Learn to Use AI Like I Do

FUTURE

Becoming an AI Expert User Today

Welcome back! This week, we are looking at the first part of a two-parter in which I will give you my honest view of how Generative AI should be used today (or at least how I use it).

Today’s article will focus on how I use it in my daily life; the next part will be how I use it in my businesses. Thus, today’s newsletter includes the following:

How I understand foundation models and how that shapes how I interact with them

A short guide of recommended use cases

My best advice to get the most out of each interaction, from learning why threatening the models works to pro tips like explicit creativity mode or self-consistency.

This is not a technical read; it requires zero knowledge of Generative AI or AI in general. In fact, the less you know, the more useful it will be, but still includes tips that will be helpful to anyone independently of their expertise.

By the end, I guarantee you will have become a better Generative AI user, an expert who is way more deliberate, confident, and prepared than anyone around you.

If AI won’t take your job, but a human using AI will, why not be that human?

Let’s dive in.

A Primer on GenAI - How to Think About an AI Model

I will focus exclusively on Large Language Models, or LLMs, products like ChatGPT or Gemini. Even though AI is much broader, every reference in this newsletter to ‘AI models’ refers to these guys.

Let me start with a non-technical, purely vibes-based intuition about how to think of these products. This sets the tone for every interaction I have with them; it’s literally my test as to whether an AI can help me with ‘x’ or ‘y’ or not.

And I’m pretty sure it will help you, too.

First, a disclaimer: I highly discourage attribution of consciousness, sentience, or any anthropomorphizing of AI models. In fact, I highly encourage you to be deliberate about your treatment of AI models as ‘it’, not ‘he’ or ‘she’.

Never, and I mean never, attribute it characteristics of human nature, as that will backfire. Your brain desires the anthropomorphization of AIs, so if you give in to these desires, you will soon be developing a relationship with these models that can get pretty dark and lead to unwanted behaviors by you and by ‘it’ (and the model will perform worse too, and by worse I mean sycophantic, ending with a product that will endlessly praise you for no reason).

Instead, view AIs as knowledge map tools, and yourself as a knowledge retriever.

To drive this home, let’s use an even more familiar analogy: books. But not the dusty ones sitting on your shelf.

I’m being deliberate about using the word ‘knowledge’ here, as plenty of mechanistic evidence proves these models compress the underlying knowledge in their training set. In other words, they are not mere databases that simply…

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