Welcome Back!

Welcome back to the Another Excuse Newsletter, which isn’t just another excuse, but a reason to start that thing you’ve been putting off.

In today’s newsletter, we’ve got a bit of an AI theme going. It’s difficult to steer clear of it when it’s everywhere!

What to expect this week:
🔭Perspective - Our days are numbered… literally
🔨 Tool - Fireflies.ai never forget an action item again
🍿Consume - Sam Altman on Success
📖Concept - AI

Perspective

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Who we spend our time with

This chart is being shared across social media, and it puts things into perspective.

When you follow each group’s line, it makes you reflect. I started asking, “Where do I fall on that line?” and whether I was above or below the average.

The steep decline in time spent with family, children and friends made me realise that I’m not doing enough of it. I’m not making enough of an effort to spend time with those close to me. There is no excuse, but rather an evaluation of my priorities that needs to happen.

The “alone” line also shows us how lonely we all are. Loneliness is becoming a pressing issue and even more of a reason to connect with those around us.

Having a support system can be so beneficial to personal growth and mental health. So, reach out to those that are close to you or go out to meet some new people. It will make the world a better place.

The study goes into a lot more detail on how we spend our time. If you’d like to check it out, here it is.

Tool

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Fireflies.ai is a platform that basically makes your life a lot easier.

It transcribes your whole meeting

Summarises it into important points and actions items

Then it adds those action items to your calendar and to-do list

How crazy is that?!

No more scribbling down ineligible notes or typing while someone was speaking and missing out on half of what they said. Just be present in the meeting and focus on creating those actionable items. The rest is taken care of. It even notes who said what, so it can allocate the tasks to the correct people in Slack, Asana or Notion.

AI tools are coming out at an alarmingly fast rate. They’re solving problems we never even knew we had. I wonder if we will soon be able to quantify how much AI increases an individual’s output in any field.

Anyway, if you want to look like a great listener who never forgets a thing, here’s the link to check it out yourself.

Consume (Read / Watch / Listen)

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Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT and DALL.E. Four years ago, he wrote a blog piece titled How To Be Successful.

He writes about 13 points and I’ll list them below. If you want to read the whole thing, which I recommend you do, you can read it here.

1. Compound yourself

2. Have almost too much self-belief

3. Learn to think independently

4. Get good at “sales”

5. Make it easy to take risks

6. Focus

7. Work hard

8. Be bold

9. Be willful

10. Be hard to compete with

11. Build a network

12. You get rich by owning things

13. Be internally driven

He goes into detail on each point, but just scrolling through these once in a while can act as a reminder. To check if you’re staying on your chosen path.

Concept

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AI

What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence is a combination of computer science and a huge amount of data. Training systems on huge amounts of data enable these systems to problem solve. This forms part of machine learning, where these systems are trained to recall and respond in a way that suits us.

We can train each programme on a unique set of data to solve a particular type of problem. Take ChatGPT for example. It’s trained on a wide range of data and, although its responses are technically correct, it may not be entirely accurate in terms of context or relevance. Whereas Fireflies (above) is trained in a more specific set of data.

I’m sure you’re wondering why there’s a picture of the Pope above. It’s because AI produced that image. Someone wrote a text prompt into Midjourney, an AI image creator, and out came that image. It went viral because people believed it was real.

That’s the direction we’re heading at the moment and people aren’t sure if we’re prepared for it. AI is getting so good that we might not be able to trust anything online, and I literally mean anything. There’s AI to create music with singers’ voices. We can make deep fakes of politicians saying anything we like, make up podcasts, and most of the news articles these days are already being written by AI.

Don’t get me wrong, I love what AI is doing and where things are going, but we might be moving a bit too fast. At least that’s what 19,000 other people think who signed an open letter to pause giant AI experiments, and these people included Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Tristan Harris.

Throughout history, there has always been pushback against technological advancement and this isn’t any different. We might swing in one direction, but we will regulate to a new normal soon enough. Hopefully, in a more efficient and productive future where we can still tell what’s real and what isn’t.

Here’s a children’s book I created using AI.

Here’s an image of teachers protesting calculators in 1966.

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Thanks for Reading

See you next week.