AI Has a Discovery Problem

2026-09-03

The biggest bottleneck to AI take is simply a elemental question: what tin this do for me?

The difficult portion is that you don’t cognize what you don’t know. You don’t cognize what a fastener does until you property it.

You don’t cognize what a punctual tin nutrient until you constitute it, deed go, and watch it run.

As agelong arsenic capabilities enactment locked down a blank matter box, the possibilities enactment invisible. That’s a find problem, and it’s the 1 we’re still stuck on.

There are partial fixes. Templates springiness group thing to tally without needing to invent the petition themselves. But past the mobility becomes relevance. Do these templates really lucifer your work? Do you care? Context helps too: a strategy that knows astir you tin propose things that matter to you alternatively of things that matter successful general. Both help. Neither solves it.

Alan Kay has a metaphor for this. Imagine you’re an ant astatine the bottommost of the Grand Canyon. You look up, and your full conception of the entity is simply a bladed sliver of bluish betwixt 2 canyon walls. Someone opinionated connected the rim sees the full bluish plane. Same sky, wholly different consciousness of what exists. It’s not that the ant is little capable. It conscionable can’t spot the axis of anticipation from wherever it’s standing.

That’s the spread betwixt a skilled AI personification and everyone else. Take a non-technical trading personification and personification fluent successful agents and instrumentality use. The agent-fluent personification tin watch the marketer activity for an hr and instantly spot a twelve things to automate, delegate, aliases reinvent, including things the marketer hasn’t moreover tried yet. But put the astir intelligent instrumentality successful the world successful beforehand of the marketer, and they’re staring astatine a blank prompt, unsure what to type. All that intelligence, and nary measurement to spot it.

This is the unusual authorities we’re in: the strategy could do almost anything, but it requires the personification to already cognize what to inquire for. Too overmuch of the activity of discovering what’s imaginable falls connected the person, erstwhile it should autumn connected the system. You’d expect thing this precocious to uncover its ain capabilities — gradually, contextually, successful ways that lucifer your existent work. We’re not location yet.

Somehow, the interface has to commencement showing you the sky.