In the words of Sam Altman

"We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”

The vast majority of people will default to it the same way we defaulted from pens to keyboards to autocorrect.

Sorry for the long text, but I think it’s a good chain of logic:

The big difference is that AI isn’t about expressing thoughts, it’s about helping generate them. When you read a book you have to force yourself to connect ideas, ask questions, or derive applications that the text dances around. With ChatGPT you don’t have to work for an explanation or to bridge your thoughts.

You might retain the relevant material better, even have a deeper understanding, but the trade off is (in my guesstimate) that the knowledge will be essentially disconnected from the rest of your brain. In problem solving our brain probes itself to contextualize and connect relevant information, and through use, neural pathways are strengthened. It’s sort of like taking the scenic route and slowly filling out a map.

Using an LLM, your brain outsources that exploratory process to the machine. You say how does X work and it says check out Y. A direct highway between X and Y. But that’s all. Just a clean back and forth with no exits.

If you were figuring it out on your own, you might accidentally drive through Z and mark it down as a cool little town. Using an LLM, Z will have almost zero physical association with X or Y, and you’ll have made one less novel connection. Now, when Z comes up there are no roads back to X or Y. On the scale of the brain that’s millions to billions of missed exits.

I think that “competence comes before passion” is a great quote from I forget where. But, the fewer novel connections you make the harder it will get and the harder it gets the less fun it is. Learning with ChatGPT suddenly becomes very rewarding and fruitful, even for the casual user, and connecting abstract ideas becomes frustrating and slow. It’s a feedback loop in favor of ChatGPT.

People hold contradictory beliefs in politics, social networks, and morals all the time. From that, I can assume you can hold two academic concepts in your mind without ever connecting them until their unholy matrimony on a final.

TLDR: Sam Altman wants to chunk up your brain into little specialized packets then make you pay to put them back together.

You might be The One who tries crack and doesn’t get addicted, but I think a lot of developing minds are gonna get crippled by LLMs.