“Hey Chat”
“Hey Noah, How’s it going?”
“What am I doing right now?”
“Looks like you’re in class or giving a speech”
“That’s right, can you teach me two Chinese words real quick”
“Word 1 and 2”
“What’s the latest with the tariff saga, and how has it affected the US bond market? Feel free to search if you need to”
“Response”
“Great, thanks chat”.
3 months ago I gave a speech imploring my classmates to start using AI for 10 minutes every day. I pulled out my phone, switched to GPT video + voice mode, pointed it at the class, and conversed with the AI in the above words. The energy in the room matched what I had been feeling for months, and this was just the beginning.
I continued with a comparison between the launch of AI and the launch of the internet…
Tech leaders, like Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, have called these the two the most significant technological breakthroughs of the past 40 years.
The internet was technically invented in 1983, but the first public-facing browser was Mosaic, and that was released in 1993. It’s been two and a half years since the first major AI release: ChatGPT, which puts our timeline at about 1995 in internet years.
And in that 1995 world…
Amazon was just beginning to sell books.
Google was 3 years from its inception.
Facebook was 9 years from launching.
YouTube wouldn’t appear for another decade.
Uber’s launch was 15 years in the future.
Discord was 20 years away.
TikTok was 21 years from release and 25 from virality.
AI stands at a similar juncture today: the tools are here, and it’s not going to go away. What does this mean for the future? Well, it is still wide open. It can be easy to forget how early we are when change is happening so fast.
I’ve generally been a pretty early adopter to new tech. At 10 years old, I wrote a 10 page paper on internet stranger danger (font size 28) in order to get my parents to let me make a Facebook. I started on Instagram with filtered pictures in middle school, and tweeted unprompted play-by-play reactions for the Cleveland Browns back when Johnny Manziel was manning the offense in 2014.
Since then, not much has changed.
I’ve been using ChatGPT nearly since its inception and started using Gemini not soon after. This year, I’ve been trying to fix my golf swing by creating a computer vision trainer using Claude and Cursor. I’m a novice engineer, but I’ve made strides. And while all of this is true, and I take my own advice by using, researching with, and training AI’s, I still feel like I'm simply not keeping up. There is so much new information coming out, and the space is moving so quickly, that the more tweets I read, and the more podcasts I listen to, the further behind I feel.
I’ve observed the good…
Tech leaders talking about how they use AI models within their companies.
PM's and engineers tweeting out interesting AI use cases on a daily basis.
Friends talking about how they improve their day-day workflows with AI.
The questionable…
Claims of technical breakthroughs daily.
Products announced as instant industry killers.
Meta poaching employees and paying software engineers as if they are NBA free agents.
And the bad…
Bots that talk about making thousands a month with simple AI tricks.
AI slop across my TikTok feed.
Panic of AI induced job-loss.
What I’ve realized is this, and stop me if you’ve realized it too:
It’s difficult to passively keep up with the changes in AI. To distinguish and notate between the good, the bad and the questionable takes time. Constant reading and bookmarking tweets is a good effort, but at the end of the day, you actually have to go back and look at them. Half the battle is distinguishing between the hyperbole and the game changers, and in an environment moving as fast as this one, the former can become the latter in mere weeks.
I’ve recognized that I'm not doing everything I can to maximize my knowledge in the field, and I’m going to change how I operate.
From this point forward, I’ll be putting time aside each week to actively dive into the world of AI, and I welcome you to come along. I’ll be tracking weekly developments from the most important companies, highlighting legitimate use cases by industry, and having conversations with folks to make sense of where this is all heading. For my VC friends, I’ll also be highlighting startups that I find are making an impact in the AI landscape.
Join me as I break down what matters, what’s hype, and what’s actually changing the game, all in a weekly newsletter built for those who want to stay ahead.
Noah on AI will be available every Tuesday at 8 a.m.
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