10 Ways to Think Bigger with Opportunity AI

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

When GPT-6 Astra was released, people quickly noticed that it was a little bit different than other previous model releases. In some ways, it was unbelievably more advanced than anything we'd seen before. And yet in others, not only were the improvements not necessarily super noticeable in certain use cases, but sometimes it actually felt like a regression. The interesting point in the history of the development of AI that we've come to, is that broad model capability has reached a level where the value of new models is very frequently not going to be in just doing the same things that you've been doing with AI better, but actually about totally unlocking new capabilities that you've never even considered. That said, unlocking new capabilities that you've never considered by definition means you haven't considered them. And so how do you figure out even what is valuable to use that AI for? That is the goal of today's episode, to give you a set of thought starters about what I call use cases for opportunity AI.

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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we are talking about ways to use AI way better. And the specific context for this exploration is around the latest generation of models, Fable 5.1 and especially GPT-6 Astra. Astra is in some ways a really strange model. Like I said in my show, I called it so significant but also so confounding. And over the last week since it's been available, you can kind of see examples of this if you're paying attention to the advanced AI users. For example, a couple of days ago, Francesco on X wrote, Moved back to GPT-56 Sol and Fable 5.1.

GPT-6 Astra might be the smartest and dumbest model I've ever worked with. I can't deal with its mood swings, especially the absurd shortcuts it takes to arrive at something technically working. Theo reposted that and said, Remember when everyone said I was overreacting to Astra's spikes of stupidity? Meanwhile, OpenCode's Dax wrote, A portion of our team has gone back to Sol. Astra is good and can do some novel things, but it has some downsides. And so far, our effective spend looks doubled, so tough to justify.

Now, all of these folks are dealing primarily with the coding use case. But that's not necessarily where a lot of the initial excitement about Astra has been. Instead, the excitement about Astra has been around some totally new capabilities that get unlocked around things like video editing and 3D design and modeling. Things, in other words, that are not currently part of our day-to-day work. Now, whether that's a good strategy for OpenAI from a business perspective is a whole separate question. But the larger concept that this gets into is one of my most frequently discussed ideas. The difference between Efficiency AI and Opportunity AI.

Efficiency AI is, of course, AI that helps you do your existing work better. Better can mean faster, more efficiently, more cheaply. Opportunity AI, on the other hand, is AI that unlocks entirely new opportunities. Now, efficiency versus opportunity AI, in most times that I've discussed it, has been more about a mindset for how to use and think about AI than some actual specific difference in the models. With Astra, it's one of the first times that I've seen a model that actually dances inside this difference. Now, it's important to note that there is absolutely nothing wrong with efficiency AI. It is going to be the foundation for most of our use of AI. It's where a lot of the initial value for AI is going to come. The reason that I've always discussed opportunity AI is that I think especially on a business strategic level, if companies only think about AI as an efficiency technology, they're going to miss a lot of the opportunities that the companies that ultimately win will not. In other words, all of those efficiency use cases will become table stakes and will reset the expectations of how work gets done, but the companies that lean into finding and discovering new opportunities, even if those opportunities are currently orthogonal to what they do, are likely to be the ones that race out ahead and really transform themselves for this new era. So where I left the Astra conversation a few days ago was that it was all about opportunity AI.

And I guarantee that some of you were sitting there thinking, well, that's well and good, but what the heck does it even mean to use this model to unlock entirely new opportunities?

Maybe some number of us have some things that we'd like to do that we've never been able to before. But I have found that certainly for myself, a lot of what I would categorize as my opportunity AI use cases, I kind of had to stumble and bumble into. In other words, it wasn't like I was sitting around just waiting for the technology unlock to build a new type of website that could automatically turn these episodes into shareable chunks and then push them into a pipeline that could provide social and video, that came after a lot of stumbling around and experimenting and looking at problems that I had and trying to solve them in new ways. I think that if you just ask people in general to go use AI to find new opportunities, you're going to have a pretty massive blank page problem.