Newsletter #7 - AI Interns, Bravery, and the Swedish Model

Hello everyone,

I apologize for the late-night newsletter. I wanted to get it out today, Monday but have struggled to finish it during the day therefore the late send-out. I hope this email finds you well.

I am currently looking for a Master's thesis for the fall and things are moving forward. In the next few weeks, I hope to finalize the thesis topic and be ready for the fall. It feels strange but exciting to be almost finished with my university studies. An exciting thing that happened last week was that it was the 10th anniversary of The Tim Ferriss Show and I signed up for the meetup in Gothenburg. I was unsure of what to expect but it ended up being an amazing evening together with a bunch of great people many of which were from TedX Göteborg. It goes to show that we should get out of our comfort zones and say yes to things like that!

💭Weekly Thought

This winter I took a course in Entrepreneurship as a part of my engineering degree. One of the tasks in the course was to create a new venture in a group of 4 and try to implement the things we were learning in the course.

One idea I had was to create a newsletter focusing on how students could better utilize ChatGPT for both their academic and personal lives. Now I am no expert in AI, but I had a thought that “even if we lose - as in the business fails, we will win - because we will have gained the knowledge of how to leverage AI ourselves”. This was inspired by the thinking of Tim Ferriss that you want to win even if you fail. However, there never became an AI newsletter for the group because when we emailed our professor he told me another professor called Ethan Mollick was already doing something similar. So sadly there never became an AI newsletter for students (instead we tried to create a company organizing pub crawls, but that is a story for another time). One good thing was that I was introduced to the newsletter One Useful Thing by Ethan Mollick about how to leverage AI.

I have been subscribed for a few months, passively reading the newsletter as it comes into my inbox, but the other day a flip switch. I have to begin using generative AI more, I used it quite a lot at first when ChatGPT launched to the public in 2022 but now I am not using it so much anymore. I decided to take action after hearing Ethan Mollick say that it usually takes around 10 hours of usage before people understand the power of AI and you must use the latest models, meaning you should pay for ChatGPT 4 if you are in Sweden (the other cutting edge models are not available in Sweden). So I got a subscription and I am now trying to onboard my AI intern.

I am integrating ChatGPT into many of my daily tasks. While sometimes it works great, there are moments when it struggles, but encountering these challenges is how you discover its limitations and potential. I believe it is important for us all to learn how to use these tools to enable us to increase our output. Ethan Mollick states that AI is not as good as the best humans today instead it is generally around the 80th percentile in many fields. This means we can strengthen many of our weaknesses and focus on where our strength lies. Although I am sometimes concerned about AI replacing human jobs, I think that in the near term, AI will mostly increase our output if used correctly. To achieve this, we must understand the best ways to utilize it; otherwise, we risk being replaced.

"You won’t be replaced by AI, you will be replaced by a person who is using AI" - Scott Galloway

🖋Quote of the Week

The quote below is from the famous US Navy Seal and podcast host Jocko Willink. The idea is that bravery can't be faked, because if you are afraid to do something while "faking bravery", you are being brave. I find this idea intriguing and try to remind myself of it whenever I face something that scares me.

"You can't fake bravery as an emotion. You can fake being angry or upset or whatever, but if you fake bravery when you're terrified, that's bravery. Doing the thing in spite of being terrified is what bravery is." - Jocko Willink

🎧Content I Have Enjoyed This Week

I re-listened to Tim Ferriss' interview with Daniel Ek this week based on a recommendation from the meetup last week and it is a great episode. The interview discusses how the Swedish model allows for risk-taking, Spotify's culture, and how to run better meetings. If you have any interest in Spotify or entrepreneurship this podcast is a great listen. Here are my three main takeaways:

1. Sometimes you have to be unreasonable to change the world. Daniel presents the quote below as an inspiration for this.
   1. ”The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” –Georg Bernard Shaw
2. A key metric for success in future leaders according to Daniel is their rate of learning. The faster they are able to pick up new information and adapt the better suited they are for leadership in our dynamic world.
3. "Be kind, everyone is on their own journey"–Daniel Ek

Have a great week!

Oskar