The Jagged Intelligence of Humans
Today’s piece is slightly different from my typical investing musings. I have been thinking about this for the last few days, and I would like to get this off my chest.
In a recent episode on “No Priors” podcast, Andrej Karpathy mentioned the following:
“…these models still are not, you know, they've improved a lot, but they're still, like, rough around the edges as maybe the way I would describe it. I simultaneously feel like I'm talking to an extremely brilliant PhD student who's been like a systems programmer for their entire life and a 10-year-old. And it's so weird because humans, like there's, I feel like they're a lot more coupled. Like you have, you know, everything is a lot more coupled. You wouldn't encounter that combination. This jaggedness is really strange. And humans have a lot less of that kind of jaggedness, although they definitely have some.”
It’s not just Karpathy; I have heard this sentiment echoed by many others in recent months. Admittedly, I am a bit surprised how consensus this conventional wisdom appears to be. If you are on X (formerly twitter), you are routinely bombarded with takes from objectively smart people that can perhaps only be explained by jagged intelligence of humans. I suspect human intelligence is just as jagged as the machines and yet, we tend to notice lot less of it primarily for a couple of reasons: a) most of us have more self-awareness than the machines (the bar is low since I’m comparing against something that has likely no self-awareness) and hence, we avoid topics where me may divulge our naivete, and b) we seem to find it fundamentally challenging to have opposing opinions about someone and crave a desire to have consistency which perhaps explains if someone thinks Elon Musk is the greatest entrepreneur ever lived, they are also particularly prone to ignore or downplay any other negative traits shown by Musk.
You may roll your eyes and think the capitalists such as Musk or Gates are far from epitome of human intelligence. Well, I can point to Isaac Newton, perhaps one of the greatest scientists ever lived! While Newton is still revered today for his contributions to some of the core tenets of our scientific understanding of the world, we mostly ignore the fact that he also spent enormous amounts of time in his later years on alchemy and biblical chronology. He actually wrote more on these subjects than on physics and mathematics combined. He tried to transmute metals, searched for the philosopher’s stone, and attempted to decode hidden prophecies in the Bible, including calculating dates for the apocalypse. Boy, that sounds pretty jagged intelligence to me!
In fact, in a recent Dwarkesh podcast episode, Michael Nielsen mentioned an essay that John Maynard Keynes wrote about Newton in which Keynes perhaps aptly called Newton “the last of the magicians” rather than the first of the age of reason. From the essay (emphasis mine):
"In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason.
I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage."
Indeed, even if I look at scientists who are the torchbearers of the age of reason, it’s not hard to see noticeable jaggedness in their accomplishments. Think about Einstein. At 26, while working as a patent clerk in Switzerland, he published four groundbreaking papers. Photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, Special relativity, and Mass–energy equivalence. Those four papers were published in March, May, June, and September of the same year: 1905! Any single one of these would have been a career-defining contribution; doing all four in one year, outside academia, is why 1905 is "annus mirabilis" (miracle year) in physics. If you are blown away by the cadence of AI model releases in 2026, imagine what you would have thought about annus mirabilis in 1905! Alas, the “annus mirabilis” didn’t repeat in Einstein’s lifetime!
Almost ten years after “annus mirabilis”, Einstein published his seminal paper on general relativity. However, from roughly the mid-1920s until his death in 1955, Einstein devoted the bulk of his research energy pursuing “unified field theory” but couldn’t pull it off.
Perhaps nothing proves the Jaggedness of human intelligence than the Planck’s principle itself:
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”
The jaggedness of our intelligence is so embedded that perhaps it is only through our death can we relieve the rest of society from our own ignorance. In fact, one of my counterintuitive beliefs is the world may find itself in a relative tech stasis or stagnation if we are able to materially extend our life span.
I am still not quite an “AGI” believer, but the more I hear about jagged intelligence of the machines, the more I think we may want to look us in the mirror a bit more closely!
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Please note that these are NOT my recommendation to buy/sell these securities, but just disclosure from my end so that you can assess potential biases that I may have because of my own personal portfolio holdings. Always consider my write-up my personal investing journal and never forget my objectives, risk tolerance, and constraints may have no resemblance to yours.
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