'The most rapid change in human communication ever'
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Hey Reader, There's always a TON going on in the AI economy – today's newsletter is about the two most important ones. 🙂 But before we dive in, could you take 2 minutes to help me make Innovating with AI even better? Click here to take an anonymous 2-minute survey to help make IWAI the best it can be. And with that, here's the latest... ••• #1 – 'The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever'Ethan Mollick, who's one of my favorite "AI poster" types on social media (and also a Wharton professor and best-selling author), shared a study that, while not a huge surprise to those of us who are paying attention, indicates a huge shift in how humans communicate with each other. The takeaway – AI is being used to write or assist with:
And that's probably an understatement. Here's the full study explaining how the researchers analyzed these common forms of writing for AI influence. #2 – OpenAI's Deep Research is changing the 'cost of intelligence'A ton of new AI models have been released in the past few months – Grok 3, Claude 3.7 and GPT-4.5 to name just a few. They are all meaningfully better than their predecessors, but there's only one release that I think changes the game: Deep Research from OpenAI. Deep Research is not really a model in and of itself, but is instead a "research agent" that expands the capabilities of existing models. In other words, it takes your requests (usually to create a detailed document with lots of citations), asks you some clarifying questions, then searches the web and reads in-depth articles and synthesizes it all for you into a custom document. The result is really remarkable. It cites its sources (and thus rarely hallucinates) and can give you a 10-30-page detailed document at the level of at least a very smart intern, and in some cases approaching the work of PhD-level researchers. And it takes minutes, not months. One writer said, "Deep Research is the first AI product I've found that's useful for my work." For me, it's far from the first, but it is a new release that is really changing the way I develop content for my students. Many students really want the 30-page deep dive into their favorite topics, and Deep Research allows me to feed in my frameworks and big ideas and get a very detailed set of additional resources and recommendations that I can share with my audience. I also enjoyed this Bloomberg article about how Deep Research is changing the "cost of intelligence" – that is, the value of hiring a bunch of PhDs to research things for you. For most of history, hiring a dozen PhDs meant a massive budget and months of lead time. Today, a few keystrokes in a chatbot summon that brainpower in seconds.
As intelligence becomes cheaper and faster, the basic assumption underpinning our institutions — that human insight is scarce and expensive — no longer holds. When you can effectively consult a dozen experts anytime you like, it changes how companies organize, how we innovate and how each of us approaches learning and decision-making. The question facing individuals and organizations alike is: What will you do when intelligence itself is suddenly ubiquitous and practically free?
Grab the gift link to the Bloomberg article here (only good for a week – damn you, paywalls!) ••• That's all for today! As always, if you have any questions or topic ideas, just reply. Have a great day, – Rob Howard |
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