While this is great information, I wish more could be said about Centaurs & Cyborgs, the title of the piece.
There's a brief example of a type of task that each approach excels at, but I'd definitely like more. The crux of this piece is that our human judgment of when/how to use AI tools is the most important factor in work quality when we're on the edge of the frontier. But there's no analysis of whether centaurs or cyborgs did better at those outside-the-frontier tasks; it's not clear why those categories are even mentioned since they appear to have no relevance to the preceding research results. And as the article mentions, the frontier is "invisible" (or at least difficult to see); learning to detect tasks that are in, on, or outside of the frontier seems like an immensely important skill. (I also realize it may become completely obsolete in <5 years as the frontier expands exponentially.)
I understand the goal of this research was not to find these "edges" and to determine how we can improve our judgment about when & how to use AI. But after reading these strong results, that's definitely the only thing I'm interested in. I use AI almost not at all in my work, web development. It has been most useful to me in getting me unstuck from a thorny under-documented problem. Over a year after ChatGPT released, I still don't know if modern LLMs can actually be a force multiplier for my work or if I'm correctly judging that they're not appropriate for the majority of my tasks. The latter seems increasingly unlikely as capabilities advance.
There's a brief example of a type of task that each approach excels at, but I'd definitely like more. The crux of this piece is that our human judgment of when/how to use AI tools is the most important factor in work quality when we're on the edge of the frontier. But there's no analysis of whether centaurs or cyborgs did better at those outside-the-frontier tasks; it's not clear why those categories are even mentioned since they appear to have no relevance to the preceding research results. And as the article mentions, the frontier is "invisible" (or at least difficult to see); learning to detect tasks that are in, on, or outside of the frontier seems like an immensely important skill. (I also realize it may become completely obsolete in <5 years as the frontier expands exponentially.)
I understand the goal of this research was not to find these "edges" and to determine how we can improve our judgment about when & how to use AI. But after reading these strong results, that's definitely the only thing I'm interested in. I use AI almost not at all in my work, web development. It has been most useful to me in getting me unstuck from a thorny under-documented problem. Over a year after ChatGPT released, I still don't know if modern LLMs can actually be a force multiplier for my work or if I'm correctly judging that they're not appropriate for the majority of my tasks. The latter seems increasingly unlikely as capabilities advance.