You Are Not Max Verstappen

The Spanish Grand Prix is underway, and millions of people are watching some of the best drivers in the world make extraordinarily powerful cars look almost effortless to control. That can create a dangerous illusion, because what Max Verstappen can do with a race car has very little to do with what you or I could do with one.

Imagine someone puts you on a racetrack later today and gives you a choice between a Ford Mustang GT and a Bugatti Veyron. And your only instruction is to get around the track as fast as you can.

Most people would take the Bugatti. It is faster, more powerful, and capable of things the Mustang is not. On paper, this is not much of a contest.

So you climb into the Bugatti, buckle in, and pull onto the track. You press the accelerator and the car surges forward harder than anything you have ever driven, and before you are halfway down the straight it is gone. The rear steps out, you overcorrect, and you spin to a stop in the grass with your heart pounding and no clear idea what you just did wrong.

You never reached the corner. You never even got the chance to find out whether you knew how to take it, because the raw power of the car had already exceeded your ability to control it.

Then the fear wears off. You get the car turned around, ease back onto the track, and settle into a rhythm. This time you are careful, and the car rewards you for it because a machine like that can feel remarkably composed at speeds that would make an ordinary car feel frantic.

A few minutes later, the straight does not seem quite as intimidating. The steering feels light, the car feels planted, and your confidence comes back faster than your skill does. Before long you are carrying far more speed than you realize, and the number on the speedometer does not become real until the corner is already on top of you.

This time there is no spin and no warning. You simply realize, a fraction of a second too late, that you are going too fast and there is nothing left to do. You go into the wall still convinced, only moments earlier, that you had the car under control.

Now imagine climbing into the Mustang instead. It is slower than the Bugatti, but it is still a very fast, capable sports car. The difference is that you are far more likely to understand what it is doing, push it closer to its limits, and learn from the feedback while you can still do something about it.

There is a decent chance you get around the track faster in the Mustang. Not because it is the more capable car, but because its capability is a better match for yours.

That is the part we often miss when talking about artificial intelligence. We spend enormous amounts of time comparing models and asking which one is the most capable, as though the answer automatically tells us which tool a person should use. It does not, because the capability of the user matters too.

A new user reaching straight for the most capable model can get burned twice. The first failure is obvious because the tool overwhelms the user and something goes visibly wrong. The second is harder to see because the system feels controlled, the answers keep coming back polished and convincing, and confidence grows faster than competence.

Someone who has spent hundreds of hours using GenAI develops instincts that a new user simply does not have. They begin to recognize when the model is drifting, when an answer sounds better than it is, when more context is making things worse rather than better, and when the right move is to stop using the tool altogether.

That is why I have long thought people should have to demonstrate some level of competence before they are allowed to level up. Start with simpler tools and lower-risk uses. Learn where the system helps, where it fails, what needs to be verified, and where your own judgment is most likely to slip.

Then give the user more capability. That becomes even more important as we move from systems that merely answer questions to agents that can take actions on our behalf. More powerful tools do not reduce the need for skill. They increase it.

The fastest car is not always the right car for the driver. Sometimes you are better off learning what you can do in the Mustang before somebody hands you the keys to the Bugatti, because no matter how capable the machine is, there is still someone sitting behind the wheel.

And if that someone is you, remember one thing. You are not Max Verstappen.