AI Beats the Clock

In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, who was the world’s best chess player at the time.

Almost 30 years later, the insight that sticks with me is this: Deep Blue didn’t defeat Kasparov. It defeated the clock.

Deep Blue did not understand chess in any meaningful way. Under the same clock, it just searched orders of magnitude more positions than Garry could.

That is where we are with LLMs.

Forget intelligence for a moment. The speed alone is already transformative. There is a whole class of work LLMs do orders of magnitude faster than we can.

That changes what is worth automating. The best candidates aren’t tasks where models are perfect. They’re tasks where volume covers for rough edges: research, drafts, summaries, tests, reviews and increasingly, actions.

More ideas. More tactics. More strategies. More shots on goal.

AI does not have to be perfect. It has to be fast enough that imperfections don’t matter.

80% as good. 10x as fast.