LLMs allow swarms of amateurs to find interesting new ideas more quickly.

A friend was sitting next to a college student on his last flight.

The friend was laboring to bang out some work emails.

The college student was writing a 20 page essay using AI tools, at a 100x faster clip.

The student was orchestrating tools like a conductor, totally naturally.

I won't comment on if I think using AI to write a college essay is a good thing, but I will point out that this is the new baseline reality that non-centaurs will have to compete with.

LLMs allow everyone to think through a problem more quickly, to apply the existing best practices without having to read the book on those best practices.

This means that every member of the "swarm" searching for new ideas can do it more quickly.

The quality of the ideas the swarm searches for might not improve, but the swarm's "clock speed" or rate of discovering a viable idea does improve.

We should expect game-changing new ideas to be found more quickly.

Now amateurs have a hurricane force wind at their back.

Most of the things AI-assisted amateurs discover will be junk.

But every so often they'll discover something novel and valuable.

And it only takes a few of those game-changing ideas found by anyone in the swarm to make the whole swarm better off.

You could argue that YouTubers like MKBHD and Casey Neustadt were members of the swarm of YouTube creators who discovered compelling and viable new aesthetics that were previously unknown.

The AI-assisted swarm of amateur humans is more likely to find more "move 37s": discoveries that, once found, change the game forever.