@tbpn: CEO of Every @danshipper says AI increases the demand for human experts because it provides "cheap competence" that onl…

CEO of Every @danshipper says AI increases the demand for human experts because it provides “cheap competence” that only humans can turn into valuable, differentiated work.

What he said:

“Every agent needs a human. The further away an agent is from a human who’s doing it, the worse it does.”

“You also see this inside the scaled AI companies, like OpenAI or Anthropic. They have company-wide bots that you can @, but they’re run by teams of people.”

“And I think that’s a really interesting, and pretty stable phenomenon based on how these agents work.”

“AI collapses tasks that used to take hours into a few minutes, but the human is like a sandwich on either end. Bookending the process, framing the task, or evaluating it when it’s done.”

“Even though AI can do expert human work, it actually increases the demand for human experts.”

“You can get pretty good writing, images, or code [from AI]. But it’s all based on yesterday’s competence. It’s all based on what’s in the training data from yesterday.”

“What that does is it floods the market with PRs, images, or writing that’s kind of good, but not quite right for the situation. And what you need are human experts to come in and take the cheap competence that AI enables anyone to have, and turn it into actually good, valuable, differentiated work. Otherwise it’s just the same thing everybody else is doing. And it’s not valuable.”

“That’s a dynamic inside how the models work — and how they function in the economy — that kind of gets lost when people are worried about it being able to do all this great stuff.”

“It can, but in order for that great stuff to be valuable, it needs to be done by a human.”

ChinaTalk’s @jordanschneider takes the other side of Chamath’s thesis that Taiwan will lose its strategic importance in 18 months:

“The percentage of chips that are going to be manufactured in Taiwan 18 months from now is still going to be 85-90%.”

“If that’s the only thing you care about, you will still have a global economic catastrophe if the lights go off in Taiwan in 2028.”

“Why should you care about Taiwan besides chips? I mean, it’s a democracy. People deserve to have self-determination.”

“From a geostrategic perspective, there’s also this concept of the first island chain. It makes the broader Pacific architecture that America has built over the past 75 years in Asia a lot more tenuous if all the sudden the anchor to both Southeast Asia as well as North Asia becomes a PLA base.”

“It’s not all about technology. There are other risks, incentives, institutional dynamics, and historical dynamics at play.”

“And there are a whole lot of downsides to starting something that you don’t know how is going to end. Which is a lesson that Xi has gotten to relearn from Putin over the past 5 years.”