7th Brain Weekly - #2
7th Brain Weekly covers AI and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). Each issue features insights on AI tools, PKM workflows, trends, and practical tips, along with curated news and resources.
Happy Thursday my friends!
What a week it's been in the PKM + AI world. Lots of updates and announcements happened, so let's get right to it!
Big News
We've officially entered Level 3 AGI, the age of the agent:
The biggest news of the week comes from AI company Anthropic. On Tuesday (October 22, 2024) they announced:
- An updated 3.5 Sonnet model
- A new 3.5 Haiku model (to be released later this month)
- A new capability in beta: computer use
Even though it shares the same name as its predecessor, the new Sonnet makes some important improvements in areas such as coding as reasoning. The biggest shock to me was the leap in reasoning as discussed by AI Explained in his latest video. His SimpleBench benchmark tests show the new 3.5 Sonnet to be basically inline with OpenAI's 01-preview model with a score of ~41%, a result I did not expect! The new model improves upon its predecessor in nearly every measurement:
A somewhat hidden gem in this announcement is the new 3.5 Haiku model which improves upon the powerhouse Claude 3 Opus in pretty much every way but at an insanely low cost. Not to mention "it scores 40.6% on SWE-bench Verified, outperforming many agents using publicly available state-of-the-art models—including the original Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o." !! The original 3.5 Sonnet was widely seen as the best coding model, so this is an incredible result!
Computer use, available now via the API, allows the model to take actions on the user's computer, such as mouse clicks, scrolling and similar actions. There's a lot to say about the new computer use capabilities, too much to go deeply into in this newsletter, but here is a short video showing some of what is now possible:
There is a lot to be covered in these new releases and I hope to do a dedicated write-up to discuss just what, if anything, this means for you and your knowledge work.
This Week's Articles
No new articles from me this week as I've been dealing with some health stuff, but here is my primer on Artificial Intelligence and Personal Knowledge Management in case you missed it!
Sarah Bentley
Tip of the Week
@wilreynolds on X/Twitter pointed out that Readwise now allows you to export all of your highlights to NotebookLM (via Google Docs). This allows you to chat, ask questions and use all of NotebookLM's features (including Audio Overview) over all of your highlights, and it autoupdates! So cool!
So @readwise dropped a 1 click integration to NotebookLM - allowing me to search every highlight in every article I've read in the last 6 years and every kindle highlight for the last 12 years, in my own language, with citations. Oh and it auto updates with each new highlight :) pic.twitter.com/8X8O3V8SZX
— Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) October 22, 2024
News and Interesting Finds
- Joel Chan asks: "Can #toolsforthought like RoamResearch, Obsidian, and Notion actually help us think better? If so, how?" and dives in with this awesome paper. Here's the twitter announcement.
- Speaking of NotebookLM, they've released some new features including allowing you to guide the AI hosts and customize their expertise level, listen to AI Overviews in the background and a new business pilot program.
- The Reflect team has shared a helpful spreadsheet full of custom prompts for all types of use cases.
- AI Applied (Youtube) discusses how ChatGPT's New Canvas Mode is The Future of AI Writing Assistants
- Notion has acquired the AI company Aquarium, whose mission is to "accelerate the process of building and deploying production AI systems". Will be interesting to see just how they incorporate their expertise in this area!
- There's a new app called OneTask that aims to use AI to completely automate the process for creatives, individuals with ADHD, and those on the neurodivergent spectrum by showing you the one task you need to do next.
App Updates
- André Foeken has been dropping updates left and right for his new app InboxAI that allows power users to set up advanced AI workflows and automations on their Mac.
- There's a new Obsidian plugin called LLM Summary:
- "Minimize your efforts for lazy note-takers. Before your readings, summarize all PDF files in a folder to your vault with the power of LLMs (like GPTs from OpenAI). During your readings, define concepts to new *.MD notes and create a link to each."
- Calendar app Morgen has released their October updates, which include using AI to make it easier to set up recurrence patterns.
- Popular AI app Voicenotes has released widgets for iOS.
- Perplexity introduced Internal Knowledge Search and Spaces for everyone. now you can upload your own files to use as reference alongside the normal search.
- RemNote has added RemNote AI which adds features like AI Create Flashcards, Tutor Chat, Image-to-Text, AI Flashcard Insights, AI Grading, AI MCQ Explanations, PDF Cards and more!
Thanks for reading! If you’ve found this useful, feel free to share with a friend. As always, if you have any suggestions or requests, reach out and let me know what you have in mind!
