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    Why AI Needs a “Genie Coefficient”

    This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in IEEE Spectrum . Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to do it. We propose a new metric: the Genie coefficient. There’s often a gap between one person’s request and another’s understanding. Most of the time, we bridge it using general knowledge. For example, if you ask a friend to get you coffee, they’ll pour a cup from the pot or buy one from a coffee shop. They won’t bring you a bag of raw beans or snatch a cup from a stranger and hand it to you. You never specified any of this. You never had to...

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    Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/07/why-ai-needs-a-genie-coefficient.html

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