Drinking Beer with Grok
Our friend David Perell is either having an existential crisis or having an AI writing aide claim that to be the case so we will pay more attention to his (its?) X nee Twitter post. But who can tell the difference these days? Or maybe both are true. Also 400k views is better than anything I’ve published recently…alas.
His point is that large language models (LLMs) have fundamentally changed what it means to be a writer because most LLMs can write better and faster on most topics than most humans. And maybe that’s true. I didn’t know because despite our CEO Brent’s enthusiasm (he wrote about it in his annual letter), I have been a slower adopter of AI than maybe I should be (though I am pumped to have an AI expert now on our team…shoutout Bryce).
That said, I was drinking a beer the other night and saw an Elon Musk X nee Twitter post boasting about Grok and decided to give it a whirl. So I asked it (her? him? them?...pronouns are hard) to write an Unqualified Opinion like me. Here’s the result.
It’s not great! And do I really sound like that? I mean, I’ll cop to the overuse of italics, but “like trying to fix a leaky roof with a single shingle”? That’s a tortured analogy. I don’t do those, right? Right?!
While I briefly relished in how crappy I thought Grok’s Unqualified Opinion delivered “with a dash of Hanson-esque flair” was, I sobered up when I realized that it had produced it in less than five seconds. Because this Unqualified Opinion – like at least a few of the others – has taken considerably more time to write than that. So from a return on effort standpoint, well, I’m losing.
That said, David (or his AI) said that personal writing will still have a future as will unique perspectives, and since Grok (or any of the AIs) can’t help coach a u13 girls soccer team for the time being, I think I’m safe there. For the time being. But how big is the addressable market for that?
David wrote that “If you have an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world, you don’t have much to worry about.” And people around the Permanent Equity office know that I love the word idiosyncratic. But idiosyncratic is just a fancy way of saying weird and weird is definitionally not mainstream and therefore not scalable. In other words, to use a tortured analogy from punk rock, while AI might displace a more mainstream act like Blink-182, it won’t displace a highly idiosyncratic one such as Fugazi, but while Fugazi were great, they were never that popular.
So would Unqualified Opinions garner more pageviews and subscribers if I turned this whatever it is over to AI and instead spent more time on the beach (which was awesome, thank you for asking). I suspect it would. Yet I won’t do that!
That said, I don’t know that I have enough material to get us from now to the summer, but if AI keeps improving maybe it (her? him? them?...pronouns are hard) will be what gets us to Memorial Day. You may even like that better.
– Tim
