Cal Newport looked in the wrong places. He has no visibility into the usage of ChatGPT to do homework. The collapse of Chegg should tell you, with no other public information, that if 30% of students were already cheating somehow, somewhat weakly, they are now doing super-powerful cheating, and surely more than 30% of students at this stage.
It’s also kind of stupid to hand wave away, programming. Programmers are where all the early adopters of software are. He’s merely conflating an adoption curve with capabilities. Programmers, I’m sure, were also the first to use Google and smartphones. “It doesn’t work for me” is missing the critical word “yet” at the end, and really, is it saying much that forecasts about adoption in the metric, “years until when Cal Newport’s arbitrary criteria of what agent and adoption means meets some threshold only inside Cal Newport’s head” is hard to do?
There are 700m active weeklies for ChatGPT. It has joined the workforce! It just isn’t being paid the salaries.
It’s also kind of stupid to hand wave away, programming. Programmers are where all the early adopters of software are. He’s merely conflating an adoption curve with capabilities. Programmers, I’m sure, were also the first to use Google and smartphones. “It doesn’t work for me” is missing the critical word “yet” at the end, and really, is it saying much that forecasts about adoption in the metric, “years until when Cal Newport’s arbitrary criteria of what agent and adoption means meets some threshold only inside Cal Newport’s head” is hard to do?
There are 700m active weeklies for ChatGPT. It has joined the workforce! It just isn’t being paid the salaries.