7th Brain Weekly - #3
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 Friday (or whichever day you happen to read this)! There was no shortage of new updates and exciting releases to cover this week.
A small announcement before we delve into the news:
If you missed it, I've launched a sister newsletter called Tana Tuesdays that will be sent out, you guessed it, on Tuesdays. A large percentage of my readers are Tana users or Tana-curious and in order to best serve everyone I'm going to split off Tana specific content into that newsletter. If you want to follow along you can add Tana Tuesdays in your account portal for free. I've also released my ✅ Super Simple Task Template to celebrate.
Alright, back to the important news.
Big Stuff
This week has been all about AI search. We got big releases from 3 major players in this area, with Google and OpenAI both releasing Perplexity competitors and Perplexity rolling out some new features:
- OpenAI publicly released SearchGPT and a companion Chrome extension.
- Google launched Grounding with Google Search for Gemini.
- Perplexity launched their MacOS app.
These improvements come as an effort to battle hallucinations so common in LLMs and in a move to topple Google's control over real time relevant results.
Anthropic News
The creators of Claude released some big features and improvements on what feels like every day this week. As I'm typing this they've just announced visual PDF support which should be a major boon for knowledge workers, especially anyone working with complicated documents with charts and diagrams.
Other announcements include:
- Dictating messages to Claude via the mobile apps.
- A desktop app release of their own.
- Claude availability in Github Copilot.
- The launch of a code analysis tool.
This Week's Article
My focus this week was on all things voice, and I wasn't alone. During the Tana Office Hours last Thursday - the hosts were joined by CEO Tarjei M. Vassbotn who mentioned that they believe AI + Voice is the new UX and they will be putting a heavy focus on voice interaction.
I happen to agree and I discussed the importance of AI and voice in this week's article:
Sarah Bentley
Multiple companies also made updates to their voice functionalities including OpenAI who brought Advanced Voice Mode to their desktop apps, as well as Realtime API improvements like prompt caching, new voices and more.
Tip of the Week
Our first tip comes from Ethan Mollick on X. Instead of having AI explain to your children, ask AI how you can explain it to them. I love this twist that helps maintain that human connection.
For parents who want to help their kids with a hard school concept but don't want them to use AI directly:
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) October 29, 2024
Show the LLM the problem your kid is stuck on and prompt: "how can I, as a parent, explain to my kid, grade N, how to solve this" and then use the advice to help tutor them
The second tip comes from me after seeing a recurring theme around social media this week:
Just write stuff.
Here are some sources of inspiration:
- Writes and Write-Nots from Paul Graham
- Ethan Mollick's reaction to Paul's essay
- Writing as a Way of Thinking by Dan Shipper
News and Interesting Finds
- In what might be relevant to many readers, popular llm ranking site lmarena.ai has added a new category: Creative Writing Arena. You can see below how the different models stack up.
- Sam Altman and Co held a Reddit AMA on Halloween. Here's a great summary from Tibor Blaho.
- The scientists over at Osmo figured out how to digitize the scent of a fresh summer plum.
- Andrew Gao wrote an essay discussing How the best products are approaching UI/UX for generative ai features.
- Check out Oasis, the first playable, realtime, open-world AI model.
- In his latest newsletter, Dr. Daniel Bender talks about preparing young minds for an AI future.
- GitHub's new Spark platform helps anyone build AI-powered apps with natural language.
- "The White House issued a National Security Memorandum declaring that 'AI is likely to affect almost all domains with national security significance'." Here's a thread all about it from @AndrewCurran_.
App and Plugin Updates
- Popular Read-it-Later app Omnivore is joining forces with Eleven Labs. The important news is that all Omnivore users should export their data from the service before November 15 2024, after which all information will be deleted. 😬
- Notion had their big Make with Notion event where they announced Notion Mail which incorporates AI via custom reply prompts and other interesting features. Join the Waitlist.
- Apple Intelligence was finally released to the public.
- Google released Learn About, their new experiment that helps you "grasp new topics and deepen your understanding with a 💬 conversational learning companion that adapts to your unique curiosity and learning goals."
- Fibery has decided to update their pricing to include AI features for no extra cost.
- AI Podcast app Snipd has added support for custom prompts.
- @Taskade is introducing Autonomous Task Agents, now in Beta! Request access here.
- There's a new AI-powered Obsidian plugin called Metadata-Auto-Classifier that automatically generates tags and classifies metadata for your notes.
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!
