down our throats. AI has existed since nearly invention of computing, notorious example are video games, but no one marketed them with AI, why? because that was not the point, and besides, today’s AI is overloaded term, they are represented as if they are capable of starting new war, but in reality they are repeating the same stuff over and over again they “learned” from Reddit posts, books, codebases etc. in an indeterministic way.
In most cases you don’t even need them. In some cases they give quite inaccurate answer with high confidence.
Correct. It's like believing in a particular religion, or having a certain fashion sense. When I was younger, I had a particularly handsome friend who spent as much time as possible half-naked, and he was happier than me and didn't have a religion, a fashion sense, and definitely not a need for AI. Had the world listened to my wishes, my friend would have stayed young and carefree forever. Instead, all I could do was to convince my friend to get into college so that he didn't have to sell his labor harvesting rice by hand, under the sun of Central America. Later in his career, he used AI to have to clock less time at work and have more leisure time; though I forever regret he didn't stay young and carefree.
> In some cases they give quite inaccurate answer with high confidence.
Meanwhile, I studied computer sciences, worked many technical jobs, and even got a PhD on the matter. Just yesterday, at my request, an AI re-created a piece of code that I have been able to create in the past. It took it 20 minutes; it took me much longer to exactly imagine what I wanted. It would have taken me a week had I implemented the thing by hand, if I had managed, because I still have to spend my days in this world working a senseless job so that I can pay for food and a roof. All the while I keep thinking that I would boil the oceans to keep my friend young and carefree forever. He died of cancer this year.
That's our moat, right there. I'm starting doing clean-up jobs now, advising non-technical users on where they're going wrong. I had a guy recently who'd spent well over a month on Claude, running up the wrong tree on a research question.
AI appears to be empowering non-technical users, but whether it's making them more productive or actually answering their questions is a completely different matter.
I'm also convinced software engineering tools like git and markdown are currently the best way to use AI for most things even unrelated to software development. E.g., I think using markdown notes + LaTeX + git for writing contracts is more
efficient than using Word + Copilot, which are the tools I would expect a lawyer to use.
totally agree with the repo idea. working with AI in a git repo and allowing it to write markdown files it slowly builds context over time. i knew a guy who had been using the same session for weeks because he felt he had invested too much time in building the context and was scared to close the session.
it can't basically, because all the ai's are build around the tech community, doing complex coding automation etc. nobody thinking about how normal user gone use it
Another side of this, which I can think of, is that even a skilled person feels they are not skilled enough. I might be able to see the sky right now, but what if I am not the man standing outside and I am that ant for whom the sky is like this?
If I know the code behind the button, I don't have to press it to know what it will do.
If I know how LLM work, and what it is trained on, I don't have to "explore" it to understand what it can do for me. The only variable is how deeply one knows how "LLMs" work, and that makes up all the on going arguments by lay people...
This is very true, but I don't think this is an AI-only problem. It is fundamentally a human problem.
There are so many things happening around us, and one of the biggest things that separates people is knowledge. A non-technical person who puts in the effort to learn technology becomes a technical person. The only way to become good at something is to actually do it and practice.
Someone who still doesn't know what AI is also doesn't know what is possible in the world today. My mom is a good example. She comes up with a lot of ideas and tells me about them on calls. Recently I told her, "Just tell ChatGPT. It can probably build a lot of what you need." But even that sentence isn't enough for her to understand what I mean, because she doesn't yet have a mental model of what AI can actually do. She simply isn't aware of its capabilities.
I'm going home in a few days and will be staying with her for a couple of weeks. I'm actually going to try an experiment: teach her some of these tools and see what happens. Can someone with essentially no technical background learn to use AI effectively and actually build something meaningful within a few weeks?
She already has a good job and doesn't really need to become technical, so there is no practical necessity for her to do this. But I think it would be a fascinating experiment.
I see this too. Generally, having a builder mindeset is independent from the tools available.
Subtle Lena[1] reference, maybe?
[1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
nice catch haha
The author seems to describe a person who doesn't know the specific tool we're talking about, but this is no way exclusive to AI. Life is filled with people doing things the "non-optimal" way, or missing huge shortcuts to better quality with less work, and similar stuff, it's all over the place once you start looking for it.
> Most of them hang out at r/BetterOffline.
Top submission right now: "Anthropic science lead: There's a >10% chance our product will kill all humans"
Is there any subreddit/forum/community that kind of sits in-between all these extremes? You either have LocalLlama which is astroturfed by all the AI labs and individuals singing the praise of Q2 quant of Qwen 3.8 27B, or places like BetterOffline which contains hyperbole the other way. Is there really no community that is at least pretending to be level-headed about all this stuff?
The simple ctrl+C ctrl+V, for example.
Does it really? Or is it that they're all pretty much good enough and so you just go with what's cheapest or what you're used to?
For example, in IntelliJ I can switch between maybe a dozen models with a drop-down but the only time I do it is when whatever model I'm currently using has an outage.
Another example, our product has some ai features (not coding related). I use spring-ai and so I can change models just in the config file. But I stick with deepseek because it's more than good enough and is super cheap.
It’s pretty well established by now that harness matters as much as a model. Even if a model is smart enough to work around harness’ limitations, it may take it way more time, context and money.
Can you not just tell them: Imagine you are chatting with a very knowledgable person who knows answers to most questions, and can do many computer-related things for you ?
I was trying to teach a co-worker some agentic stuff today, and this is totally true. Especially if they are using gimpy tools like Github Copilot.
The harness matters. None of my super-powered CLI + skills stuff worked like how it does in a more powerful harness like Codex or Claude Code.
Try telling someone to imagine it could do something amazing, if they switch to a completely different tool.
Same when sometimes you talk about AI with people and they say ChatGPT is absolutely horrible, gets everything wrong and never can keep track of more than 3-4 messages and so on.
Then it turns out they were on the free logged-out version, writing the most obtuse, confusing and contradictory prompts, and they're trying to do "real work" like this.
We're all having very different experiences with AI right now, and when people talk to each other about it, we're not nearly specifying what environment, tools, weights, etc are used, for these discussions to actually be valuable, because people are comparing apples to oranges everywhere.
I'm so sorry OP, but every time I see your name/domain pop up, I can't help but think of qntm's Lena. :( It's a deep-rooted trigger for me.
> the system could do almost anything
I'm clearly the ant.
Corporate mandates, the most pervasive advertising campaigns one can imagine, and so on; yeah, discoverability...
year 3 of AI taking our jobs in the next 6 months
thanks for not changing, humans
The biggest problem with “AI” is that big corps are shoving it down our throats. AI has existed since nearly invention of computing, notorious example are video games, but no one marketed them with AI, why? because that was not the point, and besides, today’s AI is overloaded term, they are represented as if they are capable of starting new war, but in reality they are repeating the same stuff over and over again they “learned” from Reddit posts, books, codebases etc. in an indeterministic way.
In most cases you don’t even need them. In some cases they give quite inaccurate answer with high confidence.
> In most cases you don’t even need them.
Correct. It's like believing in a particular religion, or having a certain fashion sense. When I was younger, I had a particularly handsome friend who spent as much time as possible half-naked, and he was happier than me and didn't have a religion, a fashion sense, and definitely not a need for AI. Had the world listened to my wishes, my friend would have stayed young and carefree forever. Instead, all I could do was to convince my friend to get into college so that he didn't have to sell his labor harvesting rice by hand, under the sun of Central America. Later in his career, he used AI to have to clock less time at work and have more leisure time; though I forever regret he didn't stay young and carefree.
> In some cases they give quite inaccurate answer with high confidence.
Meanwhile, I studied computer sciences, worked many technical jobs, and even got a PhD on the matter. Just yesterday, at my request, an AI re-created a piece of code that I have been able to create in the past. It took it 20 minutes; it took me much longer to exactly imagine what I wanted. It would have taken me a week had I implemented the thing by hand, if I had managed, because I still have to spend my days in this world working a senseless job so that I can pay for food and a roof. All the while I keep thinking that I would boil the oceans to keep my friend young and carefree forever. He died of cancer this year.
that's super true, it;s very hard for non-tech people to use ai at its peak power
That's our moat, right there. I'm starting doing clean-up jobs now, advising non-technical users on where they're going wrong. I had a guy recently who'd spent well over a month on Claude, running up the wrong tree on a research question.
AI appears to be empowering non-technical users, but whether it's making them more productive or actually answering their questions is a completely different matter.
I'm also convinced software engineering tools like git and markdown are currently the best way to use AI for most things even unrelated to software development. E.g., I think using markdown notes + LaTeX + git for writing contracts is more efficient than using Word + Copilot, which are the tools I would expect a lawyer to use.
totally agree with the repo idea. working with AI in a git repo and allowing it to write markdown files it slowly builds context over time. i knew a guy who had been using the same session for weeks because he felt he had invested too much time in building the context and was scared to close the session.
it can't basically, because all the ai's are build around the tech community, doing complex coding automation etc. nobody thinking about how normal user gone use it
It's hard even for a lot of tech people to use AI at its peak power. Many of the programmers I know are not using it nearly as much as they could.
asking the AI helps
That helps, but people tend to ask about uses they can already imagine. The hard part is discovering what’s possible beyond that.
Hilariously, there is no substitute for intelligence, not even another intelligence.
Another side of this, which I can think of, is that even a skilled person feels they are not skilled enough. I might be able to see the sky right now, but what if I am not the man standing outside and I am that ant for whom the sky is like this?
If I know the code behind the button, I don't have to press it to know what it will do.
If I know how LLM work, and what it is trained on, I don't have to "explore" it to understand what it can do for me. The only variable is how deeply one knows how "LLMs" work, and that makes up all the on going arguments by lay people...