Increasingly, I use an AI tool every day, and the speed at which these products improve is extraordinary.
My first exposure to AI was at a presentation by IBM in 2017 showcasing Watson. It gained fame in 2011 by beating humans playing Jeopardy, demonstrating its natural language processing and vast data retrieval capabilities. I watched an oncology and medical diagnostics demo, which ultimately proved very costly to implement. IBM exited Watson Health in 2021 and now focuses on hybrid cloud and enterprise AI.
Fast forward to playing with Chat GPT beta and subscribing at launch. It feels like I have a front-row seat to another game-changing moment: Apple/Amazon/Space-X/YouTube/Google Search/Navigation/Social Media/Cloud Computing/Blockchain and Crypto.
I’m not a super AI user, but the most significant change in my habits is using Perplexity for internet queries. I no longer Google it; I ask Perplexity questions. I like how the response is organised with simple access to sources.
I use ChatGPT 4o daily for research, querying documents, marketing ideas and creating images for blog posts. I made my own GPT, the DataDrivenAdvisor, to help research and analyse investment opportunities. Creating your own GPT could not be simpler; just trial and error with designing what you would like the model to do.
I was recently blown away by the podcast feature of Google Notebook LM, “Your Personalised AI Research Assistant”. Spookily lifelike humans discuss the documents and information uploaded.
Fathom AI Notetaker is incredible for anyone taking notes of meetings and spits out accurate summaries and action points, an excellent time hack.
AI agents are popping up everywhere. Most of the time, I would prefer the bot vs a human for simple requests. The smart people at Keepme.ai have delivered a powerful sales tool to deal with complex enquiries and help keep the sales funnel flowing.
But the real positive upside to AI is to help solve the big problems. Here Dario Amodei sets out his vision. He is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the company behind the large language model series Claude AI and previously the vice president of research at OpenAi
Make yourself a cuppa and have a read.
He believes “that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.”
The five categories he is most excited about are:
- Biology and physical health: elimination of most cancers and prevention and cures for genetic diseases and Alzheimer’s. Doubling of human lifespan (no thanks)
- Neuroscience and mental health: curing most mental illnesses
- Economic development and poverty
- Peace and governance
- Work and meaning
Here is a good example. Harvard Medical School has developed a ChatGPT-like AI model that can diagnose cancer, guide treatment choice, and predict survival across multiple cancer types.
A New Artificial Intelligence Tool for Cancer | Harvard Medical School
I like this optimistic vision of the future. However, the dark side of AI and wading through AI slop (the cousin of spam) will grab headlines.
I stay on top of the good, bad, and ugly in Tech and AI via the amusing Hard Fork Podcast from the New York Times.
Written by me, a human, with some help from Grammarly.
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