Overview: Productivity

Like me, the author has "been taking notes for over a decade ...ended up with thousands of notes that I never revisited. So I decided to train ChatGPT on my 3,743 Obsidian notes", which were created for "one purpose: content creation. So I use an improved version of the Zettelkasten".Apparently there are just 3 ways to use AI i…

Google's AI-powered assistant: "Duet AI is a powerful collaborator that can act as a coach, thought partner, source of inspiration, and productivity booster — all while ensuring every user and organization has control over their data... you must first have an eligible Google Workspace plan."Via this post on "creating the perfec…

Short video. Pretty mindblowing.

"My advice: Jump headfirst into AI with everything you’ve got."

Is your organization more like a jellyfish or a flatworm?The author's "Jellyfish and Flatworm story has been remarkably effective at helping ... [executives] visualize the impact of AI on their customers, their products, and their employees... this story is about why Knowledge Representation (KR) must be the core of any cost-effective lo…

"despite the immense potential of LLMs, they come with a range of challenges... hallucinations, the high costs associated with training and scaling, the complexity of addressing and updating them, their inherent inconsistency, the difficulty of conducting audits and providing explanations, predominance of English language content... [they…

insights into the complex relationship between AI and knowledge work, emphasizing the need for a nuanced understanding of AI's role in enhancing productivity and quality in different task domains - Harpa

Asks: could LLMs be used to "create tools that sift and summarize scientific evidence for policymaking... [for] knowledge brokers providing presidents, prime ministers, civil servants and politicians with up-to-date information on how science and technology intersects with societal issues... [who must] nimbly navigate ... millions of scientif…

How to use LLMs to solve "really hard problems"? The "AIdeas Collider" approach, piloted by Head of Innovation Design at MIT's Collective Intelligence Design Lab.

"how can you use ChatGPT to generate ideas and brainstorm within Obsidian?", which is currently my note-taking tool of choice. First, some generic advice for prompting:"be specific about the outcome that you want to achieve... providing a prompt that contains more descriptive language ...give preceding prompts ... [specify the] resp…

Borrowing heavily from an article "about social media platform saturation inspired by the craze to sign up on Threads (only to sign out a week later).", Alberto Romero does the same for generative AI to explain "why it isn’t worth getting generative AI fatigue.After providing a potted timeline of the release of the major LLMs for th…

An interview with Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind & architect behind AlphaFold.

"ChatGPT only looks at the past... [it's response] based on an “average” of everything already said on the issue. It’s pure reversion to the mean"

"AI-generated advice represents a huge shift"convenience: whereas a google search inundates you with results mixed with spam, splog and ads, "ChatGPT streamline this process... people choose convenience over almost anything else... [cf]Fogg’s behavior model: Behavior = Motivation × Ability × Prompt". With AI, it's finally …

"“Document Search Chatbot” ... field common questions (FAQ’s) based on the content of several documents.... Azure Search to extract and rank key highlights from a set of text documents based on a user query. This user query and Azure Search results are then passed to OpenAI to be interpreted and formatted into a chat based response..."Wh…

" a step-by-step guide for building a document Q&A chatbot in an efficient way with llama-index and GPT API... ask the bot in natural language about your own documents/data... [see it] retrieving info from the documents and generating a response [1]... customer support, synthesizing user research, your personal knowledge management"K…

Wired's rules for using generative AI: "Not for images, yes for research, no for copyediting, maybe for idea generation". Meanwhile interactive book PromptCraft shows how to "get the most out of the creative man/machine communications... AI is like querying our collective intelligence".So how best to design an AI prompt?…

from Alice Albrecht, who "runs re:collect, a startup building an AI-powered thought partner:... advances in AI and cheaper compute lower the bar for getting from a creative idea to a final output... though, we still need to provide the initial seed... and ... judge whether we’re heading in the right direction. We’re still the creative direct…

"What if we were to think of LLMs not as tools for answering questions, but as tools for asking us questions and inspiring our creativity? ... even simple tools can lead to interesting results when they clash with the contents of our minds"So he tries using ChatGPT as a muse. TL:DR; "ChatGPT asked me probing questions, suggested spe…

Interesting, illuminating (but contested) metaphor for thinking about LLMs from one of my favourite authors, Ted Chiang:"Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information... but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation... nonse…

This piece captures and then explores exactly what I've always thought about the future direction of myhub.ai: imagine what would happen if you had your own personal AI assistant operating across your content - your public posts, private library (including content shared from friends, stuff in your reading queue, etc.) and the wider web, emph…

Articulates exactly my problem with most Tools4Thought, hence the "super simple Thinking Tool" I want at the heart of myhub's CMS."Perhaps something as simple as having the word ‘Tool’ first causes us to focus on the tool more than the thinking... to confuse thought as an object rather than thought as a process... [causing us t…

I've been invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG). My chapter will encompass each user’s PKG, the Social Knowledge Graph created by networking them together via the Fediverse, Solid hosting, AI writing tools and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.This post provides a first draft of its Introducti…

A neural network to help web content authors efficiently and completely characterise their content using the site taxonomy. Accuracy improves with use.

The Syllabus collects the best articles, podcasts and videos about the political, economic and social consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on a daily basis...world’s foremost technology critic... scans 100 pages per minute, 12 books in an hour, 100 in one day... can determine the relevance of every book in the world... all information and know…

a unique productivity philosophy called deep work. He carefully blocked out his day, and created space for long, uninterrupted hours to write ... tactics like travelling on foot to give himself more time in isolation and actively sought out isolated spaces to work... his latest book, Digital Minimalism... there's an implicit reward for the sha…

Jane.ai, an artificially intelligent platform that indexes data from cloud storage providers, teams, and more... allows employees to search through its corpus using conversational language...an intuitive, intelligent AI-powered Teammate who gives employees instant access to the information they need to do their jobs well.

“death by PowerPoint,”... sucks the life and energy out of ... meetings... spreadsheets rife with errors and macro miscalculations. Email and chat facilitate ... inbox overload ... So what makes artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) champions confident that their technologies will be immune to comparably counterproductive outcomes? ... …

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

for innovators who are tasked with problem solving and imagining the future, human curiosity and playfulness will always have the advantage.. . machines cannot yet have intuition, nor the ability to empathize, reframe problems and truly innovate.. . The robots may be coming for our jobs, but it is too early to call checkmate on human ingenuity.