Welcome to Lesson 2 of the How to Succeed with AI free course.
I’m Dave Waring, your instructor, and the co-creator of BrainDrive.ai.
In the last lesson we learned that AI is actually two things: the AI model (the intelligence) and the system (what makes that intelligence useful).
If you follow AI at all, you probably hear a lot about AI models. That’s kind of funny to me, because the AI models are actually the boring part. Like if all we talked about was electricity, and not all the amazing things that you can power with electricity.
The interesting part of AI is not the AI models, but all the useful things you can do with them — like using them to make yourself more successful.
When it comes to leveraging AI to make our lives better, the most important part by far is the memory.
What Is Your Memory?
Think about it this way:
AI models are like a smart executive assistant that knows about pretty much everything. But there is one thing they don’t know, and that you have to teach them if they are going to be helpful to you.
They don’t know about you.
Are you older or younger?
Male or female?
Where do you live?
What type of work do you do?
What are your hobbies?
Your most important relationships?
What projects are you working on?
What problems are you struggling with?
How do you prioritize what you spend time on across your life?
Just think about all the things a smart human assistant would need to know to be the most helpful to you. The AI system you use needs that same info. And it needs a way to remember it, so you don’t have to keep telling it the same thing over and over again.
This is what I refer to as Your Memory. Your Memory is everything an AI system knows about you, so that it can tailor its help specifically to you.
And this is what being good at AI comes down to: How good are you at partnering with AI to build, organize, and leverage Your Memory?
What About Privacy?
If you’ve been following along you may be thinking: “great, now I need to give these Big Tech companies even more of my personal information. And they will have even more power over us than they already do”.
This is the right thought. But privacy is really a secondary effect of something even more important: ownership.
When you use a Big Tech AI system like ChatGPT, you are a user of their system. They own and control everything. This includes what AI models you can use, how the interface works, and what you can and cannot do with their system. Your Memory is also locked inside their system.
But being a user of Big Tech AI is not the only option. In fact most serious AI users build a system that they own, control, and benefit from instead. A system where you are the owner, you can use any publicly available AI model (there are thousands of them), Your Memory is under your control, and you make the rules.
Before we start building our memory, we need to make sure we’re building it on a system that we own and control.
And if that sounds complicated, it really isn’t. You can buy a dresser from the store already assembled, or you can get it from IKEA and put it together yourself. Setting up your own AI system is more like the IKEA version. And honestly, it’s even easier than that.
I’ll show you exactly how in the next lesson. I’ll see you there!