I find this statement, which came from an article by OpenAI and was shared by Sam Altman on November 8, to be incredibly true. There appears to be a wide gap between what people do with AI and what the technology can actually do when used properly.

Most of us still use AI for the most basic tasks that require very little brainpower. We prompt our chatbots — from Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude to ChatGPT — asking them to generate articles, edit what we’ve written, or write and debug code.

But AI, even in its present and still-flawed state, is far more powerful than what we’ve been conditioned to use it for.

“Most of the world still thinks about AI as chatbots and better search, but today, we have systems that can outperform the smartest humans at some of our most challenging intellectual competitions,” OpenAI writes.

Reading this this morning made me ask myself: How do I use AI? Do I truly maximize its strength? Or am I just one of those people who use it merely to be more productive at mundane tasks that I could do myself?

Although I’m always in search of new ways to use AI and to maximize its potential, I’m afraid I still underutilize it.

But what I’ve truly come to use AI for is learning. Almost every day, I learn something new from AI by asking it to break down complex subjects into simpler explanations that I can understand. This particular way of using AI has made me a better seeker of knowledge — and, more interestingly, has made me realize that I too, with my ordinary brain, can understand complex ideas like the theory of relativity or complex economic systems.

Do you feel you underutilize AI?