Type 4: The slack in the rope restriction

This seems related to the third, but it's sneaky and colossal. This is another inertia problem, but much larger in scale. It's like Type 3, but for society as a whole. A lot of people would say that it's obvious that a 4-year education in something like computer science in a 4-year university should not take that long. They would say that the limitations are societal and institutional, and this is the reason that things are still done the way they are.

We've got ancient textbooks that cost an extraordinary amount of money. We have most university professors really just guiding people through the textbook, which, as we said already, isn't very good and is quite outdated. Meanwhile, we have potentially far better content and training available using YouTube videos and AI to create custom curriculums with more examples, tutors available 24/7, etc. But we still send people to college to learn how to program and build software. I've heard of a childhood education company that's treating teachers more like mentors and guides and is using highly customized AI-selected course curriculums to teach kids reading and math.

Within two years, every single person in the class is in the top 1% of the country. I believe these types of opportunities are everywhere. I'm talking about completely re-thinking what is possible from first principles. In finding little tricks that make a huge difference. A good example of this we've seen in the last few years for advancements in AI.

Many people thought the biggest gains were going to come from hardware, and that all the gains were going to come from the hardware. I was saying back in 2023 that at first it would come from the hardware, but I thought that it would soon start to be slack in the rope improvements from very small and strange observations. For example, "chain of thought" reasoning. Having an AI talk through the various steps of a process and sort of self-observe turned out to have extraordinary gains.