Learn How to Write with AI in 68 Minutes – Tyler Cowen

look there are people who know a lot about AI but they don't know anything about writing and there's people who know a lot about writing but they don't know anything about Ai and Tyler Cowan is one of the very few people who's an expert in both we talked about how is your career going to change if you're a writer how is AI going to change writing in general and how can you use AI to learn faster and think better I want to set the ground rules for this so there's a lot of conversations about utopian

dystopian visions of AI and the ethics of AI I don't want to have this conversation the thing that I really want to talk to you about is the Practical implications of AI how do you use it how can you learn about using llms better and then also what that means for writing in particular and we need to be practical if you want to make progress on thinking about the very big questions simply using it experimenting it seeing what works and fails will get you much further than sitting on your Duff and rereading heiger so how

are you using it every day in order to advance your skills like how are you actually learning about it most of all I use AI when I read things so I use it as the secondary literature so I'm preparing a podcast for a British historian she does history of Richard II and Henry V now in the old days I would have ordered and paid for 20 to 30 books on those kings now maybe I've ordered and paid for two or three books on those kings but I'll keep on interrogating the best llms about the topics

of her books Helen Caster is the historian and just keep on going and I acquire the context much more quickly uh it's pretty accurate keep in mind I'm the questioner so if there's a modest degree of hallucination it doesn't matter for me I'm not giving the answers and uh I can now do many more podcasts than I used to because I'm using AI for my prep okay so do you think that this is about saving time or improving the quality of your prep it's improving the quality of my reading which I use for my pleasure

reading so I reread Shakespeare's Richard II which is a wonderful play again in the old days I would have piled up a lot of secondary literature I'm also rereading weathering Heights I just keep on asking the AI what do you think of chapter 2 like what happened there what are some puzzles what should I Ponder more how does that connect to something else later in the book and it just gets me thinking it's the new secondary literature for me so it's more fun I learn more just by being more actively involved asking a question I

think that improves my epistemics of the reading uh and then I think I'm smarter about the thing in the final analysis but mostly I'm doing it because for me it's fun and a pleasure to learn what are the puzzles that's an interesting question tell me about that well Shakespeare's full of puzzles right Camille poglia once said if you look at Hamlet too closely most of it just doesn't make sense I'm not sure that's true but she's a very smart woman and she studied Shakespeare quite a bit and if she says that you know Shakespeare is

very hard to read any major well-known good Shakespeare play you can read five to 10 times and still just you're beginning to get a handle on it so you can reread it in infinite number of times so it's very well suited for having a guide or companion who can talk you through it and uh the major large language models they've all read Shakespeare itis in the public domain and they seem to know the secondary literature quite well you could just ask it a question what are three or four major readings of what Hamlet meant in

the speech and it gives you an excellent answer so with that it's getting a bunch of different perspectives do you put in people's names to say I want a perspective from this scholar or this scholar or is that not necessary anymore uh you can do that so like what would Harold Bloom say what would Godard say uh it's not mainly what I do I'm happy to randomize it a fair amount uh but it works for that and at the moment this changes a lot over time but 01 Pro is the single best model for doing

this from open AI that's the one you have to pay for uh Claude is very good uh deep seek is very useful and fun not reliable in terms of hallucinations but it should definitely be in your repertoire so to speak now if 01 Pro on average it takes me two to four minutes to get an answer so do you have multiple 01 Pros open at the same time I only have one open uh most of the questions I ask it it takes me a minute or a little more than a minute in it maybe I'm

more of adult my questions are too simple I recognize that uh well I'm waiting there's plenty else I can do check my email maybe I've heard from you check Twitter go back to reading Shakespeare so the time cost to me it's actually fun I enjoy the suspense uh it's not a problem I multitask anyway whether that's good or bad Frank you know I do it so there's no cost to me to wait to confirm I emailed you at 1018 last night you emailed me back at 1019 and what did I say confirmed I think I

was probably waiting for an 01 Pro answer at that time okay so what I've noticed is a lot of people think that hallucinations are a major issue and you're like they're actually not that big of a deal especially in the context of interview prep and I think that what other people think is really important is like finding the true answer and I think what you are trying to do much more often is kind of trying to find a model of how reality works or something like that is you want to broaden your horizons see more

perspectives first and most important point is anything you learn from any Source if you're going to use it you've got to double check it it could be a human it could be Einstein it could be the encyclopedia branica so the fact that you should double check what you learn from an AI it's not an extra burden and like every book I write I then have my research assistant fact check every single thing I say I say act like you're to destroy me and they do find things that need to be changed you said on page

172 was on page 173 that happens so that's one issue uh when you do podcasts and you're the interviewer again you're not giving the answers you just need context so huc hallucinations won't trip you up but the biggest thing is simply the very best models with reasoning hallucinate much much less than what most people are used to hallucinations have gone down I would say by more than 10x in the last year and we're talking now in February they're due to go down a lot more over the the year to come so it's just not that

big a problem for me I uh was scrolling through your reviews on conversations with Tyler to prep for this yeah and the the best review was Tyler's the master of out of left field questions how do you use AI to find out of left field things because a lot of them end up kind of homogenizing thought but also the potential to really get out into wild and wacky places I never ask the AI what question should I ask person X it's quite dull and Bland if you do that it's too Normy that's the worst question

you can ask an AI from my point of view you just want to ask it about the details of historical examples so something like Well w Cliffe what was special about his translation of the Bible and how did his patrons feel about what he had done which is implicit in a lot of books I haven't yet seen a book that spelled that out explicitly and maybe it's an open question how much we even know about that the AIS will give you some context just keep on asking specific questions practical questions to get back to that

point and you will yourself come up without of left field questions H specific question so tell me about that something you're curious about uh The Peasants Revolt of 1381 I'm starting to learn about that I only know a small amount about it I I don't yet have a good question about the peasants Revolt but I feel within the next two weeks I will and that will be an out of left field question okay so writing with AI are you using it to frame ideas or where are you using it in the writing process I don't

directly use AI for writing typically now I sometimes I do in the following sense if I'm writing on a legal issue and I'm not a lawyer huh I will ask 01 Pro for the relevant legal background to something I'm writing on HM so I just wrote a column about declassifying classified documents I don't know that law very well I asked the AI for a lot of background on the topic uh I didn't use what it gave me but now I feel like I'm not an idiot on the topic and what I wanted to say whether

or not it's correct you can debate but it's not what you would call flat out wrong uh but I don't let it right for me I want the writing to be my own it's like my little baby so to speak I don't care whenever it's better than I am I'm still not not going to let it write for me also a lot of the sources I write for wouldn't let me uh I agree with that decision on their part but even if they would let me I wouldn't do it there's ways you can use AI

that will smooth out your writing on average make it easier to understand I don't want to do that I want to be like Tyler cow and this weirdo well the whole fun of your writing is that it's a little bit cryptic and there's a lot of different layers going on and I read it and then I try to say what is Tyler explicitly saying what is he trying to hint at me and then also you have these weird ways of writing sentences that are almost like Parables that I kind of have to puzzle through and

I don't want the AI messing with that and it's not going to because I won't let it and if the world stops paying attention to me and only reads the AI I'm in peace with that it's we're not at that point now but if we get to that point uh I won't feel bad I'll be fine you mentioned the legal stuff do you use AI to check your work later on or no not that much actually again I think it can make your work better but I want it to stay weird I will use it

to fact check things in areas I don't know wouldn't say I don't use it at all uh there was one use where uh Agnes card a while ago suggested this she said run your writing through the AI and ask it what what is in here that some people are likely to find obnoxious and explain to me in great detail what that is and I did that and it was right on target you you may or may not need that but there was one part of something I'm writing it was very obnoxious I even pondered keeping

it that way but I decided to change it and the AI pointed it out to me and explained why it was obnoxious and why I was being supercilious and condescending I just thought well if the AI says that there is some like greater wisdom at work there yeah I find it to be very good at telling me when something feels like Alice or cold it's like you didn't really think about that or it's like harsh or something like that I know a lot of managers who uh let's just say they have high tempers and one

of the ways that they're using AI is they'll give sharp critiques for people they'll put in the AI they'll say hey make it warm clean it up they'll copy and paste it and they said that it's reduceed Conflict for them yeah but again I don't want to do that too much and most of my writing it's not managerial uh if I wrote memos I think I would do that a lot I think it's extreme useful for many people uh but for me I'm mostly writing for just external audiences and it it still has to sound

like me and sound like my thinking how about General critique are you using it for that to critique your work uh sometimes yeah but you know I think in terms of my ability to index the arguments out there I have some AI like abilities more than most humans do and I feel I can do that pretty well myself all I think of my head is having a kind of system of index cards and there's a lot of index cards in there and I can flip through them not at the speed of light but sort of

faster than a normal person could think so I'm able to flip through all the permutations in less than a second and just see like which combinations of arguments might apply to an argument I or someone else is making when you're looking at how other people use Ai and you're like ah you're using it wrong what is the thing that they're doing wrong they're asking it questions that are too General they're not willing to put in enough of their own time generating context now maybe they don't have the time if that's what's efficient for them I

mean fine uh but I think they end up not sufficiently impressed by the AI because they're using it as a substitute for putting in their own time which again for them might be fine but it's not what I want to do I want to put in more and more of my time to learn and have it complement that learning and if you do that and keep on whacking it with queries and facts and questions and interpretations you'll come away much more impressed than if you just ask it oh what what does the rate of price

inflation mean or I'm interviewing Tyler tomorrow what questions should I ask him then it's pretty you know mid is that the term people use now like mid is fine mid is called mid for a reason but at the end of the day you will be asleep on the revolution occurring before our eyes which is that it it's getting smarter than we are you'll just think it's a cheap way to achieve a lot of mid tasks which it is also well I think part of the problem is that it's a text window that makes it feel

like a text message so people use text message lengths when in particular the first context setting setting question should be super long so one of the things that I'll do is I'll use voice dictation and I'll actually dictate it for a minute and a half three minutes get something very substantial and my follow-up questions tend to be shorter but my first one tends to be extremely long and that's why I use voice dictation so I can just get it all out and I find that the that Chachi p is quite good at sorting what's really

important something a lot of people are doing I haven't myself tried it yet I suspect it works very well they say they're using 03 mini to write the prompt for them and then they ask you know the full model and they get the prompt quickly so just to think of it as a stacked device not a single box but a set of interacting agents that in a sense are trying to evolve toward a market with multiple agents that talk to each other correct each other grade each other when you view the AI as evolving toward

a decentralized system of AIS which is not there yet but in the meantime try to use it as if it were one the way like for humans there's a republic of science way smarter than Newton or Einstein or anyone scientist uh we're evolving toward that we don't have it yet but you're using AIS to bounce things off each other so to speak and have a dialogue where you're part of it I like to say there's three kind of layers of knowing stuff about Ai and most people maybe get most people don't get to any of

them actually so layer one is are you working with the very best systems uh some of them cost money so that's a yes or a no but that's important second question is do you have an innate understanding of how it is through reinforcement learning and some other techniques they can improve themselves basically ongoing all the time a lot of people don't get that they're impressed by what they see in the moment but they don't understand the rate of improvement and why it's going to be so steady and then the third question is and this is

fully speculative but I believe in it very strongly do you have an understanding of how much better AIS will be as they evolve their own markets their own institutions of science inquiry their own ways of grading each other self-correction dealing with each other and become as I said before this Republic of science the way humans did it how much did it Advance human science or literary criticism to build those institutions immensely that's where most of the value at is so AIS I believe will do that I think there are private projects now starting to do

that it's not a thing out there you can access and when you understand all all those three levels it's like oh my goodness this is just a huge thing yeah and most people aren't even at level one and if we take things like reinforcement learning synthetic data stuff like that how important is the technical understanding of those things in order to answer that question well I don't think you need the technical understanding if you work with them and are able to read what's equivalent to a popular science account of how AI works the people with

the technical understanding of course they understand it much better but there's plenty of other processes like how did cars get safer from 1970 until today I have no deep technical understanding of that but I could tell you a bunch of things I don't get flat tires anymore I have a side airbag and I couldn't explain to you how the side airbag works but I'm not an idiot and it's a bit like that yeah a car engineer understands it better but you can have a handle on what's going on so then let's go to the third

question which is do you have a vision of the future of AI becoming a decentralized network interacting with each other and humans probably with markets I don't know if we would call it peer review but it decentralized again Republic of science where it moves forward by mobilizing decentralized knowledge and working together uh the way our civilization does and that's fully speculative but it would just see seem so strange to me if there were nothing there as another source of progress personally mine's very Jagged like I have a clear sense of how it would show up

in management a clear sense of how it might show up in writing which I think we should explore together right uh but it is very Jagged and it sort of turns my brain into a science fiction novel absolutely it's and it's scary because we all Wonder well how do I fit into this new world I don't think the answer has to be negative but there's no answer you can give with certainty and we're not used to that so the world I've lived in has not changed that much since I was born but that's about to

change you could say it's changed already but it's not fully instantiated in most of the things we do so for writers you're an upand cominging writer you're getting started I mean how do you respond to this it I feel a sense of dejection and I'm at The Cutting Edge of these things I I get the benefit of feeling excited about this and I also feel completely dejected in terms of having a skill that I've developed in terms of writing that now I feel like AI can do a lot better than me and then also in

terms of teaching developing Frameworks and ideas that I feel like has become obsolete I can only imagine if you're not using these tools how deflating it must be some humans will become masters of the tools how much writing they still will be doing at what pace I'm not sure but it's a a major psychological adjustment and a lot of people who thought they would be writers I will predict they won't be just like the number of jobs for certain types of computer programmers is plummeting yeah and that will come to other areas by no means

all areas but a lot of kinds of writing are one of them something like generic corporate writing is the first to go from what I can see uh it could be writing a biography of a person the AI cannot really do it may help you a lot but it can't go out and interview you know the the high school teacher and so on writing Memoirs Of course the AI cannot do writing that is more subjective more personal I think the AI already can do it very well especially deep seek program we can get to that

soon but uh I'm not sure readers want the better product from the AI they may want it from a human being I feel that I do so if I read a brilliant Memoir written by an AI but it corresponded to no actual life I would read a few of those but at some point I'd get Bor and I don't think I would keep on reading them even if they were better than human Memoirs on average you've mentioned deep seek twice how is the the shape or personality of deep seek different from the others deep seek

is from China as many of you know it is less manipulated to sound a certain way it is less Bland I would say it's better at poetry better at emotion more romantic more uneven it does hallucinate more so so be very careful if you're using deep seek but if you want say a glorious description of what it is like to eat a ma fongo which is a Puerto Rican dish which I enjoy I go to deep seek for that like I want the you know bring on the hallucination it's just more creative and uh it's

more censored on a bunch of things that you could predict knowing it comes from China but overall it's it's Freer it's a free spirit llm but don't use it for your research not mainly do you think that deep research will get to a point where you can trust it at least to the level of Wikipedia in terms of fact quality I'm teaching a PhD level class now and I'm teaching the Ricardo's theory of rent and I looked at Wikipedia on Ricardo's theory of rent and I googled to a number of other websites and then I

asked deep research write a 10-page article for me on Ricardo's theory of rent and I fleshed out the prompt I told it it's my PhD students some other things I wanted in my view what it did is by far the best thing out there it's teller made to what I wanted not saying it's best for everyone but it's already beating not just Wikipedia but any other source I could find using Google and it's due to improve right as they say this the worst will ever be the second level of of the lesson yeah exactly so

how does all this influence what you're choosing to to write like should you write books articles how is all the shaping that it's affected my writing uh very significantly already so there's two quite different effects at work one is simply that AI is progressing quite rapidly and that changes the world quite rapidly so if you're writing a book that takes say two years to write and a year and a half to come out maybe there's some other delays we're talking four years there's a lot of topics you just can't write on like you can't write

a book on AI it's crazy you could write a very good book The history of AI which is Frozen in historical time now maybe the AI will write that book better than you could but at least you could consider doing it so what I call predictive books uh books about the near future that don't make sense anymore you've got to cover those by writing on this ultra high time frequency every day every week something like substack blogging Twitter uh that's a big change so some of the recent stuff I've written is about the more distant

past that is frozen in history but the other question is what can the AI soon enough write better than you can and it may not be that the AI writes a book don't fixate on book maybe the AI is no better than to write books they're just like a box and you can ask the Box any question you might read in the book that's what I suspect is the case not that there'll be all these books written by AIS it's inefficient like why this single package for everyone just give people the box so it's a

question box mhm and uh what you're writing had better be more interesting than the question box so the book I've started writing recently we were discussing it before filming started it will be called mentors it's about mentoring and also being a mentee and first I think the extant literature is weak enough the AI maybe can't do a great job but even if the AI could do as good a job or better than I can I don't think people want to read that book from an AI h I think they want to read it from a

human who has been a mentor and a Mente just like I don't want to read all these phony Memoirs from AI even if some of them are good and that's a human book that only a human can truly write sincerely incredibly so I'm going to write fewer books in the future because of this I may not write any more books after this book on mentors a lot of books I would have written they're now obsolete I I feel I'm wise enough to recognize that and I'm not going to write less but I'm going to do

more of this super highfrequency writing much of it about AI with the mentoring the other thing is that you're going to have a very opinionated perspective on mentoring right that is far different than what the average person would think so if we meet you know Jane on the street it's probably very different from how you're going to think about this if the book that you wrote on Talent is an indicator and I have personal anecdotes one of them concerns you and those anecdotes are about real people which I think readers want we'll see you know

maybe the readers are are fine with the AI book on mening but my bet is no that the the truly human books will stand out all the more and a lot of the rest will be this will be AI slop human slop uh just a lot of it will look like human slop all of a sudden So when you say the truly human books what do you mean Memoir biography where you need to do things like fieldwork and interviewing uh books based on person personal experience such as a book on mentoring it could be relatively

few categories uh I'm sure there's categories I haven't thought of yet your ideas are welcome I'd love to keep on writing as much as I can uh but I'm not going to get sentimental about it you know I'm very willing to be coldblooded and just say nope Tyler when it comes to that you're obsolete when it comes to answering questions about economics and economic models uh right now it's better than I am not on every question not in every area but most ly it's better and I recognize that and I will reallocate my energies accordingly

so then does that mean that the YouTube channel is in a better spot in terms of persisting because we get a sense of your personality we see the visuals or do you feel like even that it's not going to be as useful I'm doing more podcasting which is also YouTube just as we're recording this the podcasts I do uh we're taking greater care to make sure there's always a video of it uh so yes I think video will be more important for a while now what's the rate of AI progress in video I have a

less clear sense of that I know less about it but I think a lot of viia will be like the Memoir that people will want humans and not fake humans even if the fake Tyler looks just like me and that seems to me two years away the fake Tyler Voice already is indistinguishable for me I just did a a video where I said something wrong in the video and we were like ah we got to go back and we record it and so what we did was we took my voice and we went in changed

the text in the voice it came out and you can't tell the difference it's an artificial voice for that little section can't tell I played the Tyler cow voice for my sister not just one word but a whole paragraph she couldn't tell she was stunned when I told her that was AI yeah well then the thing that's going to happen next is the our voices the Cadence will now work in Spanish or in Hindi or in Italian or something like that and now YouTube is rolling out dubbing in every single language and so someone will

be able to press play on this video in Italian we'll be speaking Italian and they'll be able to hear it in our Styles and my accent in Italian which is the thing that exists scoozie we're talking about writing with AI here and maybe you're thinking okay okay I've been against this AI thing but now fine I give in where do you start well I recommend a tool called Lex what I love about Lex is you go in there and it's really fun like it's super welld designed the colors the formatting it's all very intuitive and

I find that I just have more fun when I'm writing with Lex cuz I get instant feedback if I get stuck I can ask it to interview me I can say hey this is all the writing I've done this is sort of a context of how I like to write and a little bit about what I'm really going for and because of that I just feel like I have a creative collaborator and then the other thing is structuring my ideas Lex is like an 80th percentile editor it's pretty good not like the best editor in

the entire world but here's the thing it's super fast it'll work for you 24/7 and it's pretty darn affordable so if you want to start writing with AI we'll go to lex. page Perell here's another thing I'm doing with writing so some people have told me like I should write an autobiography I've never wanted to do that it seems too narcissistic I wouldn't feel the kind of motivation I don't think that would sell that many copies a bunch of reasons not to do it but it occurred to me I can write an autobiography quite simply

there's just a lot of me out there podcast blog essays books the AIS know most of it I will continue to open source as much as I can so the AI can write my biography but there's parts missing so there's no podcast where I talk about the three four years when I lived in Fall River Massachusetts h i was I what like four to seven I don't think it's that interesting but I'll write maybe two blog posts about it just kind of his filler so when someone goes to their AI three years from now oh

I'd like to read a Tyler Cowen biography that's in there so I'm thinking through I think it's maybe only 20 blog posts it's not much that is needed it's sort of fun for me to be nostalgic I'm going to put those online and then it will be possible for the advanced AIS of the near future to write a very good Tyler Cowan biography and I don't know how many people want it but it's so low cost why why shouldn't I create the Tyler Cowen possible biography so that's a thing you can do that obviously you

couldn't have done before I should have asked this earlier so I'm going to ask it now but how are you tactically learning about this and there's a specific constraint that you have which is you're very high on curiosity and uh informational fluenc but very low on sort of technical chops right and you're also in your 60s so there's such a 63 to be clear 63 that's what I thought it was the lower end at least okay so you're 63 and so what are you doing in terms of staying at The Cutting Edge because here's what

I find I kind of will get boxed in in terms of not realizing the the potential of what's out there and I need to go have conversations and say hey show me exactly what you're doing and actually the the biggest constraint for me in terms of improving with AI is oh I didn't realize that you could do that I think so far at least it's been a big Advantage for me that I'm not a technical person in the AI field so an example I wrote a book it came out now 11 years ago it's called

average is over and it says the future will be this age of incredible advances in Ai and it will change our lives in these different ways and that book has turned out I think to be quite true and I was then not an expert technical AI whatsoever as I'm not now but I knew a lot about AI from chess and I had this intuitive sense from my own life as a chess player when I was young that chess is really mainly not calculation it's intuition and it's very difficult intuitions and Ai and chess some while

ago became very very strong and I just had this core intuitive belief that if AI can get that good at chess it can get very good at many other things and all the reasons people would give for why it can't happen it's not that I didn't know them I had read them but they didn't register vividly in my mind and I stuck with my core intuition and if you're not focused on the technical side you will see other things more clearly now maybe over time some of my future intuitions will be quite wrong I readily

admit that but uh there were ways in which it can be an advantage you just focus on what is this actually good for and not am I impressed by all the neat bells and whistles on this Advance with AI but you've got to be super practical in how you address it don't spend too much time on the abstract work with it use it be self-critical about what you're doing with it and be willing to learn from other people if we stripped out AI like a Jango block now in what ways would you be sad or

devastated and in what ways you'd be like oh that's fine I'm just going to go back too whatever when you say stripped it out you mean shut it down just all of a sudden it doesn't exist anymore what would you feel like I I I miss that I love that about the AIS well I would just learn much less uh I think for people somewhat younger than I am rather than living to 84 they will live to 97 or whatever is the time when on average you die of old age that is significant for them

I think it's less likely I see those gains maybe not impossible but I would bet against it so that would be a significant gain for Humanity uh other areas of the Sciences they'll Advance much more rapidly something like green energy quality of batteries our ability to terraform the Earth all of that would be quite stunted compared to the world where AI progresses but I think like the printing press AI even in its most positive forms has the potential to bring a lot of disruption and psychological disorientation and just upsetting the balance of interest groups and

social status and those disruptions can go very badly uh and that worries me uh it's not a thing you can just manage the way like you manage a small company so humanity is faced with that we're faced with some version of that anyway but it seems to me that's quite accelerated and I think people I would I don't want to quite say they should be nervous but objectively speaking being nervous is the correct point of view when you say that you write for the AI I mean I get what you mean you're saying I want

to write it because the AIS will be a reader of what I'm saying and I can by writing a lot basically convince them that I'm a legitimate source and I'm worth referencing and all that but tactically does the writing style or the substance of what you produce does it change at all it changes a bit so I like to think the AI will have a better model of me than most other humans so I've done many hundreds of podcasts blogged every day for now like 22 years the blogging I feel is some genuine version of

me it's not edited by someone else there's a lot I have like 16 17 books a lot of other output out there are there's people with more but I'm trying to think well what does the AI still need to know about me so it's a kind of intellectual immortality I I'm close to already having achieved I'm not sure how much I value that uh I'm not hung up on it but it's like yeah it's like let's just do this for fun and it's so cheap to do the final mile on that like write those two

blog posts about Fall River and what the name of our dog was and what I thought of our neighbors and why there were so many syrians who lived in the neighborhood that kind of thing like what's the harm in that what's the name of your dog now uh Spinosa Spinosa I was thinking it was Ricardo I knew that it was an intellectual the first dog was named Zero my father named it zero and we had dog in Fall River Spinosa but when you write for the AIS like for one thing they're your most sympathetic reader

it's one reason to write for them they're your best informed reader uh you don't need to give them much background context it's not like writing a prompt so if I write something and don't explain all the filled in pieces the AI knows so I would say at the margin I'm less inclined to fill in those blanks for people because the AI doesn't need them it's already read everything else so I'm not saying everyone should make that move like you will or maybe lose some human audience or they'll understand you less well but at least it's

a trade-off worth considering one of the things that you haven't spoken about that has been fundamental for me in terms of using the AIS is visualizing information so I was in Buenos CIS and I wanted to get a sense of the immigration patterns I had it make a table for me of the different cities in Italy that people had come from and how it changed over time and something about my ability to read that it just wasn't it wasn't working it wasn't Computing and then I visualized it and I ask it to make tables and

to compare and contrast all the time like the amount of information that I'm inputting like that is at least up 10x that's great I'm much more text based than you are but I know that works and many people do it and wonderful and the other thing that I think is worth getting good at is if you can get good enough data that you can trust using Chachi is better for tables but CLA is really good for graphs and there's certain graphs that really help you make an argument well and just being able to take an

argument from text into a visual is a way that you can be a lot more effective as a writer in terms of making a point quickly I think in the next two years we'll see incredible further improvements in graphing and graphing will be perfect sometimes I have trouble with its graphing right now but I know it's just a matter of time and not much time so we just landed in DC and I struggle to kind of understand the the the cultural Vibe of this place like what do people do all day what are the kinds

of people here uh I find DC to be like this strange city that I I don't quite have a good way to describe and sort of my project for the rest of my time here is to figure out to find a good answer to that question and so how much do you think about now in as you're traveling talking to people going out first- person experiences uh versus books like normal or using AI to solve a question like this to solve that question I think AI can help you quite a bit but you'll need a

very sophisticated wellth thought out prompt I use it in a much kind of stupider way so I took a trip with my sister to Northern Colombia she's a bird watcher took photos of a bird a plant and you just ask you know in the app well what that and it tells you and you can ask it about details so or take a photo of a menu uh I do read Spanish but a while back I was in a paraguayan restaurant I've never been to Paraguay some of the menu was in gorani not Spanish I photographed

the menu I asked GPT what should I order and why it gave me answers I ordered this dishes I'll never know the alternative if it seemed to work and I knew what I was doing all of a sudden so I just use it like for very Al concrete objectives not even so much theorizing about the place like hey what's this help you walk by a building when was it built snap a photo ask it it knows but planning an itinerary so I will likely be in Northern Ghana in August and I asked it there's two

places in Northern Ghana I want to go well if I want an itinerary how do I get from one to the other and how long will it take now that I'll have to double check and I'll trip triple check it by trying to do it uh it gave me what seems to be an awesome answer in I don't know 10 seconds where is the AI getting that information because it seems like the travel information online is so uniquely bad that I've been very surprised to hear you say that actually the AI is giving you really

good travel information it's one of its best uses is for travel when my wife and I went to carola India in December she used it every day about different things to do or see it's very good some places to eat dishes to order uh and I I'm not putting in super smart prompts I might add a sentence or two saying like Oh I'm a serious consumer of food I want something that you know a top rated food critic might recommend but like very simple ads to the prompt and it just blew me away how good

it was so I like that piece and I have a sentence from that piece that I think really shows the kind of writing that'll persist and here it is a little story and it really connects us with you this is by Me by you okay by you Tyler my wife and I just ate a wonderful meal on a river house booat in carala and it was perhaps the best lobster I've ever had and for her the best lentils my chef was simply a member of the boat crew who cooked what I had bought from a

local fisherman and the reason that I saved that sentence is it's a quick story it really helps us connect with you and it was something in that piece about how India has the best food in the world that was not something that the AIS could have given and I read that and I was like ha this is a sort of writing that'll persist writers will need to personalize more I would say they already do 100% tell me about AI in the classroom how are you using it and what are your students not understanding from my

PhD class that I mentioned before there is no assigned textbook that saves them some money but they have to subscribe to one of the better AI services that costs them some money but it's much less than what the text would cost and then the main grade is based on a paper they have to write a paper uh they're required to use the AI in some fashion they're required to report what they did but I just tell them your goal is to make the paper as good as possible how much of it is yours it's all

yours from my point of view just like when you write with pen and paper or word processing that's also all yours but I want you to tell me what you did in part because I want to learn from what they did right so uh I've done this in the past I had a law class the year before where they had three papers uh this was less radical one of the three had to be with AI the other two had to be them um and it's worked very well so far and the students feel they learn

a lot other classes tell them like that's cheating but we all know there's some forthcoming equilibrium where you need to be able to do that especially as a lawyer I would say but in most walks of life so why not teach it now what's the constraint them not wanting to use AI or their lack of knowledge about how to use it well uh most of them seem to want to use it now since I'm telling them to use it maybe some of them are just going along with what I'm saying but I think they genuinely

are curious uh a minority of them already know how to use it well most of them don't most of them don't know the importance of using the better models and they want to learn uh it's been a pretty positive experience but they don't no one has taught them and every year I at my Law class my econ class has anyone else been teaching you how to do this I'll ask them silence and that to me is a scandal this is Academia we should be at the Forefront in fact the students those the ones who are

cheating they know way more than the professors now I don't condone the cheating when it's not allowed but I think that whole Norm needs to shift and in fact collapse homework needs to change more oral exams you know Proctor in person exams and so on uh we need to change that now it's very striking from all the questions that I've asked you then just the on line takeaway from this that is far superior to everything else I've learned is just use the best models people right like you're completely hopeless if you're not using 01 Pro

and these these these Cutting Edge models and I've come to realize over the course of this conversation so far just how big the variance is and if you're not at The Cutting Edge you're completely missing how fast things are improving but not just the speed but the actual vectors and ways that the Improvement is actually happening strong yes to all of that noting what is currently the best model as we are speaking is $200 a month right but unless you're very poor and have no prospects I think that's a good investment for many many more

people than realize it and over time uh the free models will be as good as that model and then there'll be a new better model that costs more when will the free model be good enough If Ever I don't know but I think there's High returns to staying on the frontier for at least for a while it may ASM toot out where oh maybe in four and a half years the free model's good enough and the fact that the paid model can do Einstein like I don't need that we may get to that point but

we're not there now and how is what it means to be a research-based academic changing well the sad news it's not changing at all uh it needs to change now right now the AIS are not better than good academics at producing papers so it feels like there's not a threat but once you understand the rate of improvement in my opinion they will be better not at writing every aspect of the paper or choosing the right question question but at doing much of the work I think they'll be better than humans in less than two years

and my academic sector is not ready for that there'll be differential rates of adoption some people will be remarkably prolific and high quality and we'll sort of know what's going on I'm not sure how transparent they'll all be or have to be but it will change things a great deal and you'll be able to produce if you know what you're doing but very good work very quickly so the number one way I use AI is to study the Bible which is sort of my big intellectual project I think it's great for the Bible it is

so good it is so good and first of all that's the will of God right it's the will of God but there's also but there's also structural things going on that there's a lot of old writing that's in the public domain that things can be very easily verified which I think contributes to the AI being uniquely good here the reasoning models in particular that's right and it's based if it's the abrahamic religions so a lot going for it just like it's especially good at economics it it's really good but here's the thing where it's good

is if I have a very specific question it's very helpful I love the way it helps me with cross references where I can see how the book of Hebrews relates to the Book of Job I would never find that on my own also for translating into Hebrew words or Greek words that saves me so much time see a secondary literature that it's replacing so that's exactly that's exactly right so what I'm not doing anymore is I don't read study Bibles but where it still is lacking is if I speak to somebody who really knows it

well themselves their ability to ask the one question that really matters the one take away um is completely completely Next Level and the AI just aren't even close to that I agree Adam Brown hit something similar in his dwesh podcast he does physics he said you'll still do better calling like the three or four world's top experts on a physics question then you will with AI but that's the level he had to get to for you to do better but here's the thing that the at least in my experience what the experts do is they

get to the absolute core one or two sentences and it's not something of volume or big explanation like it's not quite in the literature either say more they've maybe learned it through seminars or by knowing a lot of people or by having this life Rich context in the area that maybe the AI cannot get very quickly or readily that could be good for your mentorship book as well because that is what a mentor can provide is unique uh what do you say it's context Secrets humans know Secrets uh maybe AIS can be fed Secrets but

they don't in general know Secrets now a human only knows so many secrets that's partly where decentralization comes in how AIS will handle Secrets I think is a big and interesting question it's somewhat under discussed it seems like in the Peter teal definition of a secret which is something you know about the world that that other people don't know there's a chance that those go up because now there's less of an incentive almost to put things in the public domain because they can spread so much faster so there might be more of an incentive to

hoard information that's right it will be worth more to you because the public information you used to hold now is worth very little so the future the AI Rich future is also a world repete with secrets secrets are super important gossip is very emotionally and practically potent it's another part of this new structure we're not ready for okay we got to talk more about this how good are you with Secrets right are you good at trading Secrets if you are you're a lot more productive than you used to be you ever have these conventions with

your closer friends like I'll tell you this secret it's not quite a deal but it's understood that they'll tell you that secret in return Maybe over time that's a more valuable skill now increasing returns to social networks that's right so social networks become way more important as well traveling and meeting people becomes way more important I'm doing much more of it getting back to how my life is changing it's a striking Paradox right because on one hand you have access to information that is so much better that is now personalized for you you can get

the exact essay that you want so if you just heard that you'd say oh great I'm just going to spend way more time reading all those things but actually there's another element to this which is everyone has that therefore I'm going to do exactly the opposite that's right and if you want to get things done you'll need to mobilize resources the AI per se can't lend you money not yet at least and you need humans whether it's a venture capitalist or a philanthropist or whatever someone who hires you your network of humans is not just

like 20% more valuable it could be 50x more valuable because the most productive people people could be 50x 5,000x more impactful because they have this free army of highly intelligent servants at their disposal but to mobilize their projects they'll need help from others so networking again the value has gone up a lot more than people realize even when people say oh I see the value of the network has gone up do you have any simple rules for prompting like if you were teaching somebody hey here's how you should think about prompting what are the things

that you would tell them put humans out of your mind imagine yourself either speaking to an alien or maybe a non-human animal this feel a need to be more literal if you're willing to do it I don't think it's that hard but you to actually want to put yourself in that state of mind it does require some sort of emotional leap that for reasons of inertia not everyone seems willing to make but it's not a cognitively difficult project to prompt well that maybe is emotionally slightly challenging and do you feel it's becoming more important or

less important oh that oscillates very rapidly I would say with deep research it's become much much more important yeah because you you need to get exactly what you want and not too much blah blah blah and it still might give you high quality something or other but if that 10-page report is not what you wanted like why' you do it so so for a lot of basic queries it's much less important you just get a smart answer no matter what but for some of the very best stuff it's exponentially increasing in value to give it

the right instructions the thing that frustrates me is it seems to be a lot better to prompt one thing 10 times than 10 things one time and there's no way to actually put that into the llm if I want you to do this question this question this question this question because if you ask a really long it almost gets tired by the end of it like it needs to take a nap and answers 8 9 10 just won't be as good often follow-ups planned as follow-ups you'll do better with those than too long a prompt

and I'll tend to do that if I'm struggling a bit what exactly goes in this prompt I'll just start with the stupid version and then rely on my follow-ups and I think that's worked pretty well for me again it may vary on which model which system all these things are changing all the time but at least keep that that in mind as an option so when you're mentoring young people what are you telling them to do well when you're mentoring young people I'm not sure it's about advice you should be a certain way and hope

some part of that is vivid to them and rubs off maybe the advice you tell them is useful to communicate your style but it might be worthless as advice but two pieces of general advice with or without AI in the world that I think are pretty good for almost everyone is get more and better mentors and uh work every day at improving the quality of your peer Network and those two things I'd say they're more valuable in the AI Rich world but they were always good advice they're good advice for virtually everyone they don't require

you to know much about the person those are my two Universal pieces of advice that I give pretty much all the time and how much do you feel that career trajectories are changing for example to get really practical here would you invest what four years in a PhD now given what you have I think we really don't know where a lot of these things are headed I think investing in a PhD is much riskier but there's also some chance depending who you are you become that person whose 5,000 decks more impactful because you command an

army and maybe you're not capable of that and if you're not maybe you shouldn't get the PHD but to blanket in a blanket way to tell people don't get a PhD that doesn't sound right to me but I think we'll need fewer phds more people who understand how to manage AIS and a very different mix of skills than how it is now so a lot of professions it will be difficult to predict but just being familiar with the best models I don't I don't see how that can be bad advice and it's why I think

whatever it costs per month to get the best model whenever you're listening I suspect it's a good investment well once again it's sort of like what we were talking about ear on one hand the AIS are getting so much better so learn how to use the AIS on the other hand the AIS are getting so much better so invest in these other things that aren't AI pure networks you got to both so there is more of a burden on you and it's less formulaic so what you used to do oh I'm an undergrad at Yale

I want to go to McKenzie there were all these set paths that were pretty predictable as long as you just didn't totally screw up uh it seems to me those will be disappearing you know we were talking writing for the AIS earlier and another thing that stands out is if you assume that there's a AI Note Taker on the other side and you're preparing a talk you could almost think what is the AI Note Taker going to say and then give it exactly that because if you're giving a talk at some University or whatever there's

probably 50 AI note takers in the audience and people who write about that probably most of them will start with that now so you're not only writing for the AI you're speaking for the AI absolutely MH another interesting thing about AI is even when you don't use it as you mentioned you have this model in your mind of what the AI would say or write back to you so there's like a phantom AI sitting on your shoulder it's enriching it can also be intimidating maybe in some ways it's too homogenizing but it matters and I

would just say give it some thought how is the Phantom AI also shaping your life too homogenizing why do you say that if you just ask AI simple questions like improve my writing or what do you think about this again depend deep seek is somewhat different but you get a somewhat homogenized style and answer it's a bit Bland even when it's very good or useful so if I ask it well tell me about the The Mating practices of this kind of parrot it'll sound like a somewhat denser and smarter Wikipedia I'm okay with that but

it there's something homogenized to it and you have to work to get it not to be that way it's not a complaint but it's something we should notice and make some corrections for well after the Apple earnings came out recently Ben Thompson did two prompts with the o1 and one of them was something like this the first one was fairly generic based on the Apple earnings give me a report and then the second one was based on the Apple earnings give me a report and here is my take on it and this is what I

want you to focus on he said the first answer wasn't very good and he was very happy with the second answer once he had given it Direction and his take and kind of set the direction that AI could fill in the rest in a way that was quite good yeah I also find it valuable to use deep seek periodically just so I don't forget what AI is capable of uh I call it China boss this kind of a joke like you say Let's go ask China boss and it means like okay we're willing to consider

kind of a wacky answer here you know there's not something at stake we're writing a report or column where everything has to be perfectly correct you just want to hear an opinion Let's go ask China boss and that's deeps you should use it like once a day just so you don't think of AI as being Bland in the way they can be I want a lot more crazy in my life so my wish from AI is that they can give me more crazy ideas that's a lot of what hanging out with people gives me is

just I didn't think about that before how much do you use deep seek that's been my biggest lesson so far is I didn't realize how much wackier deep seek was than the other models especially if you ask it but even if you don't ask it it'll be much weirder so uh yeah that's one of my core recommendations and there'll be other models like it and deep seek is itself open sourced there's a version of Deep seek now in perplexity as of about a week ago when we're recording I haven't played around with that much did

they make it less weird I don't know I worry maybe they did um but the the original Deep seek man that's priceless I love it and do you have ways of using perplexity that are as strategic as how you prompt the llms I use perplexity every day for me it's a super practical thing it replaces most of my earlier uses of Google as most of you know it's completely up to date if I'm writing say a Bloomberg column and I need the right citation I go to perplexity and it just works very very well and

you know you check it by clicking on the link it's a problem with hallucinations you get the right citation better than Google would give it to you I don't have ways that I strategically use perplexity though I kind of just use it like Google where I throw things in there whereas I'm very strategic about how I prompt chat GPT I agree with that uh super practical for me perplexity it feels like it's ASM tooted for me in a way in in a very good way like how could it get better not like oh I feel

they're stuck maybe they'll get better they're adding some Voice on features but it's it's incredibly good so walk me through the sort of AI stack and the different reasons that you use different tools I can tell you what I use I'm not saying it's all you should use you should use more and experiment with more to learn things but I use o1 Pro the most deep research which is kind of an offshoot it's a feature of o1 pro that actually is using O3 I know the labeling is comp they say they're going to clean that

up uh I think it's the single most impressive thing humans have built that is out there but I don't use it that much it's not that practical for me it will do more to replace human labor than 01 Pro o on Pro is best for queries deep research is best for 10-page reports I don't want it doing 10-page reports for me for the most part a bit when I teach uh so that's not that much in my routine but to learn what it can do it's something you should spend a lot of time with Claude

is a wonderful mix of thoughtful philosophical dreamy flexible versatile it's the best writer you should use Claude A Lot the current Claude is already amazing the next Claude is just going to be out of this world so yeah you should be doing Claude uh deep seek absolutely now you're sending things to China my view is China knows a lot about me already I'm not at all nervous about that but like don't you know if you work for the military the CIA talk to some people give it some thought like you know it's China right if

I ask uh deep seek for a glorious description of eating a and the Chinese know I want that I'm like yes you know I'd love to spread this to China they don't know what mongos are uh Gemini can do some things other services cannot I don't use it much because I'm not working with very long or thick documents but if you are it is often the best for a lot of legal work and there will be versions of all these things soon where you're not sending your data to another company that's limited the use of

these for legal work in particular you'll be able to do it on your own hard drive in some fashion I'm not sure what the loss of value will be at first but this people are working on this a lot it'll come soon it's one thing that if you follow AI you know is coming some people would say I can't send my data to you know Gemini too Google whatever okay you can but pretty soon you won't have to uh but Gemini is there's some ways in which its multimodal capabilities and its ability to handle big

thick files it's number one the fact that Google owns YouTube makes it really nice because the YouTube integration is really good so if I want to prep for an interview I can put in say 15 videos and I can start asking questions about all the videos because it can take the transcript and Gemini is just so much better reading video files and especially YouTube than than the other llms those are just things I don't do much but you should many people should use Gemini a lot that I don't use it a lot is nothing against

Gemini it's an amazing system grock you can use very quickly to fact check tweets uh meta it's right on your WhatsApp uh their ability to Market and open source is very strong I don't like I'm not an Instagram person uh people should know what Med is up to the Llama models I think they'll be very important globally something to play around with they're not part of my regular routine but you should be aware of them and there's plenty of things I don't know about or I've heard about and couldn't really tell you how to use

them that would be like the opening menu and you you can just keep on asking perplexity like what are some new things that have come out in the last month that I should just play around with for 15 minutes and it will send you to some articles and another thing I do it's $400 a year but worth it for me I subscribe to information which keeps a breast of new AI developments I don't think it's worth it for most people but if you can afford $400 a year I think it's quite good and useful and

it covers some things in crypto other parts of tech as well that's a good way to stay in touch Twitter obviously X and the being in good chat groups that final one's a big one it's a big one and it's hard to get into the best chat groups uh but just keep on working your way up if you can what do you think becomes possible with really large context windows so Gemini now has 2 million tokens I'd be willing to bet money by the end of the year we'll have 10 20 million tokens what becomes

possible true about the world once the context windows can be that big well that people in a decentralized manner there may be people now who can work with these very large context windows it's just not a public service so keep that in mind but in a decentralized manner to deal with things like regulatory codes which are very important to businesses lawyers that will be completely routine and it's coming very soon uh again it's not a thing I need uh historical archives if you're a historian and there's massive documentation like tax records from Renaissance Florence I

don't know how big that file would be You' have to put it in somehow scan it uh but working with things like that over time a new project for Humanity that will create a lot of jobs by the way is converting data into usable form you'll also need a lot more lawyers to haggle over who owns the idual rights that were never specified in original contracts because no one imagined this would be a thing that would be another new set of jobs but a lot of philanthropy in the future should just be paying for data

to be fed into AIS just like what Nat fredman is doing that's right and he's translating you know Scrolls from burnt to readable it's so cool but to put all that into Ai and just everything we know about history what's in the National Archives I'm pretty sure I've been ped it was not fed into the main AI models it's a lot of stuff uh maybe not useful to most people but over time this will be the new human project is to have all our knowledge fed into the ai's musical knowledge so like tab notation for

guitar a lot of that's online but a lot of it isn't it's quite an undertaking to assemble all those scrolled things on paper and turn them into AI usable form but I think a lot of our next Century we should spend doing that with just everything possible where you're not like violating privacy or running into National Security issues and it will just be a much richer world but it will take a lot of human very human effort to get there yeah and last question how Innovative is the llm usage inside of companies like for people

building their private models the very biggest companies how big is the Delta between what we're seeing from the basically free models the most Innovative people won't tell us I strongly suspect the most Innovative people are the AI companies themselves they use AI to improve AI they hold their secrets close to their chest for obvious and justifiable commercial reasons and I think the difference between what they're doing and what others doing is just immense you can't even compare it wow and we don't know what they're doing but it see since it gets better it seems to

be working right yeah that's what we do know well thank you Tyler this was fun thank you David thanks for nerding out with me thanks for nerding out with me