AI is Getting Really Smart (Or is it?)

Plus, How to Use ChatGPT for Project Management

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In today’s newsletter:

  1. 📖 AI is Getting Really Smart

  2. 🤖 Project Management with ChatGPT

  3. 🏫 Automate Phone Calls with AI

  4. 🧠 Is AI Hitting a Plateau?

  5. 🎤 One prompt you can use at work today

Read time: 4.5 minutes

1. AI is Getting Really Smart

Ethan Mollick wrote a great article summarizing the advancements in AI and highlighting how AI capabilities are continually transforming.

He gave an interesting anecdote about how powerful OpenAI’s o1 model is at analyzing data without providing a lot of context.

  • One academic paper claimed that black plastic utensils could poison users due to recycled e-waste containing a compound called BDE-209

  • This caused panic on social media and people started throwing away their plastic utensils

  • However, Joe Schwarcz of McGill University found a critical math error in the paper, where the dosage was mistakenly multiplied by 10.

  • To check if AI can find the error, Mollick pasted the paper into ChatGPT (he used o1), and typed: “carefully check the math in this paper” (no other context was given)

  • The error was instantly detected. Here’s a screenshot that he shared.

It’s worth noting that Mollick wrote about this a week ago, so it was before the announcement by OpenAI about the release of their latest o3 model (which is even more advanced than o1).

2. Project Management with ChatGPT

I just released a new course on Udemy about using ChatGPT for project management (both traditional and agile project management).

It's a short course (~60 minutes) that covers how to be a smarter, faster, and more effective project manager.

The course also covers using ChatGPT features such as Canvas, summarization, image generation, and custom GPTs.

3. Automate Phone Calls with AI

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Synthflow, a tool that helps automate your business phone calls with AI. More details below.

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  • Discover templates for routine/repetitive tasks like lead qualification and managing appointments.

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4. Is AI Hitting a Plateau?

On the other end of the spectrum, some AI leaders believe that we’re hitting a plateau (at least on the data part)

Ilya Sutskever, the former OpenAI Chief Scientist, gave a talk at the NeurIPS 2024 AI conference where he said that because we have “one internet,” pre-training a large model will end given that we have achieved peak data.

He suggested some possibilities about where AI is heading, including agents, synthesizing new training data, and moving toward logical reasoning.

Here’s a video of his full talk

5. One Prompt You Can Use at Work Today

Here’s a practical ChatGPT Prompt you can use at work:

Change the tone of this paragraph so that [goal] [insert paragraph]

For example,

Change the tone of this paragraph so that it sounds more friendly [insert paragraph]

If you would like to see more of those prompts, check out my free book called: ChatGPT for Better Business Communication.

You can grab it for free by clicking the button and subscribing to the newsletter 👇️