The human-AI 'centaur' era — where AI plus humans outperforms AI alone — is temporary and will end with humans adding only noise to highly optimized AI systems.
Flo argues that while the 'centaur' era of human-AI collaboration is real today, it mirrors the pattern seen in chess where AI+human initially beats AI alone, then the gap narrows until humans actually degrade performance. He sees this as inevitable but temporary — we're in the centaur phase now, but it won't last. ✦ AI generated
Flo Crivello · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-08-10 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 64:03
“When it comes to the best ideas at Lindy, how many of them are human origin and how many of them are AI origin today?”
I hate the sensor, but it's it's both. It truly comes from this from the union of both. And the reason I hate it is because it ladders into this myth of the the centaur, you know, it's like this mythical man-horse creature. And so, you know, this idea that like yes, an AI is better than the human, but you know what's even better than AI is AI plus human. Hence, humans are always going to be needed. And that's a fantasy. That's just not true. And the the literature is actually clear that this like you know we've seen it happen with chess and with every other game which which AI has achieved superhuman performance on where at first AI beats human and AI plus human beats just AI and little by little the gap of AI plus human versus AI is shrinking until it actually turns negative and humans are introducing at best like random noise into the system. That said, the centaur phase exists at for a while, you know. So, the open question is like how long is it going to exist? But right now we are in the central phase.
verbatim transcript · starts at 64:03
64:03on the timeline all the time, at least in certain domains, like the open math conjectures and stuff. When it comes to the best ideas at Lindy, how many of them are human origin and how many of them are AI origin today? I hate the sensor, but it's it's both. It truly comes from this from the union of both. And the reason I hate it is because it ladders into this myth of the
64:27the centur, you know, it's like this mythical manhorse creature. And so, you know, it's this idea that like yes, an AI is better than the human, but you know what's even better than AI is AI plus human. Hence, humans are always going to be needed. And that's a fantasy. That's just not true. And the the literature is actually clear that this like you know we've seen it happen
64:45with chess and with every other game which which AI has achieved superhuman performance on where at first AI beats human and AI plus human beats just AI and little by little the gap of AI plus human versus AI is shrinking until it actually turns negative and humans are introducing at best like random noise into the system. So humans actually at some point become like truly clueless and and they start harming the system in
65:10which they're intervening. That said, the centur phase exists at for a while, you know. So the open question is like how long is it going to exist? But right now we are in the central phase and I think that's the other reason why multiplayer is so important because you want AI to be you want your agents to be in the room with you and you don't want
65:28any random agent to be in the room with you. You want an actual AI employee who's been in this room with you for a long time, who's sat in every meeting, who's built up that internal knowledge base about everything that's going on in the company and you can atmention it and you can invite it to chime in into your conversation in the company and we do that all the time. We do it actually.
65:47It's funny because it's very easy to do it on Slack or just like at Lindy, what do you think? You know, it's hard to do in the meeting in a way that like now makes us actually more and more like we prefer Slack because like it's the AI is there. Whereas like in the meeting it's there. it's listening but it's called chime in and so very often now what we
66:04do during meetings we're like actually here like you know we're struggling with this team we're like Lindy can you please send us a message after this telling us what you think and they'll send us message on Slack and and so when you do that it is not the case it is rarely the case that Lindy will first shot tell you something and you're like this is it this is the thing we should
66:23do but it is almost always the case that we we we go back and forth with Lindy and and and and from that back and forth like it misses something like the CI example is is a great one actually at first when we when we invited Lindy into this conversation it happened over like wait a minute we're done like why are we not doing this with Lindy add Lindy can