AI Renaissance
I'm a caveman getting 5% of what AI can do for me. It already feels like a superpower.
I’ve been thinking a lot about education lately. How to raise kids. Whether the system we all went through is the right one.
I hated school. Never made any sense why they crammed the same curriculum to everyone. An assembly line. Sit down, shut up, learn this. Same pace, same test, same outcome. The kid who’s bored waits. The kid who’s lost falls behind. The system is not designed to accommodate both ends.
I was a tutor in high school. Eventually turned it into a small test prep company. The transformation was always the same. Sit with a kid who was struggling with an essay, or math, or something else. Figure out where they’re stuck. Watch them go from confused to confident in weeks. A good teacher changes your trajectory. A bad one can wreck it. Most people walk around believing they’re “bad at math,” and what actually happened is they had one bad teacher in 6th grade who lost them and they never recovered. That’s not a math problem. That’s a system problem.
Growing up, the word I kept hearing was “well-rounded.” Be well-rounded. Take AP everything. Don’t neglect your weaknesses.
Why the hell would I want to be well-rounded? Well-rounded is mediocre. Every interesting person I’ve ever met is spiked. Absurdly deep in something that fascinated them, passable at the rest. The core curriculum sands down the spikes. It doesn’t reward depth. It punishes it. It rewards risk aversion. Don’t venture out too much because your GPA gets crushed. Better to have a B+ than one C. I heard the Ramp founder says he looks at what classes someone took in college and hires the ones who took the hardest courses. Not always the highest GPA. That’s a spiky person. I’d take that every time over someone who cruised through easier courses and got a 3.9.
At Inversion I look for spiky people. Someone who obsessed about a problem on end. Borderline maniacal. I was recently talking with what might be the best engineering team in crypto and they said the same thing: the 10x engineer is now 100x. The gap between the best and the average just exploded. You want the person who breaks apart complex problems and attacks them. That person is rare. And the school system isn’t engineered to produce them. It produces them despite itself. They survived the sanding.
How many forgotten engineers or mathematicians are out there because the educational system pushed them, smoothed them, or didn’t match their pace? I bet a whole lot.
Imagine a system that sharpened the spikes instead.
We’ve known what works since 1984. Benjamin Bloom showed that one-on-one tutoring moves a student from the 50th percentile to the 98th. Two standard deviations. No other method comes close. Alexander was tutored by Aristotle. Not everyone can pay $200/hour for SAT prep. The gold standard was never a mystery. It was just gated behind wealth. And you can’t scale a great tutor. So we settled for the factory that can take as many kids. I don’t see that necessarily changing. School is as much about education as it is a place to keep your kid while you go work.
AI is the best tutor. Unlike anything we’ve had before. Not metaphorically. Literally.
You talk to it. It responds. It figures out what you don’t understand and explains it a different way. Infinite patience and engaging. No question or request is ever too much or too dumb to ask. That builds confidence, especially in kids. Every subject. Available at 3am. Adapts in real time to how a specific kid thinks and learns. A skeptic would say there are plenty of free resources already. Khan Academy, YouTube, Wikipedia. Sure. But they’re passive. They sit there and wait for a kid to show up motivated. AI is different. It loops. It gives real-time feedback. It notices you’re stuck and tries another angle. It’s the closest thing I’ve experienced to actually sitting with a kid and watching something click.
Bloom’s 2-sigma. The thing we’ve known works for forty years. Finally available and accessible to everyone. Schools, whether they want it or not, will be forced to adapt.
But this isn’t just about kids. I’ve lived this.
Over the past year, and especially the last few months, AI has become integral to and accelerated my learning. I use it every day. Not as a search engine but as a thinking partner. Dumb question. Clear answer. Sharper follow-up. It's highly engaging, at least for the curious. And it never tells you you're dumb. A feature, not a bug.
I’ve gone deep on subjects I never would have touched because the friction dropped to zero. No course to sign up for. No ego cost. You just ask.
But the real unlock has been building.
I was always either too lazy or frustrated in learning how to build an app or website. But I love design. I find myself thinking a lot about what I would build if I had an army of engineers who could just inject themselves in my brain and see what I see and build what I want to build.
Before AI, the process was brutal. Explain it to an engineer. Maybe involve a designer. They’d collaborate and iterate. Come back days or weeks later. Rarely matching what I wanted. Thousands of dollars. Now it is staggering what you can do. I am not technical but I am building and leveling up. Getting more familiar by doing. Not by reading about it or sitting in a classroom.
This is the part I can’t stop thinking about.
AI will be immensely powerful for generalists who are spiky in one domain. People who have vision, taste, judgment. Architects who had been handicapped by not being technical. Low-code and no-code have been around for a while, but anyone who has vibe coded with AI understands the difference is massive.
This means rethinking what a “skill” even is. Montessori has been saying it for decades. Teach thinking, not memorizing. That argument just got urgent. Inquiry, logic, problem decomposition, taste. Those are the skills that compound now. Memorization is what Google killed twenty years ago. AI kills the rest of the busywork.
Every technological revolution changes what we value in terms of skills. But the educational system has always been right about one thing: curiosity and hard work. If you had those two things, you went far. That hasn’t changed. What changed is the leverage.
If you’re an engineer, you apply that curiosity to AI and you’re 100x more productive. If you’re a non-technical person with taste and judgment, you can now build what was previously impossible without a team. The ceiling just got ripped off.
If history is any indication, some of the most remarkable discoveries came from outsiders. By accident or curiosity or both. AI explodes that. It lowers the barrier to experimentation, exploration, and ultimately, discovery.
A renaissance.
I’ve leveled up faster this past year than in any year of formal education. And I already knew how to learn. Most kids, unfortunately, are taught to memorize and comply, not how to learn. AI teaches you to ask and build. Even if you come at it with little knowledge or skill, the key is persistence. And it will keep you engaged. That’s a different kind of person coming out the other end.
And by the way. As much as I’m maxing out my credits in Claude every day, I get the sense I’m still a caveman. Probably getting 5% of what AI can actually do for me. I’m scratching the surface and it already feels like a superpower. That’s the crazy part. We’re all beginners right now. Everyone. The people who seem ahead are just slightly less early.
I’ve never had more fun. I am opening a cabinet in my brain with all the ideas I’ve had and putting them in production. It is remarkable, addicting, and intensely entertaining. I see a lot of my friends doing the same. Sharing their work, new apps, new websites. We are in a renaissance of creativity. And for that reason, the bar between great and excellent is just getting higher. Because now everyone can do a whole lot more.
Holy shit.