For now

Whenever I share a new artificial intelligence tool with my peers, I urge them to distinguish between the technology’s current performance and its potential.

It’s easy to hold a magnifying glass up to an odd response from a large language model or goofy-looking image from a text-to-image model and prematurely judge what it’s truly capable of.

But you look back at many of the pitfalls of any technology from ten years ago, many of them have likely been addressed today. Likewise, many of the pitfalls that we might see in tech today are likely to be addressed in the future — perhaps far sooner than 10 years.

The idea that things will improve over time is a reasonable assumption to make. Historically this has held true and is a form of informed optimism.

This also applies to humans.

If you’re not good at something, it’s for now.

You’re not relegated to what you can do today.

You will not be the same person in five years and that’s often a promising thing.

Do not be disheartened by gaps in knowledge or capability, we all have them.

Instead, look forward to the progress that you are capable of making to address them.