AI is most valuable when it expands what people can attempt

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 0:22

   in this article, but I guess high level. What was your view? You talked about ambition in four different types. So speed, altitude, depth, and range. Yeah, curious your holistic view of ambition and how you tie it into your work in this article. Yeah, I mean, first of all, thanks for having me. I've been thinking about this ambition thing for like a little bit because I think an experience a lot of people are having with AI is that we frequently talk about sort of the difference between automation and augmentation, right? This idea that obviously AI can maybe reduce some of the toil and take away work that you don't want to do and like automate the things that you would have done anyway but I think to many people certainly me the part that is more exciting are the things that I couldn't do myself right right and not just because I didn't have the

2. 1:09

   time but maybe straight up because I like knowledge experience creativity what have you right those things are more exciting and I think especially as you're an ex this happens all the time to me that someone comes to me it's like I did a thing with Claude and it's usually more impressive to me that the person like the pilot the person like actually drove Claude that they came up with the idea in the first place it's less usually less exciting to me that Claude can even do those things in the first place right there's there's this I think he's actually a product manager his name is Pavel who may or may not have found a planet last week by yes yeah right but saw that yeah and I think if you zoom out a little bit like if I told you oh Claude can now go over large amounts of data and find things for you it's not

3. 1:53

   that exciting to you on the surface of it but the ambition of like actually doing that at that level is like pretty exciting to me and that's what i thought about for a long time yeah yeah definitely so i think that um from your end because a lot of this is these like users are bringing these truly novel um sort of problems or creative tasks or whatever um that they bring into claude how do you guys from like internally think about like what are the trends of like things that people are vibe coding what is the logical next step to like augment the product um yeah what are just like novel ways that you can sort of follow the thread of what the users are doing amplified the like actual curiosity and the very high level of abstraction like goal setting yeah it's like super hard and yeah right like to say the thing that i often think about it it will be pretty easy for

4. 2:46

   me to take every single amazing use case and just make a button for it right like you open up clock You're talking like, do you want to find a planet today button? The exact planet button. Find planet. I think that would be pretty easy to build, but because the option space is so wide, I do think as an industry, we do have a decent amount of problems with like, we give people this like genie in a bottle.

5. 3:07

   And we're like, oh, if you just know the right spells and if you know the right things to ask, this thing is going to do amazing things for you. And there is, I think, a pretty large subset of the population overall that is like, oh, I guess I'm going to ask it, what's the capital of France? Yeah. like it says Paris you know okay exactly yeah and I I think when you do talk to people you can sort of see the spark and you see the excitement in their eyes whenever they do something that they literally didn't consider possible before and that's why I went with this pause right like I tried to deconstruct that a little bit of like okay what do people actually like if you take how do we actually turn this into actionable advice rather than just how people be more ambitious because that's not super useful yeah as information and you

6. 3:49

   You mentioned the four dimensions. I think speed is super well-documented. You don't really have to discuss it. But altitude, depth, range are the three that I find very exciting. Yeah, yeah. So before we get to that,