Prompt Playbook: Next Steps in AI Entrepreneurship PART 5

I know exactly when a new big AI model release is coming.

It’s a superpower. And a curse.

I know because it happens everytime I get on a plane to enjoy a holiday away.

The most hilarious was when I was literally taxiing at Heathrow, about to takeoff, and GPT-4 dropped.

Every. Damn. Time.

Because the pace of change in AI is incessant.

Another model. Another set of capabilities to learn. Another shift in what's possible. Another round of "is my expertise still relevant?" Great vibe to take on holiday!

Then I remember something crucial: I'm not trying to be the smartest AI person in the room. I'm trying to be the most helpful AI person to my industry.

That changes everything.

When GPT-4 launched, I didn't panic about learning every new feature. I asked: "How does this help the people I talk to work faster?" When Midjourney v6 dropped, I didn't stress about mastering every parameter. I focused on: "What can my students do with this?"

The AI field will never stop evolving. That's not a bug - it's a feature. Your job isn't to know everything about AI. It's to stay current enough to build your business and do well in the world of AI.

Let’s get started

It’s a bitter-sweet day. It’s the end of the 50 day AI Summer Camp. And you’ve come a long long way. We’re wrapping up now with some tips on staying in the loop so that you can continue your AI entrepreneurship journey.

You don’t need me anymore! You’re super well equipped for whatever AI is going throw at us. The key is just staying on top of everything in a sensible way that doesn’t overwhelm us.

Staying Current vs. Staying Cutting-Edge

You do not need to know everything going on in AI. AI is a broad field - much broader than even genAI (ie. LLMs like ChatGPT). So already we’re focusing our attention - the current “modern” AIs are really a very small subset of the larger field of AI.

We’re just going to constrain our focus even more. We’ll focus on what parts of AI makes sense for our industry and business. And tune out the rest.

Staying cutting-edge means knowing every new model, every feature update, every technical advancement. It's exhausting, expensive, and largely irrelevant to your audience and customers.

Heck, even I can’t do this and I’m pretty much living and breathing this stuff on the day to day. And I talk to other content creators and AI entrepreneurs and they are exactly the same - there’s no way to drink from the firehose of information in a meaningful way.

Staying current means understanding which developments actually impact your industry. It's focused, practical, and directly valuable to your audience. What specifically is important for your business?

And easy example - does your product use AI imagery in any way? Nope - it’s purely text based? Sweet: we can ignore a lot of the updates on diffusion models and the like. It’s just not in our wheelhouse and that’s fine!

This means your approach should be

Industry-first, not AI-first. When new AI tools launch, your first question isn't "What can this do?" It's "How does this help my audience and customers?" Useful reframe that immediately filters out noise.

Practical filter over everything. You (probably!) don't need to deeply understand transformer architecture. It’s cool. And fun to learn about. But will it ultimately help the people you serve? Your customers? Probably not!

Translation over technical knowledge. Remember that your value isn't knowing how AI works. It's knowing how to make AI work for your particular industry.

This mindset shift is liberating. You're not competing with AI researchers or technical experts. By all means read their work - it’s fascinating and thought provoking. But don’t compare yourself to them unnecessarily. We’re doing something different to them!

Your AI Learning Stack

Here's the exact stack that will put you ahead of 99.99% of people. Probably 99.999%.

For AI insights and research

• Ethan Mollick on social media (Twitter and LinkedIn) + his book "Co-Intelligence"

• Nate B Jones for technical depth made accessible

For staying current with developments

• The Rundown AI for AI news

• My news update newsletter for curated daily updates (with more snarky commentary than the Rundown! Love ya Rowan 🤣)

For understanding how this stuff actually works

• "What is ChatGPT Doing?" by Stephen Wolfram (free online + Amazon)

• Andrej Karpathy's