AI 中的 capability overhang

“The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson

「未来已经到来——它只是分布不均」 - William Gibson

If you’re in tech, you have a keen sense of what’s happening in the world of AI agents right now. We’re seeing example after example of coding agents that can handle longer running tasks and take on much larger development projects, with teams increasingly calling out that their products are now written entirely with agents. The models have gotten insanely good at coding, and the agentic systems used for coding have quickly accelerated ahead to transform this particular domain of work.

如果你在科技领域，你对当下 AI agents 世界发生的事情有敏锐的感觉。我们看到一个又一个编码 agents 的例子，它们能够处理更长的运行任务并承担更大的开发项目，团队越来越多地表示他们的产品现在完全由 agents 编写。模型在编码方面变得异常出色，用于编码的 agentic 系统迅速加速，转变了这个特定的工作领域。

Yet, when you talk to knowledge workers outside of the tech industry (even even some within), it’s pretty clear how early we still are; AI is often an incredibly helpful assistant that can answer quick questions and help look up information, though the production of large work output and automation is in its infancy. Even with today’s technology, there’s still so much more that’s possible, and as Ethan Mollick (@emollick) pointed out, “we really could stop AI development right now and it would still transform a substantial portion of white collar work … even given current models' limitations.”

然而，当你与科技行业以外的知识工作者交谈（甚至一些业内人士），很明显我们还处于非常早期的阶段；AI 通常是一个令人难以置信的有帮助的助手，可以回答快速问题并帮助查找信息，尽管大规模工作输出和自动化的生产仍处于婴儿期。即使以当今的技术，也有更多可能的东西，正如 Ethan Mollick (@emollick) 指出的，“我们真的可以现在就停止 AI 开发，它仍然会转变大量白领工作……即使考虑到当前模型的局限性。”

And even these limitations are quickly disappearing. Increasingly, frontier AI models are being trained on almost every area of knowledge work, and they will only get more and more capable over time. They know esoteric legal topics, know deep areas in healthcare and life sciences, are increasingly getting good at creative fields like marketing and writing, and for anything they don’t know off the bat they can instantly pull up tools and talk to data sources for new...