I'm beginning to see where the comparative advantage is between myself and current-generation #AI tools.

For tasks that I perform on a daily basis, I have developed enough techniques to optimise my workflow that AI tools don't add much for me. Most obviously with regards to research mathematics, but also for instance in composing emails; I installed a plugin that lets GPT4 write email responses for me at the click of a button, but I almost never use it, because I already can write suitable email responses rapidly through decades of practice.

For tasks that I have some expertise in, but little practice, AI tools are helpful: often I can use them profitably to create a first draft of the output, which I can then verify and polish, or at least use as inspiration. (In some cases the inspiration is due to deficiencies in the AI product, in the spirit of Cunningham's law, but it can still be a more productive process than if I tried to work things out on my own). Examples in this category include data processing, translating to a foreign language, or writing text in a format that I rarely use (e.g., a public speech, a rules document, etc.)

For tasks that I have little expertise in, and do not require extremely high quality and reliable output, one can simply ask the AI tool and follow its advice more or less blindly. Here the AI functions as a slightly more convenient version of a traditional search engine.

Finally, for tasks that I do not have expertise in, but for which quality and reliability are needed, neither the AI or myself can resolve the task, and I have to consult a human expert. An example would be a repair of a complicated, expensive, and delicate piece of equipment.

As an example of a task of the third category, here is what I got when I asked GPT to summarize my previous post as a flowchart. (Presumably future multimodal versions of GPT would be able to directly supply the flowchart, rather than give a textual description.)
An example of a task in the second category: after realizing that I could ask GPT to output the flowchart in LaTeX, I obtained the first image below, which was clearly imperfect, but as I was familiar with LaTeX it was not difficult to manually correct it to the second image.
@tao emacs lisp and tricky LaTeX generation- chat GPT4 top skills which make a set of experts a lot more productive.
@jayalane @tao What do you mean? That you use GPT4 to generate emacs lisp or LaTeX code
@fl @jayalane I have primarily been using GPT to generate sample Python code for me to get me started with something that already compiles and achieves some "toy" version of the task I had in mind, and then adapt that code for my own purposes. The same workflow has also worked well for generating toy versions of LaTeX diagrams in, say, TikZ, in particular greatly lowering the friction costs of having to look up some reasonably similar code on the internet and try to debug it into a working state.
@tao @jayalane Thank you very much for these precisions.

@tao One more case I think LLMs are helpful: taking a rough draft or outline of something I write, and polishing it up. I still have to check it, but it's sometimes easier than doing it myself.

I suspect this will be very helpful for people who are not so good at writing fluently (much like ML art is useful for non-artists)

(This is also maybe helpful for programming languages that someone is learning. Maybe also foreign languages, but that seems iffier without someone fluent to check it.)

@tao gpt-4 can output mermaid.live flowcharts with very good quality