Hi all,
1.I think I’ve written about Yellowstone in the past, and for those who don’t know, Yellowstone is written solely by Taylor Sheridan who also has a bit part as a horse trainer. Sheridan is proving to be a real powerhouse being solely responsible for other shows you might have heard about like Lioness, Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown, 1883, 1923 and Landman amongst others. Landman is my recent favourite, but Sheridan has a style which I very much enjoy and whilst he does write a mean western, he has a wide range. In Australia most of his stuff is streamed on Paramount Plus, but for me he’s become a brand in his own right and signals TV worth watching. Look out for his stuff.
2.OpenAI is terrible at branding their products which means it’s easy to miss big leaps forward in their products because the progress is hidden behind dumb brands like o1. As it happens, GPT 4o1 represents a big leap because this model actually thinks and reasons. That means it still uses the same ‘big autocomplete’ method to talk to you, but it’s ability to reason means it can think about a problem and come up with it’s own answer that’s not just made up of a string of relevant words. This is a huge breakthrough not least because it doesn’t need training on data in the same way (you might have heard that AI will come to a grinding halt because we’re running out of data to train the models? Not so much) because it’s doing something similar to what we do. This model isn’t cheap at $200 per month (although Cursor have folded ten prompts per day into their subscription) and it needs prompting in a different way. It also can take time to respond because it’s thinking and doesn’t have access to a shower for thinking purposes like you and me. A friend posed a problem to it and it took 12 minutes to come back with the answer. And it was right. Fun times!!
3.My colleague Gareth recommended a video conferencing camera to me recently which has been a revelation. It’s called the InstaLink 360 Controller and it perches on top of a laptop screen and provides 4K resolution which does wonders for showing the world the true state of my skin. It’s major feature though, is an AI tracking mode which means wherever you move around the room or shift in your chair, it keeps you in the centre frame. It is possible to get a similar effect if you use your iPhone camera as a video conferencing camera, but when I did that, of course my phone is off limits for the duration of a phone call and who can deal with that? The camera has other clever features like you can gesture to it to zoom in or to pay attention to a whiteboard behind you. Worth a look.
Two tangential things:
For those who are interested I’ve lost five kilos from using Wegovy so far and still lost weight over Christmas. No side effects experienced either.
A subscribing friend got in touch and asked for a chat about AI and the implications for her work. Happy to do that for anyone else.
Look after yourself,
Ben