My Favorite Uses of AI

Recently, I was at the library & stood in front of a book that might be a good read. I fired up Gemini, asked it for a plot summary & a digest of the reviews before deciding to read it.

So I started a list : what are the ways I use AI that are new in the last year?

I often publish tables within these blog posts. I write posts in markdown, a language that requires making tables in a unique format that looks like this

| Column 1 | Column 2 |

| 2021 | 140m |

There’s a nifty little plugin for my text editor called Gen that converts data in nearly any format into these tables. I type comma+o & Gen formats the table in a few seconds. Or correct the grammar in a sentence or execute a quick search on a topic or summarize an email or format a list.

Within my email editor, I summarize long emails with the same command. Also, long articles on the internet.

AI is driving a broader behavior change : summarize, then determine whether to invest the effort to read.

I upload academic papers to a large language model, read the conclusion, & then badger the AI with questions, especially comparative ones.

Recently, Claude helped me understand the differences between the transformer AI architecture & Google’s Griffin architecture. Here’s another example exploring the Memory Wall within AI.

Voice is my most frequently used AI. I dictated to the Google Android Recorder app to dump all my thoughts at once and then click the summarize button to send myself notes or todos.

On my Mac, it’s the same thing with Whisper. I wrote a Python script so I can hold down the left option key on my Mac, & the computer will transcribe what I say while it’s depressed.

I use the same software to trancribe & summarize podcasts with Ollama & an LLM locally.

Image generation for blog post images & code completion remain persistent uses as well.

What’s your favorite way to use AI?