Happy Birthday, ChatGPT

And an update I've been dying to share with you for some time!

If you have not had a 90-minute conversation with ChatGPT yet—I fully recommend. Even if it’s just to see if by the end of it you want to murder the thing.

Free post.

I’ve got several exciting things to share with you.

1. Great news! I can now definitively confirm (no takebacks and no jinxes possible!) that I’m being featured, this newsletter is getting mentioned and most thrilling of all my new AI human-powered marketplace yougotthis.ai is being plugged in a major, beloved magazine on Dec. 12 on newsstands all around the country with millions of readers. Thank you as deeply as one can deeply thank a man to Jerry Stahl for the connection, and if you’ve never read Jerry Stahl he is basically this generation’s Lester Bangs or Hunter S. Thompson except better (and Ben Stiller made a movie of his life) so read all his books if you know what’s good for you (I particularly enjoyed his most recent memoir here). This is why I took the hiatus to build the marketplace (and heads up: why I will be extending it through Dec. 13 to spend as much remaining time as I can doing outreach and onboarding AI guides to the new site before then—which means billing will be on hold until then—so go wild in the archives in the interim for free!).

2. I’ll be publishing one post before then. It’ll be a public-facing post that I can link on all my socials that I feel like makes the value proposition of the site, the process of how it works and the value to guides who join it as clear as possible and that doesn’t have distracting housekeeping business included.

3. Why should you care about any of this? Because this is a blog about building in public harnessed by AI, and well, this is about as building in public as one can get. I know intimately how overwhelming and psychologically intimidating it can be to take your shot, and my hope is that by writing about doing this you can see that it’s okay to make mistakes along the way—and that, honestly, the most important part is to force yourself to ship, to iterate, to create and to push yourself forward in a healthy, positive-risk-taking way. I’ve never been happier doing so—and 10/10, would recommend to others!

Until I do return—rather than giving you an in-depth breakdown on news, I would like to give you some high-level observations that I hope will help you navigate this utterly wildly informational landscape we’re currently dealing with right now.

First of all—can you believe it’s been one year to the day that the world changed with the birth of ChatGPT? I can’t. I’ve seen the income of everyone I know who uses AI rise—and in this brutal economy, that’s something I’m extremely grateful for.

Is AI—particularly ChatGPT—gaslighting and enraging at times?

Absolutely.

But, my friends, so are a lot of people in society. Don’t miss the forest for the trees. It’s 1995 days all over again. (To the tune of Kool & the Gang…) Innovation time, come on!

Just keep your head in using it (“take what you like and leave the rest” is a lovely application here), and you’ll be good.

And now, a few high-level observations on all the AI upheaval and innovation from the last few months:

1. Guard your brain. What do I mean by that? Well—I’ve noticed that the firehose of non-stop chaotic news (how many hours did I spend reading about the OpenAI Succession-style upheaval only to feel like I had ultimately gone on a never-feeling-satisfied Cheetoh’s binge or something) is an addiction-fostering, open-loop-creating, concentration-destroying adversary. Observe what you get out of it. Be really honest. If you can, just be aware of this like you would a walking meditation. To wit: Now I’m checking social media. Now it’s 3, 4, 5 hours later reading about something that has very little effect on my life when I could have gotten a tech certification within that same period of time…

2. By the same token, the onslaught of AI news (if you follow it at all like I do) can feel utterly soul-destroying at times because chaos is exactly that. I find seeking out nurturing sources such as the deeply calming Stanford prof Andrew Ng and the deeply wise Wharton prof Ethan Mollick can feel like clarifying, life-improving, outlook-lifting tonics in a storm of thread-bois and $499.99 course upsells that actively make you stupider and poorer and pissed that you got scammed (either out of money or time or honesty of informational discourse). Understand deep in your heart: Most of the paid courses and groups and masterminds are actively worse than so much of the education that is out there for free. How to find the best free education? Well, I did a deep round-up of many of the best options out there several months back—but if you’re in a pinch, remember to look at Github. I just did a Google search for “free certifications,” “aws” and “github” and found this terrific repository of resources. Geeks do not like ripping people off. Go where the geeks go. The geeks go to Github.

3. If you feel scared, let education lift the terror and increase the empowerment. Two days ago Amazon’s AWS—which powers 90 percent of Fortune 100 businesses—unveiled Q, their AI chatbot to assist with using AWS and that lets you ask questions of your data that is integrated into AWS. If you’re looking to be competitive in the modern tech landscape (or you want to guide kids) I can’t recommend AWS certifications enough. Here’s another contrary, other-end-of-the-spectrum statistic. I’d say about 90 percent of the discourse online surrounding tech devolves into “it’s the end of the world…again” because there is a fairly high level of technical illiteracy that most will not ever actively admit to. Which creates this gigantic disparity of skills. So…if you can resist: Don’t fall for the seduction of the Terminator narrative—and if you want, see if you can play around with shifting mentally from being a consumer to being a creator. You’re the one who knocks, baby! (Don’t know why I’m quoting Breaking Bad—but there we are.)

4. It’s worth trying out the custom GPTs you can make on ChatGPT. You can create so many custom GPTs for different needs that you have (are you constantly having to write captions for your food blog? just create your custom GPT so you don’t have to constantly pre- and re-train it according to your needs). I’ve seen and heard a lot of success stories. Here’s one to try if you’re a coder.

5. It’s worth familiarizing yourself with the workflow for creator an AI model. Fireship has a great video here, and the way that I see it is: Why wouldn’t you create some AI influencer just for the learning process alone? And if you eventually use it to promote some Clickbank or other affiliate site, as long as you are transparent about it being an AI model, this is the brave new world we are entering. I’d like to eventually create a few of them and have them interact in an entire character-driven universe together, testing out different narrative plots while also garnering affiliate money. I’ll also add—it wasn’t until I looked into this one AI model named Emily Pellegrini—that I realized that the AI competitor to OnlyFans is already here called Fanvue (here is that very popular AI model’s NSFW profile there). One of the reasons I think it’s worth trying to do the workflow (and if it’s too technically challenging, hire a guide on yougotthis.ai — that’s what we’re here for!) is because it will also be a masterclass in learning not to fall for AI model funnels yourself.

6. I have very little interest in Elon Musk’s new Grok. It costs $16/month and is trained on data from X (formerly Twitter), which is deluged in misinformation so I don’t understand why I would want that. It’s also “funny,” which unless funniness really hits exactly right is sort of the last thing you want in an AI (at least for me, personally). Do you want me to report on Grok and try it out? I’m open. Let me know.

7. I highly recommend the experience of having a conversation with ChatGPT just to see what it’s like. As you can see in the screengrab above I wanted to throttle it a lot of the time, but it had the same positive effect it always has for me in getting me past the blank screen—or in this case the blank mind—when I was iterating verbally. Because even if you hate what it comes up with, you will react to that, and you will no longer be starting from zero.

8. Play with GPT as much as you can and you will benefit so much. Two fun points I’ve learned from watching a lot of Mollick interviews are: a) You can have a grand old time by just playing with GPT to see what it does when you put it to the test, like so. The game he likes to play is to ask it for an obscure 1800s sociological theory, a random patent, a random food and then you ask it to draw pattern connections between these vectors to come up with several innovative business ideas. I’ve tried this several times, and I swear to God, every time I’m impressed with the results. b) He makes the wonderful point that one of the most robust ways to learn with AI is to be constantly conducting experiments—seeing what happens when you push it in a different way to get an idea of the capabilities. The example he gave is that he recently asked the wrong modality—the code generator versus the image generator—on it for an image, and what it returned in exchange was innovative and fascinating. Cool, yeah? Cool.

I hope some of this is helpful to you—and I appreciate your patience and positivity more than I could ever express.

One last point I’ll make, actually, because I think this will help a lot of people who may find themselves sometimes feeling confused, demoralized and stressed right now as the world changes technologically at such a rapid rate…is this:

Being uncomfortable and being pushed intellectually—sometimes even feeling out of your depth—is one of the greatest things you can do for your brain.

This is how you learn.

This is how you grow.

You don’t need to be afraid of it.

Just reframe it as the proper thrill-ride that it is.