How to have a career even when OpenAI's o3 drops

The future belongs to people whose work cannot be easily reduced to a dataset, and who can use AI to become even better at what they do. Some jobs, like competitive programming or routine software development, are vulnerable because we can create clear benchmarks for performance. Others, like Tyler’s work or K’s website design, are safer because th... See more

So if you’re looking to evaluate your career path now, focus on skills where the gap between the best and the rest is sharply diverging because of AI. This is where you should try to become the best in because the returns are so much larger.

This isn’t necessary for all skills though. Consider the skill of writing SQL queries. Before ChatGPT and other tools came out, there would have been a large divergence between the expert who could write complex window functions and optimize queries for performance, and the beginner who struggled with basic SELECT statements. Now, AI can help anyon... See more

Both Tyler Cowen and K share the same trait: their value comes from navigating ambiguous human preferences and synthesizing disparate information in ways that can’t be reduced to clear right or wrong answers. In other words, they have taste . Their work resists dataset creation because success is contextual, subjective, and often relies on tacit kn... See more

main lesson is that if your job is legible enough that people can make a dataset clearly pointing out what is right and what is wrong, you are at the highest risk for an AI model being “superhuman” at your job. It is even more risky if it is possible to articulate your thought process in a way that is verifiable.

Looking at this perspective, it mak... See more

these tools benefit the highly skilled more than the less skilled .

if your job is legible enough that people can make a dataset clearly pointing out what is right and what is wrong, you are at the highest risk for an AI model being “superhuman” at your job. It is even more risky if it is possible to articulate your thought process in a way that is verifiable.

Looking at this perspective, it makes more sense that c... See more