I’ve been able to approximately increase the amount of intellectual output I have by 3x over the last 2 months by using LLMs. If you spend a lot of time on setting up the context and intellectual frameworks for it to think through, it is remarkably capable of convergent thinking.
For research my process is to:
Use my claude research project with strategic background context to generate questions and personas for Elicit and Gemini to use.
Use Elicits report and question generating feature in order to find the top 10-15 most relevant papers for what I’m currently doing.
Use gemini 2.5 pro and insert all of the pdfs and the specific prompt from claude in order to generate a research report within LaTeX
Use claude personas in order to give direct harsh feedback to the paper and iterate from there.
At this point I think LLM usage is a skill issue and that if you get really good at asking the right question by combining models from different fields you can have LLMs do some remarkably good convergent thinking. You just need to get good at creative thinking, management and framing ideas.
You just need to get good at creative thinking, management and framing ideas.
Yeah, the skills necessary for the (near) future.
Though I wonder about implications for education. For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that the AIs remain approximately as powerful as they are today for a few more decades, i.e. no Singularity, no paperclips. How should we change education, to make the new generation adapt to this situation.
In case of adults, we have already learned “creative thinking, management and framing ideas” by also doing lots of the things that the LLMs can now do for us. For example, I let LLMs write JavaScript code for me, but the reason I can evaluate that code, suggest improvement, etc. is that in the past I wrote a lot of JavaScript code by hand. Is it possible to get these skills some other way? Or will the future humans only practice the loop of: “AI, do what I want. AI, figure out the problem and fix it. AI, try harder. AI, try superhard. Nevermind, AI, delete the project, clear your cache, and try again.” :D
Subjective report:
I’ve been able to approximately increase the amount of intellectual output I have by 3x over the last 2 months by using LLMs. If you spend a lot of time on setting up the context and intellectual frameworks for it to think through, it is remarkably capable of convergent thinking.
For research my process is to:
Use my claude research project with strategic background context to generate questions and personas for Elicit and Gemini to use.
Use Elicits report and question generating feature in order to find the top 10-15 most relevant papers for what I’m currently doing.
Use gemini 2.5 pro and insert all of the pdfs and the specific prompt from claude in order to generate a research report within LaTeX
Use claude personas in order to give direct harsh feedback to the paper and iterate from there.
At this point I think LLM usage is a skill issue and that if you get really good at asking the right question by combining models from different fields you can have LLMs do some remarkably good convergent thinking. You just need to get good at creative thinking, management and framing ideas.
Yeah, the skills necessary for the (near) future.
Though I wonder about implications for education. For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that the AIs remain approximately as powerful as they are today for a few more decades, i.e. no Singularity, no paperclips. How should we change education, to make the new generation adapt to this situation.
In case of adults, we have already learned “creative thinking, management and framing ideas” by also doing lots of the things that the LLMs can now do for us. For example, I let LLMs write JavaScript code for me, but the reason I can evaluate that code, suggest improvement, etc. is that in the past I wrote a lot of JavaScript code by hand. Is it possible to get these skills some other way? Or will the future humans only practice the loop of: “AI, do what I want. AI, figure out the problem and fix it. AI, try harder. AI, try superhard. Nevermind, AI, delete the project, clear your cache, and try again.” :D