Friday Fuel - July 17th, 2020
Good morning and happy Friday. Big thank you to everyone who’s shared the newsletter so far and welcome to the ten new subscribers we have this week! Reminder that the $100 Bombas giveaway ends on August 3rd, so there’s still plenty of time to refer your smartest friends. While many people have participated, no one yet has reached the five people required to win.
Pro Tip: Refer your friends, get free socks. As of now, it’s anyone’s game.
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Without further ado, here is your weekly intake of Friday Fuel, a collection of things that I’ve been learning from and paying attention to recently.
📕What I’ve Been Reading - Tim Ferriss is a man of many talents. He’s an entrepreneur, five-time NYT best-selling author, Guinness World Record tango dancer, National Chinese kickboxing champion, and host of the wildly popular Tim Ferris Show, to name a few. His “5-Bullet Friday” newsletter also serves as the inspiration for the Friday Fuel format you are currently enjoying. I’ve had his classic book “The Four Hour Work Week” recommended to me countless times, so when I came across a brand new copy sitting untouched in my basement, I decided to dive in. Tim has lived one of the craziest and most spontaneous lives a human can live and this book details exactly how you can do it too. It focuses on how to maximize income, while reducing effort, also known as every person’s dream. While it’s particularly helpful for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, a lot of the lessons can be applied to anyone looking to spend less time working and more time living.
🎧What I’ve Been Listening To - Jordan Harbinger is one of the best, most experienced podcast hosts in the world. With over twenty years of experience, he’s interviewed the best of the best in any field you can imagine. His show, The Jordan Harbinger Show, has nearly 380 episodes and over 4.6k ratings on Apple Podcasts. Last month, he released an episode with Mark Cuban, so of course I had to listen. This interview is a bit different from most of the other interviews with Mark that I’ve listened to, as it touches on many of the world issues that we are currently facing. I’d also highly recommend listening to his episode with the late, great Kobe Bryant. Here’s one of my favorite clips from the Kobe episode where Kobe shares his appreciation for Taylor Swift, describing her as “a killer” (I fully agree).
🤯What’s Blown My Mind - Last month, San Francisco based company OpenAI released a new version of their Better Language Model, GPT-3. This is essentially an algorithm that has been fed a bunch of data (millions and millions of web pages) with the goal of “predict[ing] the next word, given all of the previous words within some text.” If run correctly, the algorithm can receive a question and deliver a complex and comprehensive answer. An example of this are the AI chatbots that now appear on the bottom of most websites. Spoiler alert: These aren’t real people. In February 2019, GPT-2 was released and it was announced that it has 1.5 billion parameters, (a calculation in a neural network that applies a great or lesser weighting to some aspect of the data) and was trained on a data set of 8 million web pages. OpenAI refused to open-source the code, as they acknowledge how detrimental this model could be if it fell in the wrong hands (think Russia). If you think this is impressive, GPT-3 blows GPT-2 out of the water. GPT-3 is trained on 175 billion parameters, which means it is significantly more capable and intelligent than its predecessor. With this introduction of the OpenAI API, developers will now have access to one of the most powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to ever be created to date. It’s not perfect, but it’s an impressive advancement nonetheless.
Here is just one of the examples of brilliance that can be created with GPT-3.
I mean…c’mon. That is crazy! This is just the tip of the iceberg for the already booming no-code industry.
🧠A Tool I Will Be Using - That one. If you’re interested in trying it out too, the developer has opened a Google Form where you can drop your email and stay updated once a version is released for the public.
🎤A Quote I Enjoyed: “The fishing is best where the fewest go and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone is aiming for base hits.”
Thanks for reading and keep swinging,
Randy