{"slug": "notes-from-bryan-cantrill-s-intelligence-is-not-enough", "title": "Notes from Bryan Cantrill's \"Intelligence Is Not Enough\"", "summary": "Bryan Cantrill, co-founder of Oxide Computer, argued in a talk that intelligence alone is insufficient for solving complex engineering problems, emphasizing that human values like resilience, teamwork, and optimism are critical. He noted that breakthroughs on company-destroying bugs required solutions that an artificial super intelligence would never suggest, as they contradicted all known documentation and reasoning.", "body_md": "# Notes from Bryan Cantrill’s “Intelligence is not Enough”\n\nI quite enjoyed [this talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQfJi7rjuEk) from Bryan Cantrill where he discusses the difficult engineering problems they overcame while working on their company [Oxide](https://oxide.computer).\n\nSome of the problems they ran into were bugs. But these weren’t any ordinary bugs, they were company-destroying bugs: bugs that, if they couldn’t be fixed, would sink the entire company.\n\nAnd the difficulty in solving these bugs was that they had no precedent. Any documentation or knowledge they could find around the symptoms of the problem was actively incorrect.\n\nIn fact, Bryan says that the team’s breakthroughs on these bugs were solutions that an artificial super intelligence would’ve never suggested because they ran *against* all known and available reasoning, documentation, and knowledge.\n\nHis point being: intelligence isn’t everything. Human values are still incredibly important.\n\nIntelligence alone does not solve problems like [the ones we encountered]. Our ability to solve these problems had nothing to do with our collective intelligence as a team. We’ve got a terrific team, but it’s a lot more than just intelligence. And in particular for these [kinds of] problems, and many like them, we had to summon the elements of our character not our intelligence. Our resilience. Our teamwork. Our rigor. Our optimism. […]\n\nWe talk about super intelligence, but is anyone talking about super collaboration or super teamwork? We absolutely needed teamwork [at Oxide].\n\nIf human values like curiosity are what led to breakthroughs — *not* the application of synthetic intelligence — why is there so much emphasis on intelligence these days? Bryan has a curt analysis:\n\nThis infatuation with intelligence comes from people who just don’t get outside enough.\n\nHe notes how intelligence isn’t everything in a job interview. Like, you don’t hire people by giving out an exam and taking whoever scores highest. You try to suss out other aptitudes. Nobody looks at applicants who lack values like teamwork or optimism and says, “Well, they can’t work with anyone and they’re incredibly unpleasant to be around, but their intelligence is great — let’s hire them!”\n\nIntelligence is great, but it’s not everything.\n\nWe do a disservice to our own humanity when we pretend that [AI] can engineer autonomously.\n\nA cogent case for the values of our humanity.\n\nMore like this please.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/notes-from-bryan-cantrill-s-intelligence-is-not-enough", "canonical_source": "https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/intelligence-isnt-enough/", "published_at": "2026-06-29 15:06:09+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-29 15:21:34.471727+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-ethics", "ai-research", "ai-safety"], "entities": ["Bryan Cantrill", "Oxide Computer"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/notes-from-bryan-cantrill-s-intelligence-is-not-enough", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/notes-from-bryan-cantrill-s-intelligence-is-not-enough.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/notes-from-bryan-cantrill-s-intelligence-is-not-enough.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/notes-from-bryan-cantrill-s-intelligence-is-not-enough.jsonld"}}