{"id":1356,"date":"2023-06-16T22:32:22","date_gmt":"2023-06-16T22:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/uncategorized\/ai-will-level-the-playing-field-by-making-the-conventional-wisdom-available-to-everybody-2\/"},"modified":"2025-08-22T18:06:40","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T18:06:40","slug":"ai-will-level-the-playing-field-by-making-the-conventional-wisdom-available-to-everybody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/uncategorized\/ai-will-level-the-playing-field-by-making-the-conventional-wisdom-available-to-everybody\/","title":{"rendered":"#AI will level the playing field by making the conventional wisdom available to everybody.<\/a>"},"content":{"rendered":"

#AI will level the playing field by making the conventional wisdom available to everybody. <\/p>\n

I’ve been mostly ignoring this round of ChatGPT-led AI hype, in part because the few times I’ve asked a question, I didn’t get back anything useful or insightful. <\/p>\n

But I’ve had a couple conversations recently that helped me understand how these AI bots will change things. In particular, the reason I’m not helped by ChatGPT or Bard is that I have a ton of advantages that most people don’t have.
\n— I am a native English speaker that has invested thousands of hours in my writing skills.
\n— I was privileged to have an elite college education, which trained me to reason from first principles and quickly draw conclusions from available data.
\n— Having that education helped me get several jobs and build a network of talented people whom I have consulted to learn from their expertise. <\/p>\n

In some sense, the large language models (LLMs) are encoding “common” knowledge and making it available to all. That doesn’t benefit me, because I’ve already absorbed that knowledge and\/or have easy access to it through my network. But it benefits the vast majority of people who don’t have my advantages. <\/p>\n

These are the examples that changed my mind:
\n— A non-native English speaker who took on an executive role where she had to quickly up-level her written communication skills. ChatGPT instantly helped get her to a reasonable baseline. As an aside, I recently read that there are 2.8 billion English speakers in the world, of whom only 400 million are native speakers. The vast majority of English speakers speak it as a second language, so perhaps these models will help them be treated more equitably. <\/p>\n

— A solopreneur who was trying to build a financial model to calculate his ROI on customer acquisition. ChatGPT led him through the necessary calculations and created a spreadsheet model for him. Not useful to me, because I spent 4 years building business models at Google, but again, most people don’t have my experience and connections.<\/p>\n

— An executive who wanted to quickly prototype a new product marketing campaign. Rather than wait weeks for the marketing team to fit it into their busy schedule, she had ChatGPT generate the press release, the copy for ads, a few potential brochures, etc., and had something to show her SVP in a couple hours. <\/p>\n

None of these examples is about delivering new knowledge or insight. But that’s what I didn’t understand – LLMs aren’t designed to be innovative! They are creating an easy way to access and build on what “everybody” knows aka the conventional wisdom. <\/p>\n

This is the world-changing potential I now see: everybody can have access to the types of information and knowledge that I take for granted. Having the privileges I got for being born where I was will no longer be the advantage it once was. I’ll have to figure out a different way to stand out from the crowd \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

What will be your #job if your specialized knowledge becomes commonplace?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

#AI will level the playing field by making the conventional wisdom available to everybody. I’ve been mostly ignoring this round of ChatGPT-led AI hype, in part because the few times I’ve asked a question, I didn’t get back anything useful or insightful. But I’ve had a couple conversations recently that helped me understand how these…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1356"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4506,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356\/revisions\/4506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}