The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients
One Useful Thing Ethan Mollick
The article describes how AI exhibits uneven capability across tasks—termed the 'jagged frontier'—being superhuman at some work while struggling with others in unpredictable ways. A key bottleneck is that large language models lack permanent memory and learning capabilities, limiting their ability to fully automate human tasks despite excelling in areas like math and reading. As AI companies focus on removing these bottlenecks, sudden capability leaps occur, such as improved image generation enabling better presentation creation, though the jagged frontier ensures humans remain essential for edge cases and complex social tasks.
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