📨 Weekly digest: 48 2024 | Why discipline and action (& 20% off^^) will define success in the age of intelligent assistance
How democratized achievement demands human execution | AI this week in the news; use cases; tools for the techies
👋🏻 Hello legends, and welcome to the weekly digest, week 48 of 2024.
We've touched upon a profound shift in the dynamics of personal achievement.
Possessing intelligence or knowledge is no longer enough; the real differentiator lies in effectively harnessing those resources.
Previously, access to expert advice, strategic planning, and personalized guidance was limited to a privileged few.
Now, these powerful tools are readily available with AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT, democratizing the path to success.
Imagine this: you can articulate your aspirations, no matter how ambitious, and receive a tailored roadmap outlining the steps, milestones, and even motivational nudges required to reach your goals.
This personalized blueprint, generated in mere moments, could previously have taken months of introspection, research, and consultations with expensive coaches or mentors.
Yet, this newfound accessibility presents a double-edged sword.
While the barriers to entry for planning and strategizing have been lowered, the onus of execution remains firmly on the individual.
It's akin to having a state-of-the-art kitchen with all the finest ingredients and appliances; the potential for culinary masterpieces is there, but it requires the chef's skill and dedication to bring those dishes to life.
This highlights a critical shift in the landscape of personal achievement.
While AI can provide the "what" and the "how," it cannot give the "will."
The drive, discipline, and resilience required to translate plans into action remain distinctly human traits. In a world saturated with information and readily available strategies, the true measure of success lies in the ability to execute, persevere, and adapt in the face of challenges.
This raises a profound philosophical question: As AI continues to democratize access to knowledge and strategic planning, will we see a shift in societal values, placing greater emphasis on the virtues of discipline, perseverance, and action? Will the ability to execute effectively become the defining characteristic of success in the age of AI?
Furthermore, this raises questions about the evolving nature of human agency.
As AI performs more cognitive tasks, will we witness a decline in critical thinking and problem-solving skills?
Or will this free us to focus on higher-level tasks, creativity, and emotional intelligence, leading to a new era of human flourishing?
The answers to these questions will shape the future of work, education, and personal development in the years to come.
What do you think?
I am looking forward to reading your thoughts in a comment.
Happy days,
Yael et al.
This week’s Wild Pod episode
This week’s Wild Chat
🦾 AI elsewhere on the interweb
#Perplexity is emerging as a bet that a narrow focus on using LLMs to redefine search can win against the OpenAI (and Anthropic) approach of a model that does everything, including search (this may perhaps also be a bet against LLMs scaling indefinitely). That seems to come with an impressive shipping cadence, and this week, it launched a shopping search. How many jobs-to-be-done can be refined from ‘get me the right link’ to ‘get me the answer’? [LINK]
According to The Information, #OpenAI is planning a pretty aggressive expansion of product scope: a web browser (would it bid for Chrome? It just hired one of its founding developers), integrated search, summarisation, and recommendation tools for third-party publishers, partnership for Samsung’s Android phones, and maybe more. Some of this is classic BD strategy, powerpointing, and platform-building (remember when it tried an app store?). Still, it also points to the more generalized shift from science projects wondering where it might get money to for-profit companies thinking about what it should be. So, what rows and columns would you put in your product development matrix? [LINK]
The US National Academy of Sciences published a lengthy report on possible economic consequences of LLMs. [LINK]
Fast access to our weekly posts
📌 Gen AI case study, Salesforce: enhancing customer service with AI-powered chatbots
🎯 How to build with AI agents | Building a safe and trustworthy future with virtual agents
🎲 Laying the foundation: the TOP framework approach to AI infrastructure
🚀 The AI time bomb: How data poisoning could corrupt our future
🚨❓What's your biggest concern about AI governance?
Previous digest
📨 Weekly digest
Thank you for being a subscriber and for your ongoing support.
If you haven’t already, consider becoming a paying subscriber and joining our growing community.
To support this work for free, consider “liking” this post by tapping the heart icon, sharing it on social media, and/or forwarding it to a friend.
Every little bit helps!