AI Productivity

Back in the swinging sixties, the “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue used wit and creativity (and an endless supply of cigarettes) to turn out one advertising campaign after another. Fast forward 60 years, and we see a starkly different landscape where AI brainstorming is the new black. Here’s the thing, brainstorming can be fun. But more often than not, you’re stuck in a stuffy room, the taste of your sixth…

“To prompt or not to prompt, that is the question.” If Shakespeare lived today, he would have more success in using ChatGPT than a software engineer. After all, prompt engineering — the art of interacting with AI models — is more of a verbal soliloquy than a coding symphony. Chances are that by now you’ve tried a dozen popular AI tools. Maybe you’ve coaxed ChatGPT to generate witty haikus or…

From “Star Trek’s” Holodeck to Tony Stark’s JARVIS in “Iron Man,” the idea of artificial intelligence creating intellectual value has been a staple of science fiction for decades. In today’s article, we take a closer look at generative AI tools that make those visions a reality. The current wave of generative AI tools are smart, capable, and learning new tricks at a pace humans can’t compete with. They can “paint”…

Have you ever wondered how Siri or Alexa understand your requests? Why is ChatGPT so good at decoding the nuances of Shakespearean sonnets? Or how your bank’s chatbot can sympathize with your financial woes? The answer is Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is one of the core technologies that power modern AI systems and tools. In most cases, it works behind the scenes, translating the nuances of human language into…

The IBM 7090 computer tasked with trajectory calculations at mission control for the Apollo 11 space mission had a clock speed of about 2 MHz, but it still managed to take humans to the moon and back, a wildly ambitious and high-stakes project by any standards. Fast-forward a little over 50 years, AI project management tools running on a regular smartphone let project managers plan, manage, and execute complex projects…

In the beginning, there was ChatGPT, an AI chatbot based on the GPT-3.5 large language model (LLM) developed by OpenAI. And ChatGPT was smart. It had wit, charm, and an almost encyclopedic knowledge of language and culture. But ChatGPT was also flawed in its design — it lacked autonomy and volition to perform complex tasks without human supervision. If LLMs were to write their origin story, this would make for…

Do you find yourself drowning in a sea of half-finished notes and forgotten ideas? Linking Your Thinking (LYT) is another note-taking system trying to wedge its way into the personal knowledge management (PKM) community with a promise of a more effective and satisfying note-taking experience. A promise that sounds too good to be true? Let’s find out. In today’s article, you’ll learn what Linking Your Thinking is, how it works,…

“The Answer.” “The Answer?” said Deep Thought.“The Answer to what?”“Life!” urged Fook. ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy It took the Deep Thought supercomputer from Douglas Adams’ classic novel 7 million years to produce a rather disappointing answer to the ultimate question (in case you’re wondering, it was “42”). But you don’t have to wait that long. In today’s article, we’ll show you how you can use…

When the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau visited the White House in 2016, the French part of his speech translated by ABC TV’s speech recognition software was riddled with quirks ranging from suave “portfolio of us old guys” to cryptic “agreeing. 032. clearing.” It wasn’t the finest performance of AI translation, but hey, everybody has to start somewhere. After years of development, artificial intelligence tools seem to be finally catching…

In the 1970s, British educational consultant Tony Buzan called mind mapping “a Swiss Army Knife for the brain.” Now that large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 has gone mainstream, you can use the power of AI for creating structured mind maps faster than ever before. The concept of a mind map is brilliant in its simplicity.  All you need to get started is a central idea or problem—this could be…

In the 1950s, AI could barely wrap a checkers (draughts) game before running out of memory. Fast forward seven exciting decades, large language models (LLMs) — AI systems that can understand natural language — are becoming an essential tool in our digital toolboxes. In today’s article, we review some of the best AI tools for productivity that will help you deal with all kinds of projects coming your way in…

In 1973, the AARON system designed by Harold Cohen created the first AI-generated piece of art. The black-and-white scribblings were far from what’s considered fine art, but they laid the foundation for some of the best AI image generators like DALLE-2 and Midjourney. Over the last 50 years, AI image generators have gotten much smarter. By analyzing and learning from large datasets of existing, original images, they can now create…