Knowledge Work

“Coding hit, but that's kind of a head fake, right? Like coding, coding is perfectly documented, right? So it has like perfect data. It's verifiable and it's simulatable, right? And so like most tasks in business do not share those three attributes. And so, you…”

“The second era of these products is clearly working with agents and, you know, primarily has been coding agents. We'd like to bring it to more, more domains, certainly like knowledge work.”

“Coding is so output oriented that when you ask it to do a coding task, you can verify whether it did the task correctly or well via tests. You can try it out and see if it works. Like there is a way to validate it based on the output. But knowledge work is dif…”

“A lot of work that we have done and have to continue to do is continue to adapt the product to knowledge work, which means way more focus on Making ChatGPT your collaborator, allowing you to see all the in-progress work, see its citations and inputs, help you …”

“I've always felt that there's, in terms of just pure knowledge work, there's, there is nothing that humans do that AIs can't do, you know, partly because Humans are, humans, you know, our brains are just computers, you know, like the AIs are too, right?”

“I'm no longer thinking that we need two or three orders of magnitude on the largest models to be able to You know, solve knowledge work the accounting, the legal, the code that we write.”

“Basically the agents create V-one of the work. Humans are verifying and iterating. Humans never create V-one.”

“All knowledge work is converging on training agents because it is structurally more efficient to do something once.”

“I think it is towards this vision or this goal of like a virtual collaborator. And so think of this as, you know, something that has context within your organization that can use all of the tools That are specific to you, whether they be homegrown tools or too…”

“And I think that that's what's gonna end up happening in knowledge work, where, you know, if an attorney is, is slightly better or slightly faster, they're gonna get all the work.”

“To me, it's still not significantly different than manufacturing automation in the 2000 and what that did to blue collar work in the U S and also outsourcing within China. And this is a whole other discussion right now. We only got two minutes left, but to me,…”

“I think now it's going to permeate every part of society. Like, every thing that we would call knowledge work could be token maxed.”

“I think for a lot of knowledge work tasks, probably sometime we'll get to good enough. And once you get to good enough, then you can optimize other things. Like they run locally, they're cheaper, they're faster.”

“My take is that we already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work. And I don't exclude my job from it, but if you really look about at what do we actually need to live and like to be content, it is a lot less than we've built this hierarchy. A…”

“The models we have today are actually quite capable. They're quite capable of running knowledge work of both of an extremely long time horizon, the kind of things that you give to someone and expect like a week later.”

“I feel like coding will eat all knowledge work.”

“And that we're moving out of testing on benchmarks and sort of these almost cerebral demonstrations of capability to it actually being the case that for us to develop it further, we need to see it in the real world and get feedback from how people are using it…”

“We're going to see this real takeoff Of this technology and knowledge work over the next year.”

“I do think like a lot of the last year's, 20, 25 story was the rise of coding agents. And I think 26 stories, definitely knowledge work.”

“It may be the case that knowledge work in general is also a transitory phenomenon that only existed between the foundation of the computer or computing tools and the existence of AI, generally speaking.”

“In any kind of knowledge work, any multi-step process, like anything that can call from different systems, write to those systems, come up with some analysis and insight, so much of that work is going to be done.”

“Yeah, that I'm telling you, I, that was my, in December, that was my prediction for 20, 26 on this show that what happened in software development is going to happen in knowledge worth this year. End of this year. It's happening.”

“Whether it happens widely in knowledge work, By 20, 26, I think is, you know, I'll take a bet with you on that. Certainly for coding. I think in a lot of places we're already there, right? I mean, you have like the Ralph Wiggum stuff that, that popped up over,…”

“The unit of work becomes knowledge work instead of deal work. The unit of work is different. It's not capital deployment. It's not bucket filling. It's something else moving you towards your objective, intelligent understanding of additionality in your portfol…”

“I'm hearing increasingly about people doing knowledge work and writing essays in cursor instead of just writing code.”

“And the way that nine to five knowledge work is structured is like one of the biggest freaking wastes in the world, in my opinion.”

“And I strongly believe that in the future, most of the work with any kind of systems will look like this. Of course it wouldn't be a cursor. It would be like something nicer in terms of interface and everything. But the process of building up your context, bri…”

“I don't think anyone has any doubts anymore that we're now on track to reach human level capabilities and intelligence. And in that world, 29 trillion dollars of knowledge work rewrites itself, right?”

“I think we have a hard time holding the point of view that models will reach the same level of intelligence and capabilities that the world's most capable people in every field have. And when you take a step back, and don't take the next 12 month view, but jus…”

“And so we're starting to open up much more broader outside of software development and come back to what we've always said, like we want to be able to power all of knowledge work in the world.”

“And one of the things I've realized working around engineers now is engineers are living in the future. Like they are seeing the greatest leverage of AI relative to all areas of knowledge work.”

“The difference is that the roads, even though things are complex and dynamic and all that kind of stuff on the road, the roads are the same. Like that's the same roads. You're getting from point A to point B and the way that that works, like you, there's a zil…”

“This is like, if you look at those four dimensional, if you look at that four dimensional matrix, that's 30 trillion dollars of knowledge work that is going to be automated.”

“And I think of knowledge work as being on a similar sort of exponential as code has been on, but just time shifted, right?”

“For the first time ever with AI, we can bring automation to effectively all of that work. And that automation can kind of be tuned based on just how much compute we throw at the problem.”

“I think we're going to have, like, Maybe a shift away from some very glamorous jobs, which people will be get depressed by, like similarly to how being like an artist was like so fucking cool, but clearly you can't make any money as an artist. I think we're go…”

“While we see that there is a lot of opportunity to automate some types of knowledge related work, there's other places where human friction It's more of a feature than it is a bug.”

“What percentage of knowledge work as we know today will exist in 10 years? Like if you define work, knowledge work as work you do behind a computer, I think it's probably like one percent.”

“And so I think we're going to see an immense amount of eval creation for, like, agents and that is the largest barrier to Automating most knowledge work in the economy.”

“It Would not surprise me if that becomes the most common knowledge work job in the world.”

“This idea of our, we're finally decoupling work from the physical, our physical location. It's a big deal. It's probably one of the biggest changes to knowledge work in our lifetimes, or even since Drucker coined that term knowledge work in 1959.”

“Coding is still working better than most other use cases. And it's because you basically have a workflow where you're in a text interface that is just linear, where most of the sort of knowledge of that, of the field is all public and open source for the most …”

“So this idea that, that you're going to get a, you're going to get a GitHub co-pilot effect for all forms of knowledge work, at least in the near term, it's way too early to be kind of jumping to that.”

“I don't think the smartphone helped much at all just in terms of productivity and knowledge work.”

“Physical labor will continue to be more expensive. They'll demand more and more money to do the job that they're asked to do. And then knowledge work will become increasingly more deflationary because so much of it will be automated by AI that those folks will…”

“All this knowledge work is going to be 10% as expensive to do. I don't think it's 10% less Chamath or the, you know, I think it's like 90%, 10 cents on the dollar. And it's not, this is not a five year, 10 year prediction. This is like five quarter, 10 quarter…”

“If you're working with your brain you're doing knowledge work, that work week doesn't make any sense.”

“To my own horn, as I was trying to push years ago, and we still push you know, the real model, I think, is you have to think about AI and people as symbiotic, and you have to think about the real transition in the industrial revolution of knowledge work we're …”

“You can't measure knowledge work in hours. Somebody's investment over a decade can put them into the right perspective to make the right contribution at the right time, that creates something like Ethereum or Bitcoin or whatever. And, you know, how do you corr…”