AI is a genius. It's also an idiot. Welcome to the 'jagged edge.'
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What will ChatGPT and AI in general do for us in the future? Businesses are trying to figure it out. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images 2025-12-17T10:02:01.203Z Share Facebook Email X LinkedIn Reddit Bluesky WhatsApp Copy link lighning bolt icon An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt.
Impact Link Save Saved Read in app Add us on This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Log in. AI can do amazing things. It also fails at basic stuff, all the time. That's not a temporary state of things. We'll be dealing with that dichotomy for a long time. Which makes predictions about what AI is going to do to work, and everything else, very hard to make. Sometimes I use ChatGPT and it seems stunningly obvious that AI is going to have a transformative effect on my life. I use it more every day. And other times I find myself yelling at ChatGPT in ALL CAPS, because it can't do basic, simple tasks — ones I could reasonably farm out to a 5th grader. Or even worse: It can't do basic tasks but won't tell me it can't do them, and tries to fudge a result instead. And that makes me wary of using it again.Does this sound familiar? It turns out that the AI business has a great term for this dichotomy: "The jagged frontier," coined in a 2023 research paper. Here's another way of putting it, via Reuters:"It might be a Ferrari in math but a donkey at putting things in your calendar," said Anastasios Angelopoulos, the CEO and cofounder of LMArena, a popular benchmarking tool." Every time Peter publishes a story, you’ll get an alert straight to your inbox! Stay connected to Peter and get more of their work as it publishes. Sign up By clicking “Sign up”, you agree to receive emails from Business Insider. In addition, you accept Insider's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. That quote comes from a report looking at the struggles various businesses have had implementing AI in their work. It's a theme we've been hearing a lot about over the last few months, like the MIT study that found that 95% of companies were getting "zero return" on their AI investment.This issue is core to the "Is AI a bubble and when will it pop?" question, of course. Which is a very important question, with some $2 trillion in investment in play. But I think it's not the only question: The tech isn't going away, so many of us are unquestionably going to be using AI in all kinds of ways, no matter what.So a more practical question is: What kind of tasks can AI do reliably well today — reliably enough that businesses (and the rest of us) can use it day in and day out — and which ones are going to take a while to sort out? And which ones may never be something we can hand over to AI? This is a pretty good summary of the ongoing experiments we're working out in real time, right now.