Every week I’ll dive into a curated list of links from the latest tech to just interesting reads, as well as updates on my latest entrepreneurial endeavors. Thanks for joining on this journey!

Topics for this week:

• Advent of Code

• Self Operating Computer

• Building an AI Influencer

• The One Person Business Roadmap

• Plenty of Room at the Bottom

Advent of Code

It’s that time of year again! 25 days of coding problems on AdventofCode.com, where a new programming puzzle unlocks everyday, each one progressively more difficult than the last.

Pro tip: if you’re looking to get started with coding, all of the previous years’ coding puzzles are available for practice and would make a great series of problems to solve to build up your skill.

For the more experienced, there is a leaderboard for submitting correct answers as quickly as possible after the puzzles becomes available. I solved last night’s puzzle no where near in time for getting on the leaderboard, but there’s always tomorrow. Best of luck!

Self Operating Computer

Sam Altman is back at the helm of OpenAI and ChatGPT and has been answering questions about the chaos of his being fired and rehired within a week. People are still speculating that it’s because they created Artificial General Intelligence — or a fully intelligent agent — and it scared the board so much they fired him, but Sam is still holding strong that’s not the case.

Meanwhile, another project called Self Operating Computer is building on top of GPT-4V (ChatGPT with vision) to create an AI that can operate a computer using screenshots of the screen and ChatGPT to interpret the images. The project will take an instruction and do it’s best to accomplish the task, taking control of your computer to do it if you allow it.

Like any relatively new project, it still has room for improvement, but it looks like it is capable of tasks like opening a web client, writing an email, and sending it to a specific address.

Once this project is working reliably, it could have some huge implications. In software, there are entire divisions dedicated to test automation with multiple frameworks built specifically for that purpose. Something like Self Operating Computer may be able to accomplish the same goal by being told to test different features of a website for example and not need to write any code to do it.

More broadly, this concepts opens up accessibility for anyone to be able to talk to their computer and have it do what they want, which would be incredibly beneficial.

Wes covers both topics and a few others in his video below, linked to the successful Self Operating Computer section specifically, but worth watching the full thing!

Building an AI Influencer

On the more fun and only slightly scary side of AI, here’s an entertaining video from Fireship about creating an AI Influencer. I’ve run across SDXL a few times now so I’m anxious to try out this tutorial, but maybe not with the purpose of creating a fake person. There’s a huge list of visual styles available to play around with, and I spotted a video game option so I will be investigating what that can produce.

Also Fireship has sneakily addicting videos so check out a few of his others!

The One Person Business Roadmap

Still in the early stages of the solopreneur journey, this title caught my eye. I’ve only recently started watching Dan Koe’s content, but he has been showing up in my feed more and more, and it’s not surprising. His straightforward, informational but actionable style is high value so I’m sure many others are benefitting from his advice.

There’s something alluringly comforting about a “roadmap”, which is what made me click. The idea that there’s a clear path with defined steps makes the process feel more approachable - just follow the roadmap. Naturally this video does that virtually by providing a good guideline for what to focus on now and what to be prepared for later.

Writing and social media are top priority for the time being, but it’s good to have some expectation of what to pivot to after gaining some ground, and even have side projects ready for when the opportunity is right.

Plenty of Room at the Bottom

Richard Feynman is another name I’ve been hearing referenced more frequently, which could just be Frequency Illusion but from what I gather, Feynman is worth referencing. Plenty of Room at the Bottom is the title of a lecture from Feynman in 1959 that was later rediscovered in the 1980s.

Marc Andreessen’s take on “there’s lots of room at the bottom” was a really interesting application of Feynman’s lecture. We get caught up in things we can see and there’s so much that exists at the level we can’t see that most people quickly forget about it or ignore it.

This is a long and dense podcast if you’re up for it, so here’s the link to the relevant section if you’re short on time:

And that’s it for this week! Another newsletter that’s not entirely YouTube or AI! Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

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