The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients

Back in the ancient AI days of 2023, my co-authors and I invented a term to describe the weird ability of AI to do some work incredibly well and other work incredibly badly in ways that didn’t map very well to our human intuition of the difficulty of the task. We called this the “Jagged Frontier” of AI ability, and it remains a key feature of AI and an endless source of confusion. How can an AI be superhuman at differential medical diagnosis or good at very hard math (yes, they are really good a...