From Incremental to Exponential: How AI Unlocks Human Ingenuity

Unanimous AI made a striking prediction: the Eagles would beat the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl. Their forecast stood alone - against other AI systems like Google Gemini, DeepSeek and Grok; against the betting markets; against expert analysts. The Eagles' dramatic upset victory validated their approach. I've been following Unanimous since 2018, watching their innovative use of swarm decision-making to enhance collective judgment. It's remarkable to see their evolution and impact in the era of LLMs.

How did they do it? Unanimous AI organized 104 people into small, networked groups sized for thoughtful conversation. Their AI agents propagated insights across these groups in real time, creating a form of collective intelligence that transcended both individual judgment and machine computation. This wasn't just humans using AI - it was AI transforming how humans think together.

Studies indicate that humans who use AI tools create incremental gains of approximately 15%. But the exponential gains don't come from incremental improvements, but from the human ingenuity AI unlocks. That's the difference between HI + AI and what I call HIᴬᴵ. 𝗔𝗜 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 is where AI transformation happens.

We see this difference playing out in professional work. The concept of "10x engineers" - those who have 10 times the impact of their peers - is widely accepted in tech. Now, as Andrew Ng notes, these engineers don't just write code faster - they make architectural decisions that transform downstream impact. Similarly, 10x marketers don't just use AI to write better social media posts - they orchestrate more experiments and derive deeper customer insights. 10x analysts don't just edit reports more efficiently - they coordinate AI tools to conduct deeper research into products, markets, and companies.

The conventional wisdom focuses on a simple divide between AI users and non-users. But there's a deeper divide emerging - between those who use AI for 15% productivity gains (faster writing, better editing, quicker analysis) and those who let AI free them to work in entirely new ways. This second divide isn't just about what AI can do - it's about how humans respond when AI frees them. It demands more of us, not less: new levels of flexibility, resourcefulness, openness to possibility, and the humility to let go of old ways of working. This is where human ingenuity, amplified by AI, creates 10x impact.

Getting to 10x with AI isn't about technical prowess alone. As the barriers to using AI fall away, what stands between incremental and exponential gains is mindset. As one commentator put it, “the race is between non-technical people who can build coding skills and highly technical people who can tear down their egos." For the non-technical, this means overcoming not just our egos but our perceived limitations - "I'm not a coder" is no longer a relevant barrier.

When people break through these mindset barriers, they reimagine what's possible. We see this in serial founder Elias Torres's new venture, where he's building a $1B natively-AI company with fewer than 100 employees. When AI handles routine tasks, humans can transcend traditional role boundaries - like his lawyer, an early employee, who also manages HR and operations. This shows how AI can free humans to work in ways that weren't previously imagined - but it takes a certain mindset to overcome the perceived barriers and seize this opportunity. 

Around 40,000 BCE, humans made a fundamental shift in how we used our brains - what scientists call the Upper Paleolithic transition. Later, when Greeks added vowels to their writing system, it enabled new forms of systematic thought and cultural achievement. We created language, and then language shaped us. AI represents the next frontier in this co-evolution.

Studies already show that outsourcing our thinking to AI makes us cognitively weaker. This creates a growing divide - not just between those who use AI and those who don't, but between those who use it to enhance their human capabilities versus those who simply delegate their thinking to it. The Unanimous AI experiment and examples like Andrew Ng's observations about 10x professionals aren't just case studies - they suggest possible paths to this transformation. When AI magnifies human judgment and ingenuity, we might begin to see what's truly possible.

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