Inverted Passion

Know what's true and do what's right

All posts in Mental Models

Why AI agents aren’t adopted widely

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Notes and Summaries

Hint: managing someone is actually hard, and most times not worth it.

Most people don’t use AI agents daily because delegation (to another human) is a learned skill.

Using AI agents is actually a lot like doing natural language programming: specifying requirements, verifying outputs, guiding the flow, giving context.

Also, using an AI agent requires skills similar to managing a junior employee, and most of the world simply isn’t ready or equipped to do so.

I myself built an EA team after a decade of being a founder, so this thought that arbitrary work can be delegated to someone doesn’t come naturally to us. Even if the thought comes, you have to justify the additional cognitive cost of delegation. ...  Read the entire post →

Write the first damn draft yourself

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Personal

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again:

Using LLMs-written content professionally will spoil your career, especially if you’re in early stages. Everyone worth their salt that I know is hugely aversive to reading slop and despite your smart attempts, they can sense signatures of AI writing (even if they can’t articulate what gave it away).

When you delegate writing, you delegate thinking and that delegation takes away from you the very thing you need for your future career advancement: careful thinking. ...  Read the entire post →

AI is challenging what words mean

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Math, Mental Models, Philosophy

“Math” is not what it used to be anymore

I feel AI is breaking our usual, shared understandings of what words mean.

For the first time ever, we have a new kind of cognitive labor that isn’t humans, and that’s breaking norms for what we’ve forever implicitly assumed to be universally true. All our assumptions about how a domain comprising mainly of human activity is due for sudden shattering.

e.g. With Jacob’s conjecture shown to be false using an AI, my twitter timeline is full of both sentiments: “mathematics is done”, and “maths is just getting started”. ...  Read the entire post →

What domains will be the last ones to get automated from AI?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models

The most useful way to think about AI capabilities is to think of target domains in terms of 3 orthogonal axis:

  • Ease of building a verifier (coding is easy, lab equipment manipulation is hard)
  • Causal complexity in terms of number of confounds (math problems is low as answers don’t depend on external factors, startup success is high complexity as it depends on many random factors)
  • Economic attractiveness (high for coding, low for many domains)

What we’ve seen the first to be automated are domains where building verifiers is easy, causal complexity is less and economic attractiveness is high.

No wonder coding is the first one to see big jump.

But inflated valuations of AI companies need to be justified, so I fully expect that these companies will keep attacking the next best domain they can until they exhaust the economic attractiveness constraint. ...  Read the entire post →

How to coach someone

How to coach someone

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Psychology

This essay is part of the series in which I talk about my learnings and insights building a habit coaching app (Nintee) in 2024. It didn’t ultimately work out because an app has marginal influence in a human’s life (v/s that of friends, family, culture and immediate environment). Most apps that work in the category operate like gyms (charge upfront when the motivation is high, and be okay with high churn). I had raised VC funding for it and later it became clear to me that this wouldn’t be a VC scale business, so I shut it down and returned the remaining funding. Hope the insights learned along the way would turn out to be valuable to others. ...  Read the entire post →

How does behavior change happen

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Psychology

This essay is part of the series in which I talk about my learnings and insights building a habit coaching app (Nintee) in 2024. It didn’t ultimately work out because an app has marginal influence in a human’s life (v/s that of friends, family, culture and immediate environment). Most apps that work in the category operate like gyms (charge upfront when the motivation is high, and be okay with high churn). I had raised VC funding for it and later it became clear to me that this wouldn’t be a VC scale business, so I shut it down and returned the remaining funding. Hope the insights learned along the way would turn out to be valuable to others. ...  Read the entire post →

The two views of rationality

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Psychology

This essay is part of the series in which I talk about my learnings and insights building a habit coaching app (Nintee) in 2024. It didn’t ultimately work out because an app has marginal influence in a human’s life (v/s that of friends, family, culture and immediate environment). Most apps that work in the category operate like gyms (charge upfront when the motivation is high, and be okay with high churn). I had raised VC funding for it and later it became clear to me that this wouldn’t be a VC scale business, so I shut it down and returned the remaining funding. Hope the insights learned along the way would turn out to be valuable to others. ...  Read the entire post →

Making a product that Marl loves

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Psychology

This essay is part of the series in which I talk about my learnings and insights building a habit coaching app (Nintee) in 2024. It didn’t ultimately work out because an app has marginal influence in a human’s life (v/s that of friends, family, culture and immediate environment). Most apps that work in the category operate like gyms (charge upfront when the motivation is high, and be okay with high churn). I had raised VC funding for it and later it became clear to me that this wouldn’t be a VC scale business, so I shut it down and returned the remaining funding. Hope the insights learned along the way would turn out to be valuable to others. ...  Read the entire post →

Science of habit building

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Psychology

This essay is part of the series in which I talk about my learnings and insights building a habit coaching app (Nintee) in 2024. It didn’t ultimately work out because an app has marginal influence in a human’s life (v/s that of friends, family, culture and immediate environment). Most apps that work in the category operate like gyms (charge upfront when the motivation is high, and be okay with high churn). I had raised VC funding for it and later it became clear to me that this wouldn’t be a VC scale business, so I shut it down and returned the remaining funding. Hope the insights learned along the way would turn out to be valuable to others. ...  Read the entire post →

Usefulness grounds truth

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Philosophy

Are LLMs intelligent?

Debates on this question often, but not always, devolve into debates on what LLMs can or cannot do. To a limited extent, the original question is useful because it creates an opening for people to go into specifics. But, beyond that initial use, the question quickly empties itself because (obviously) the answer to the question if X is intelligence depends on how you define intelligence (and how you define X).

Even though it is clear that words are inherently empty, internet is full of such debates. People focus on syntax, when semantics is what runs the world. ...  Read the entire post →