Dear Reader,
There has been a trend in this year’s commencement speeches: speakers receiving a wave of boos while mentioning AI.
This happened recently to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, real estate development executive Gloria Caulfield, and record executive Scott Borschetta. They went as far as to say that AI was “the next industrial revolution.” If you look at people of the Silicon Valleys of the world, they share a similar perspective.
A commencement speaker who drew cheers instead of boos, however, was Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. He told students that they had AI, but he clarified that he meant Actual Intelligence.
When you come to think of it, this depicts, pretty accurately, the two broad groups most people these days fall in. Holistically, there are either power users of AI (who are using agents, building things, founding startups), or there are people who barely go beyond “write an email” or “make this sound better.”
I’m here to argue that it is beneficial to lean towards the former than the latter. While pursuing Wozniak’s version of AI is beneficial to not lose the ability to learn skills and think critically, I believe there is a better way of doing this that utilizes this power tool we’ve now got: large language models.
It doesn’t take a historian to find out that the most brilliant thinkers of our kind had expert mentors to guide them:
- In a famous chain of genius, Socrates taught Plato not what to think but how to think. Plato then mentored Aristotle at the Academy in Athens for nearly twenty years before Aristotle went on to teach Alexander the Great, who then conquered the known world.
- Legendary investor Warren Buffett studied under Benjamin Graham at Columbia Business School. Graham taught Buffett the rigorous analytical principles of value investing that built his empire.
- Henry Ford was an engineer at Thomas Edison’s company. After Ford shared his vision for a horseless carriage, Edison enthusiastically validated his idea, giving Ford the confidence he needed to pioneer the automotive assembly line.
- During the early days of Facebook, Apple founder Steve Jobs mentored a young Mark Zuckerberg. They walked together through Palo Alto discussing company culture, vision, and how to manage a rapidly growing tech empire.
- Legendary poet and author Maya Angelou served as a mentor, mother figure, and spiritual guide to Oprah Winfrey for decades. Angelou offered crucial wisdom that guided Winfrey through her soaring media career.
Countless other examples prove that having a mentor exponentially increases the chances of things working out. This is because a mentor can help concentrate the energy of their mentee on the right thing—the thing with maximum returns.
What we must recognize is that it is practically impossible for everybody to get access to such remarkable mentors who have that amount of knowledge.
You already know where this is going: it is now possible to have such a mentor—AI.
These large language models are trained on a vast catalogue of information and wisdom accumulated throughout human history. You can now tap into that expertise and to receive excellent guidance in whatever field you choose to focus on.
Even if you want to learn something, you can use a model to build you a comprehensive study plan or ask it to give you hints on how to solve a problem rather than directly giving you the answer. This has been very handy for me in learning problem-solving.
I personally have used AI to streamline a lot of the things I do. It has been saving me over a dozen hours every single week, whether it be for my personal studying, or for work, for literature review for my research, or in writing drafts, or building strategies. The sky is the limit.
You, most certainly, shouldn’t take everything you get from an AI as facts. Make sure to verify and check things before you proceed to implement or use a model’s response.
While I do believe that, in multiple aspects, artificial intelligence has been overhyped, I also believe this is changing the world in a lot of subtle ways.
I’m hoping that you’ll take the time to think about how you can better utilize this tool for yourself. If you’d like me to dive deeper into my processes, let me know.
I will see you next week.
Warmly,
Suraj
If you'd like to hear more from me, here's my YouTube channel where I share lessons, experiments, tools, and resources to make life just a little better.
