Chi Kang Pai

Hyung Won Chung’s talk at Cornell, AI as a New Leverage

July 24, 2025 · Summary, Thoughts

⇒ My summary of Hyung Won Chung’s talk at Cornell, organized wit Heptabase + Gemini API.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcP8db8TeKI

The New Leverage: How AI is Reshaping Our World

To understand the future, we need to understand leverage. Futurist Naval Ravikant provides a powerful framework, identifying three historical forms of leverage that have driven immense value creation: human labor, capital, and code/media. Each allowed individuals or groups to dramatically multiply their output without a proportional increase in effort.

However, the power of any leverage diminishes as it becomes common. Once everyone starts a YouTube channel or learns to code, competition compresses the returns. This makes the emergence of a new form of leverage a rare and momentous event. Today, that new leverage is Artificial Intelligence.

The Quiet Revolution We're Underestimating

"The days are long, but the decades are short." This observation from Sam Altman captures a critical human bias: we're good at seeing immediate changes but terrible at grasping slow, monumental shifts. AI is one such shift. While we all know it’s important, we are likely underestimating the sheer magnitude of its impact because we fail to see it as a fundamentally new category of leverage.

AI: The New Forms of Leverage

AI (slowly, but decades are short…) creates new types of leverage by uniquely combining the properties of its predecessors.

AI Agents: Human Labor + Code An AI agent acts like human labor. It can perform tasks for you. But it's also like code, it can be copied and scaled infinitely and is permissionless. This hybrid nature "supercharges" individuals and small teams, allowing them to create value that was once exclusive to large corporations. We're already seeing agents that can build a software product with minimal capital and time.
AI for the Individual: Supercharging Learning For individuals, AI’s biggest leverage is in education. It acts as a personal tutor, dynamically generating explanations tailored to your knowledge level and dramatically lowering the barrier to learning. But this ease creates a hidden cost: the opportunity cost of not learning. When knowledge is cheap, the truly scarce resources become your own curiosity and motivation.
AI for Humanity: Unblocking Science The most profound application of AI leverage may be in accelerating scientific discovery. As science becomes too complex for any single human brain(Ex: Newtonian ⇒ Chips development), it creates a bottleneck for human progress. AI can break this stalemate by acting as a connective tissue for our fragmented, specialized knowledge. By augmenting human intellect, AI doesn't just help us find answers; it increases our very capacity to solve humanity's biggest challenges.

Conclusion