Comment by ben_w

> 4 months is barely enough time to adapt to a fundamentally new tool

Yes, but also the extra wrinkle that this whole thing is moving so fast that 4 months old is borderline obsolete. Same into the future, any study starting now based on the state of the art on 22/01/2026 will involve models and potentially workflows already obsolete by 22/05/2026.

We probably can't ever adapt fully when the entire landscape is changing like that.

> Previous tools outsourced partial processes - calculators do arithmetic, Google stores facts. LLMs can potentially take over the entire cognitive process from thinking to formulating. That's qualitatively different.

Yes, but also consider that this is true of any team: All managers hire people to outsource some entire cognitive process, letting themselves focus on their own personal comparative advantage.

The book "The Last Man Who Knew Everything" is about Thomas Young, who died in 1829; since then, the sum of recorded knowledge has broadened too much for any single person to learn it all, so we need specialists, including specialists in managing other specialists.

AI is a complement to our own minds with both sides of this: Unlike us, AI can "learn it all", just not very well compared to humans. If any of us had a sci-fi/fantasy time loop/pause that let us survive long enough to read the entire internet, we'd be much more competent than any of these models, but we don't, and the AI runs on hardware which allows it to.

For the moment, it's still useful to have management skills (and to know about and use Popperian falsification rather than verification) so that we can discover and compensate for the weaknesses of the AI.