TL;DR
I started to intentionally see how much AI can impact my life over the holiday, so I incorporate as many AI tools as possible into my daily life, both at work and at home. I wrote down some of the scenarios I encountered with AI and shared my experience and thoughts.
When I ask what, why or how?
Asking “what, why and how” happens a lot for me. I search things like “what is flood insurance, and why people buy it”. My typical workflow is having a Chrome tab open and another tab to research. I search from the address bar (yes, I like to do it). Then open more tabs to dive deep. The amount tab and window switches are a lot. After years, my tab/switching is seamless now but I’d like to avoid. I used ChatGPT desktop on my mac, perplexity etc. It saves a lot of tabs I have to open when I do research, and that’s where most of back-and-forth Q&A happens.
Ideally, in-context chat is very convenient and many of my productivity apps have integrations. However, they have slightly different experience when prompting with its underlying LLM. This makes a bit annoy that I have to tune my prompts to make it more efficient, but I get it that GPT might be different from Claude models just like talking with different people. Perhaps, it’s a skill to learn how to work with different LLMs.
When I want to learn things fast!
I have a lot of curiosity about different things, so I often spend time to research them. For instance, I learn enconomics during my leisure time. I learn by visual and listening the most and am slow in reading. But I discovered Google’s NotebookLM, a great product fits me well. I dump the stuff I need to learn - links, PDFs, videos - it summarizes and extracts the knowledge with me. I can interact with it and do Q&A. The most effective feature to me is the audio generation where a two people discussion audio is generated. I just listen and learn it. This works with me very well. This also reminds how important product-market fit is for AI.
A side note on NotebookLM: it is also a good tool to produce your Podcast. I actually also found NotebookLM generated Podcast on https://www.xiaohongshu.com.
Listen to music
Music is important to me. I listen Spotify everyday. I learned Suno from a Podcast and tried it out. It’s cool! It’s a good supplement to my current Spotify playlist. My kid and I have some fun to play with it and produce our music. Try this one from the below prompt:
I want to write a song. Today is the best day ever. I had a lot of fun with my friends and play toys. I am very happy.
However, the generated music often lacks of emotion. The music is pretty much emotional netural. I changed a few prompts to try to enforce emotions, but failed. Unlike generated music, human music is emotional containgeous as it compresses more than just lyrics and sound but life as well.
Help answer my kid’s “why” question
My kid really likes to ask why every day. I found myself limited to some of his “whys”. Glady, I find Google’s Learn About is a great tool to save me. For instance, we were talking about blackhole and I use learn about. It’s an interesting experience with text and video explaination together.
When I want to research financial stuff
The financial world has a lot of content that sometimes is hard to understand. I often look at examples. Having GPT to provide examples are pretty useful to quickly grasp the concept. I would definitely double check it, but so far it seems to be ok with the factual stuff. An example on “the wheels option strategy” below.
Next, I asked a more opinionated question regarding Tesla stock price. GPT is conservative and only refer to Internet resources. IMO, it is probably the right thing to do. I don’t think I will purely rely on GPT to make financial decisions. I expect some good AI Agents in financial space will come up to assist the analysis process.
My side husle helper
Side husle is a great way for me to test out new ideas. When I write code, and Cursor is my friend. I am actually impressed by how much Cursor can accomplish when helping me coding. The tab tab experience is good. The .cursorrules are helpful to make repo wide changes too. As an engineer myself, Cursor is super helpful and enough. I also learned Devin is good too. I categorize myself as a builder. Writing code is part of me, I’d prefer tools to help me achieve the code I want to write instead of creating the entire application for me.
Multimodal is very powerful. I used it to create logo for a Podcast. I am happy with the result.
My thoughts for now
- Various AI tools are boosting my productivity for sure. I used it mostly for factual Q&As for now. I’m actually exciting about the upcoming waves of AI Agents that could help take actions for me.
- For education, NotebookLM and Learn About are very good AI product for learn and discover.
- For creative work, how does the generation relates to people’s life is the key. Solving it perhaps will release the power of creativity generation.