Making sense of AI

When models are capable enough to not just process an entire academic paper, but to understand the context in which “checking math” makes sense, and then actually check the results successfully, that radically changes what AIs can do. In fact, my experiment, along with others doing the same thing, helped inspire an effort to see how often o1 can fi

The distinction between design as mindset versus output matters more than ever—whether you are a designer or not. As AI reshapes how we create, we face uncertainty about which human capabilities will endure and which will transform.

And while I am sure that in-class essay writing will come back in style as a stopgap measure, AI does more than help students cheat. Every school or instructor will need to think hard about what AI use is acceptable: Is asking AI to provide a draft of an outline cheating? Requesting help with a sentence that someone is stuck on? Is asking for a lis

New ideas do not come from the ether; they are based on existing concepts.

You actually have likely read enough at this point to be a good prompt engineer. Let’s start with the third principle I shared earlier—treat AI like a person and tell it what kind of person it is. LLMs work by predicting the next word, or part of a word, that would come after your prompt, sort of like a sophisticated autocomplete function. Then the

Another key aspect of idea generation is to embrace variance. Research shows that, to find good novel ideas, we likely have to come up with many bad novel ideas because most new ideas are pretty bad. Fortunately, we are good at filtering out low-quality ideas, so if we can generate novel ideas quickly and at low cost, we are more likely to generate

We have already outsourced the worst part of writing (checking grammar) and math (long division) to machines like spell checkers and calculators, which freed us from these tedious tasks. It would be natural to use LLMs to extend the process. And this is indeed what we have seen in some early research on using AI for work. People who use AI to do ta

If you want to do something with AI, just ask it to help you do the thing. “I want to write a novel; what do you need to know to help me?” will get you surprisingly far. And remember, AI is only going to get better at guiding us, rather than requiring us to guide it. Prompting is not going to be that important for that much longer.

This doesn’t mean