Nathaniel Whittemore

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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief.

Today we are talking about something called the AI capabilities overhang.

Now, this is something I think about a lot, but the specific context for it was an article that came out as part of the broader set of assets around OpenAI's announcement that ads are coming to ChatGPT, with them basically saying that part of the issue is access and ads are going to help them with that access issue.

Now, in that blog post called AI for Self-Empowerment, OpenAI defines the capability overhang as the gap between what AI systems can do now and the value most people, businesses, and countries are actually capturing from them at scale.

In other words, the delta between AI's current capabilities and society's current usage of them.

And what's important about this concept is this is not about some future state.

This is not, in other words, a debate about AGI or superintelligence or anything like that.

It is instead a discussion of the current state of play and how far behind different types of people and groups are in taking advantage of it.

So what I want to do today is talk about the AI capabilities overhang across six different groups.

Individuals, communities, municipalities, educators, businesses, and sovereigns.

For each of those groups, I want to talk a little bit about what the capabilities overhang looks like at the moment, what some of the answers to that overhang might be, and how we, and this is the royal we, I could mean society, I could mean the listeners of this podcast, but how we could support tackling that capabilities overhang and improving the way that people are taking advantage of what's possible right now.

So let's talk first about individuals.

Now, this is admittedly a wildly all-encompassing category with a huge range of different levels of this particular overhang.

While there are very, very few people who could claim that they don't experience that overhang at all, in fact, even as someone who spends basically all of my time on this, I think that there are entire categories of what's possible that I don't take nearly full enough advantage of.

Most people fall somewhere on the spectrum from barely taking advantage to only just starting to take advantage.

In fact, I think part of the reason that you're seeing so much excitement around clawed code and see it moving into the mainstream in the Wall Street Journal and things like that is that for people who are picking it up, it is radically and directly undercutting that capabilities overhang by massively accelerating what people can do.

But the implications of the capabilities overhang is dramatic.