Glossary
Jagged frontier
What is the jagged frontier?
The jagged frontier is the uneven line between the tasks AI does well and the tasks it does badly. Tasks that look equally hard to people can fall on either side of it, even within one workflow.
Also called: Jagged technological frontier
Why it matters
You can’t tell in advance which side of the line a task is on, and the line moves with every new model. That is why AI has to be tested task by task, on your own work.
Example
In the study that coined the term, run with Boston Consulting Group, consultants using GPT-4 completed more product-development tasks, faster and to a higher standard, but were more often wrong on a business case that hinged on details in interview notes.