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Action Item

Focus Batching

Like any solopreneur or small business owner, you have documents strewn all over your machines.

If you are blessed enough to have an organized assistant helping you, then it might not be so bad, but for most of us there are documents in many places.

If there is any documentation at all…

Having Claude power through your documents for you can be an exciting thing to try! But you can spend an awful lot of time grabbing and summarizing documents that mean little to your bottom line, or freeing you up to get out of your daily busy work.

I work with my clients on something I call “Focus Batching”. This is where you get a list of all the things you want to focus on and you pick ONE, and focus on THAT alone. When done with that one, you move on to the next one.

Yeah, I know, boring boring boring. Where’s the fun in such organization and drudgery!?

Here’s the payoff: you will nail your most important focus completely and be out of those weeds sooner. You can start to get your hands out of it and buy back your time every week.

When you tackle the things that matter most FIRST, you get the most benefit FIRST, get your hands out of the weeds FASTER, and give yourself breathing room QUICKLY!

How you do this is to not look at your documents, but look at your processes. Take just one or two core processes you and your team do, list out the steps, and then point out those that have gaps or issues causing you pain or large effort. If you don’t have gaps or issues…yeah ok…then look at just the steps and pick those that are too much effort for you.

• List them all out in order of pain/effort. Put all your focus on the top one. Just that one.

• Find or create any document you need to explain or dig into that step of the process

• Create a document library in a shared drive, can be OneDrive, a Google Drive or even something in the cloud or in Asana. It doesn’t matter…just make it intuitive where it is so everyone will go there first.

• Give your library structure that makes sense for your business. For example:

  

And get all the documents for your current Focus into this structure. Create documents where needed. Get that Focus completed.

If you have an assistant, get them acquainted with the structure and point them to the spray of documents you have on your laptop and out on various cloud drives. Have them organize and collect those documents and get them into a unified location that serves everyone.

The assistant can even drop unknown files into Claude and let Claude tell them what is in the document so it can be organized into the right folder quickly!

Once the structure is set, when you need to look up something in a PDF or are looking for a summary for some meeting minutes, you know right where to get them and can import them into Claude for the work.

Easy, fast, and way less brain cycles for you to deal with!

I am building custom AI Copilots to help business leaders organize and search their documents, create solid emails and documents in their voice, and help integrate all of their software. 

If you would like to be part of this beta community I am starting up, click below to let me know and find out more information!

Learning Cube

Models

When adding a document to Claude, or any other AI tool, the engine has to read the document and understand what is in it. It does this through comparing the document to everything that the engine was taught on.

Think of how a math person can take algebra and tell you what the formulas mean, while someone without a math head will struggle with it.

It is all about what you’ve been taught and retained in your brain. For each of us, it is a unique blend of things, isn’t it?

Well, each AI tool uses an “engine” that has been taught stuff. And the best engines are those that have been taught a wide variety of common (or uncommon) things! This is why ChatGPT amazed all of us when it came out. It has a wide variety of learnings, so it handled most things we threw at it!

These “engines” are called models in the field. An “LLM” is just a Large Language Model. And there are literally thousands of them out there now!

Why so many?

People realized that the general models are good for general things, but not great for determining what is in an image for example. Or not good at reading and categorizing pdfs. Or medical documents. Or whatever.

So people create language models that match their needs, that speak their language!

And they all have pros and cons.

The best AI tools out there can work with multiple models, and thus can give you the best answers based on what model you choose. Many AI tools don’t give you an option. You get the GPT-4 model, for example. It is a good, general model (though lately there has been news that it is not doing well in its latest release…quite poor results…people say it is getting “dumber”).

Hugging Face has the list of all the models (over 250k of them!) and you can group them by the task you are trying to accomplish:

Models will be bubbling up to the mainstream pretty soon. They are outpacing the tools that use them.

Personally, I would like to see more tools that are dialed in to one specific task, and use a variety of models that meet that task, to come up with the best results for us.

I am building out a Copilot that is more task oriented based on your role in your business. And it will use the right model(s) to get the tasks done. See below.

I am building custom AI Copilots to help business leaders organize and search their documents, create solid emails and documents in their voice, and help integrate all of their software. 

If you would like to be part of this beta community I am starting up, click below to let me know and find out more information!

Tool Spotlight

Claude.ai

I don’t usually spotlight the same tool talked about in the main part of the newsletter, but this time I will.

It isn’t that I am all about Claude now, and will throw out ChatGPT or my own creations. It is just that this tool is good enough to shake us up and away from relying solely on ChatGPT.

And look, there are many great AI tools out there that can serve you extremely well. I am not dissing anyone (and hey tool makers let me know about your awesome tool to get highlighted in here).

But it is great to see something that feels like ChatGPT that outperforms ChatGPT for the basic things we use it for!

I want to see you use what makes sense, and try things that are easy to adopt. Make your own decisions!

Claude is super easy to use, super fast with its results, and so far has not disappointed me. I will use it more these days and will see what the reality is for this tool…every tool has pros and cons.

Try it out and let me know what you think? Will it replace ChatGPT for you?

Cool Factor

Easy, Kinda Deepfake Vids

This week’s cool factor is a video that is equally cool and scary.

We’ve all heard of deep fakes (if not, just Google it haha). Well, with a simple combination of AI tools out there, a guy created a video of an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, spoken in Hindi! It looks like Mark and the interviewer are actually speaking the language. And it uses Mark’s voice. Their mouths move to the Hindi language, not English.

Check out Ruben Hassid’s post about it. Ruben is just reporting on the tool, and is not the author of it. But he explains the tech and shows the video:

Does this sort of AI scare you or get you excited?

Consider you doing a training video about your processes. And then running the video through this tool to have it work in Hindi, or Danish, or Spanish, or…

Could you reach your customers better without having to have videos redone for every language you wish to reach? Or having to deal with subtitles in various languages, etc.?

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Practical AI is the world’s most practical AI newsletter with subscribers from many different industries and countries, all looking to make use of tools and services to bring AI into their businesses. You can book your ad spot by emailing me at [email protected]