The AI that today can shorten a project from 3 years to 2 didn't exist 1 year ago. The AI that shortens it from 2 years to 1 doesn't exist yet.
If you started a project 1 year ago, and today realize current AI could have shorten year 1 to 3 months and can now shorten year 2 to 9 months, and in year 3 you'll also be using different AI...how should you plan and budget your time? What should you focus on right now? When you should press on vs park the prototype until the next round of model releases?
In my own work I am constantly reconfiguring what I spend time on. What can the frontier AI do? What can the weaker and cheaper AI do? What can both offload to scripts? How can I maximize those and spend my own time on the steps that still benefit from my skills and judgment? It's a moving target and I've learned that even if I know where I want to end up, I shouldn't plan a timeline too many steps ahead. Better to pivot and tackle pieces opportunistically, riding the wave of capabilities growth.
I wouldn't mind hearing from people with good vision and interesting projects I could easily help with and find cool, in general not even AI related. There are existing society issues like isolation/lack of coordination/nowhere to really signal "I want help with laziness and accountability for my laziness". Which isn't to say there aren't many people also who are low-quality-low-standards and pump out AI spam.
I often think about how gangs and tech support scam centers and pig butchering romance scammers sometimes feel better at lager coordination and agreement than being an ordinary person who wants to reach out, people that are too well-adjusted have the fear lowered status, cringe of embarrassment, ghosting, flaking, betrayal of someone stealing work, happening-to-not-care-about-someone-else's-project-and-having-to-deal-with-it etc.
Also in competitive-ish things like audience attention with winner-take-almost-all effects you wouldn't expect to see wide prosperity as much.
AI is fantastic at prototyping. A quick draft of an essay, a mockup of a website, a demo of a video game, concept art or trailer for a movie, or the core argument of a proof - each now takes one prompt instead of a week. 1000x speedup.
AI is useful for helping finish longer projects, but clearly not as good at it. Polishing up a paper draft that would have taken a month still takes two weeks. Finishing a video game that would have taken three years still takes two. Cleaning up every bug, human-checking a proof, covering every use case, handling every small nit and matter of taste, building production-ready infrastructure, all of that is work that, in my experience, only sees a 2x speedup with AI, at best.
AI is a 1000x speedup for drafting and only 2x speedup at finishing. See the problem?
We are seeing an absolute flood of slop in every AI-touched discipline, and nowhere near the promised gains in the stuff that matters. Humans are being completely hijacked by the high of being able to draft every great American novel they ever regretted not writing for a $200 subscription, and bouncing right off the wall of actually polishing any of these novels to a readable standard. The curation infrastructure (referees, editors, moderators) is being taxed beyond all measure, as the tsunami of half-finished demos crashes into its intake.
It turns out that the best, most impactful, work lives in the tail of the power law in terms of strategy and commitment, and while AI helps with that kind of work, it doesn’t remove the need for deep perseverance.
Written with help from Claude Fable 5.