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# Are we capable or reliable? — Kelford Labs Daily
- URL: https://kelfordinc.com/are-we-capable-or-reliable/
- Published: 2025-04-22T10:23:24.000Z
- Updated: 2026-01-27T13:16:16.000Z
- Description: Reliability creates certainty.
- Author: Joel Kelly
- Tags: Daily Labs, ai, certainty, principles, process, signal

In the world of AI and large language models, there’s a lot of chatter about the “capability-reliability gap”.

*(*[*Here’s a link to a talk on YouTube about the topic*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5EltXhbcfA) *if you’d like to learn more)*

Basically, LLMs can be extremely *capable*. They can perform amazing, sometimes superhuman feats of what looks like intelligence.

**But they are simultaneously extremely *unreliable*. They can perform amazing things *sometimes*, occasionally most of the time, but never *all of the the time*.**

Many (including me) suspect that this gap will keep most consumer-facing “agentic” AI systems, which perform real-world actions autonomously, from gaining mainstream traction for at least a little while.

You don’t want an AI doing real things in the real world with real consequences on your behalf if it gets it wrong a meaningful (and perhaps irreducible) amount of the time.

But here’s what this has to do with you and me:

**Are we marketing our *capability* or our *reliability*?**

Let’s face it, anyone can pull off a miracle every once in a while. But it takes real quality, real expertise to do *great* every single time.

Like [that old Joel Raphaelson quote](https://kelfordinc.com/more-certain-we-are-good-kelford-labs-daily/) goes, “People do not choose Brand A over Brand B because they think Brand A is better, but because they are more certain that it is good.”

Sure, we’ll always want (and *should* want) to show off our capabilities and just how amazing we can be.

**But we shouldn’t neglect showing off, and *demonstrating*, our *reliability.***

The processes, the principles, the *purpose* behind our work and *why* it works so well, all of the time.

Some buyers are looking for a miracle, but most are looking for certainty.

**We need to demonstrate reliability so they can have it.**

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