My AI "Second Brain" To Make Life Easier

The two most common questions that I get on literally a daily basis is one, how do you keep your finger on the pulse of everything that's going on in AI? And two, what are the actual AI tools that you use yourself on a daily basis? Because admittedly, although I talk about tons and tons of AI tools and I show them off in these videos and I highlight them all on future tools and I mention them in my newsletter, there really is only a handful that I use on a daily basis. If you look on Twitter or Discord, I'm constantly getting comments from people asking, do you ever sleep? I think the perception is that I'm actually putting way more time into all of this than in reality. I actually am, because I do lean on a lot of really cool tools and a lot of really cool resources that make my life a lot easier. And so I'm going to break down in this video how I use AI and various tools and various resources to essentially be my second brain, keep me in the loop and keep me tapped in with all the news. Now, the first tool that I use on literally a daily basis is ChatGPT. I am in ChatGPT all of the time. You can see over in my chat history on the left. I have a lot of conversations going at any given time. One thing I've even started using ChatGPT for is to be my personal YouTube consultant. I gave it this original prompt. I have a YouTube channel, and you are my YouTube mentor. I'm going to tell you about the types of videos that do well, the types that don't do well, and what I enjoy creating. I'm also going to share some struggles I'm having. I want you to give advice and make recommendations for me based on the information that I give you around my best course of action with the channel. GPT then went and asked me some questions. It said, tell me the types of videos that do well on your channel, the types of videos that don't do well on your channel, what you enjoy creating, the struggles you're currently having with your channel. I gave it some additional context and it gave me a whole plan of action for YouTube. I then said, can you ask me even more questions about my YouTube channel to help you create even more tailored advice? So it asks questions about my target audience, my video length, my audience interaction, monetization strategy, competitor analysis, growth strategy, video production. I answered all of its questions here, and then it gave me even more detailed advice and optimization strategies for my channel. In fact, it was ChatGPT that told me to reduce My posting frequency down to about three videos per week, when previously I was doing between five and six a week. When I'm struggling with a video idea, I come into this chat window that has all this additional context that I've fed it in the past, and I say, hey, I'm struggling with a video idea today. What video should I make? And it'll give me suggestions, things like AI in everyday life, surprising examples, and then it gives me feedback on how to actually create the video. So when it comes to daily tools, ChatGPT is definitely one that I am constantly using. Now, the next tool that I use every single day without fail is called MyMind, and it kind of looks like a giant Pinterest board, but it's just anything that I find that's interesting around the web. Now, my. My mind is mostly full of AI stuff that I come across. So cool AI tweets, cool AI YouTube videos, various GitHub repositories that have interesting projects on them, blogs, news articles, things like that. But it's pretty much purely anything that I come across related to AI lands in my mind. Now, what's cool and where the AI lies in my mind isn't necessarily that it's just a giant listing of all of the cool stuff that I came across, but it's that it actually organizes everything and automatically tags everything. So, for example, let's say I'm about to make a video about Mid Journey, and I want to find all of the stuff that I've recently rounded up about midjourney. I can go up to search my mind here, type midjourney, and it's going to bring up all of the content I found around Mid journey recently, including tweets, YouTube videos, websites, and anything else that I've come across recently. If I want to make a video about stable diffusion, I could type in stable diffusion, and it will bring up all of the things that I've saved recently that are related to stable diffusion. Maybe I'm going to make a video about AI music. I could type AI, AI music, and it's gonna hunt down everything I've saved recently around AI music. I've got tools here like MusicLM from Google, I've got tweets here, like this one from Roberto Nixon. Found YouTube videos like this one from Nerdy Rodent here about singing in any language, and it just rounds up anything that I've saved from music. If there's searches that you search often, like I search midjourney often, I can actually save this as what they call a space and you can see it's called a smart space here and it's just an automatic search for anything related to mid journey. If I saved a whole bunch of news, I could come up here and type news and it'll pull up all of the news that I've recently saved. And this is all from the MyMind tool, doing this automatic tagging behind the scenes to help you figure out the context of anything you saved. Now you can add your own tags to things. Like if I come up to this tool, I can click Add tags and give it some additional context if I want, which will help the search. And I can add additional notes to this. Maybe I'm going to make a video about it and I want to add some notes about what this video is going to be about. I can do that and add extra context here. But my favorite thing to do is just dump things into this and then search them later. So I just came across this YouTube video on Twitter of Jordan Peterson interviewing Brian Romley about AI and I want to watch this interview later. I don't have time to watch it now, but I want to remember that I want to watch it later. Now I could just go to YouTube and add it to my watch later, but I tend to throw a lot of things in there and just forget to watch them. However, I am inside of my mind every single day and I rarely forget to watch the stuff that I plug into here. So what I'll do is I'll come up to this little plus button. This is my MyMind Chrome extension. I click this and it says save to your mind. Now if I click back over to my mind, you can see it's taking a screenshot of the video right now and there it is. I have it saved to my mind and I will come back to it later. Here's a tweet thread that I came across from my buddy Linus about how to make simple images in midjourney. I don't have time to read it right now because, well, I'm recording a video and I do want to come back and read this thread later. So I can come up here, press my plus button, and now it's saved to my mind. If I come over to my mind, you can see it's saving it for me. And now if I search for midjourney up here, you can see that this tweet that Linus did is now in my list of midjourney related items. So that's my mind and I use it constantly. This also has a mobile app, so if you're browsing Twitter or YouTube from your phone, you can, you can automatically save it from the app as well. If I'm standing in line somewhere browsing Twitter and I want to read an article or watch a YouTube video later, I save it to my mind. If I'm in the middle of recording a video and I come across something interesting that I want to reread later, I save it to my mind. If somebody shares a cool tool or cool video inside of the feature tools discord and I want to revisit later, I save it to my mind. This is just where I dump everything AI related. And I have this tab open pretty much all day, every day. I and I'm clicking back and forth between it to remember what I wanted to look at. But also this is where I get inspiration for videos. If I'm trying to figure out what video I want to make today, I just start scrolling through my mind and looking at all of the stuff that I saved. I created my own custom tag called archived. So for example, this hugging face Transformers, I already made a video about it. So I tagged it with made video and archive here. And if I want to sort it down to just the stuff that's not archived, I created a customer space here that hides all of this stuff that I put the archive tag on it. So now it's only showing the stuff that I haven't made videos about yet. Now the next AI tool that I use every single day, and this helps me really keep my finger on the pulse of the latest news and tech, is I use Feedly. And Feedly has their own AI that they call Feedly Leo. And this basically searches the web for topics that you give it and then bring it into a news feed of all of that news for you. For example, I have an AI web alert here. If I click Refine, you can see how it's set up. Track specific companies, products and topics across the web. So it's watching for these topics. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, generative art and GPT3 and product launches. So it has to be one of these and a product launch. And you can see it found news that features one of these topics and a product launch. Alphabet's Intrinsic launches Flow State, a robotic app development platform. IBM launches Watson X, paving a path to fast or enterprise AI adoption. Nike reveals 3D printed shoes with AI, et cetera. I've got this one that's called Future of Work. All the same topics here. Artificial intelligence, machine Learning, Deep Learning, GPT, GPT3, Natural Language Processing. So it's got to have one of those keywords in it. Plus future of work. You can see some of the articles it found the disappearing white collar job on Slashdot Defining industry responsibility for AI based technology on VentureBeat can AI help warehouses reduce the impact of labor shortages on all things supply chain so these are websites that I would never normally visit. Never normally subscribe to an RSS feed. But because I'm using this AI Feedly LEO tool, it's searching pretty much every website it can for anything related to these topics. I'm looking for the third one I have in here, same topics, AI, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing and tutorials. And then I just have this all feed here which is pretty much all of these AI feeds plus the big tech blogs that I like to follow. So I follow Meta's blog, the official Google blog, Nvidia's blog, OpenAI's blog, and the official Microsoft blog. Any blog posts that any of these companies release, I see it in my feed. On new sites I've got TechCrunch and the Verge. So any AI related posts in these feeds I see in my main feed. And then again, anything that the Feedly AI brings up. And you can see just Today it found 348 articles and I can skim through them and keep my finger on the pulse of the news. And when I go to update future tools and you see this super up to date AI news page here, that's usually because it popped up in my Feedly News feed here and I shared it to my website. Now reading all these articles sounds like a fairly daunting task, so I have some automations to help me with that as well. In fact, this is one of the newer ones that I've started playing with. It's called Recast. You can find it at Lets Recast AI and this is a tool that will read blog posts and then play them back for you as if it was like a conversational podcast. So the best way to show this off is just to give an example of it. So here's the anthropic article from the other day about how they've extended their context window to a hundred thousand tokens. Here's the whole article. It's a fairly short article to begin with, but I wanted to use a short article so that the recap would also be kind of short. I can come up to this little button up here for Recast, click Recast it and when I click that it opens up a page like this that turned a four minute read into a two minute conversation and it's actually only a minute 44. So let's go ahead and listen back to how this conversation sounds.

This is a recast of the 300 word piece introducing 100k context windows from woo.anthropic.com this article introduces a new tool that can analyze and retrieve data from large texts in less than a minute. Let's listen in.

Recently Anthropic has released an Update to their AI Claude. The update expands the context window from 9,000 to 100,000 tokens. This means that businesses can now submit hundreds of pages of materials for CLAUDE to analyze.

Amazing. So this update allows Claude to read and analyze large quantities of text with a fraction of the time it would take a human.

That's right. For example, Anthropic loaded the entire text of the Great Gatsby into Claude Instant and it correctly identified a modified line in 22 seconds.

Impressive. So what are some of the applications for this update?

With 100,000 context windows, businesses can comprehend, summarize and elucidate dense documents such as financial statements or research papers. They can also evaluate strategic risks and possibilities for a company based on its yearly report. Furthermore, they can evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of a piece of legislation, recognize risks, themes and arguments across legal documents, read through hundreds of pages of developer documentation, and surface answers to technical questions.

That's incredible. That's it for today.

So you can hear that they made it sound like a podcast where they were asking somebody questions and there was multiple voices in there and it just made it more engaging and interesting to listen to. And all of that content was just found in this blog post here. They just had something like the ChatGPT API Go and Reword it as a conversational sounding podcast. Now another tool that I like to use to help me summarize articles is I like to use the Perplexity Chrome extension as well, where you can search the entire Internet, this domain or this page. So for example, I can search just this page and say, explain this article like I'm five. And there we go. Anthropic, a company that works on artificial intelligence, has made a new model called Claude that can understand and analyze up to 100,000 words at once. It's not totally true, it's 100,000 tokens. The model can use this information to have long conversations and understand complex things. So I do use this Perplexity tool a lot. In fact, I love using it on the Future Tools website. I've actually demoed this in a past video. You could come to FutureTools IE and actually ask it about specific tools for your own use cases. So if I open the Perplexity app on this site and then click on this domain, I could type something like what are some AI tools I can use to create 3D images? It's searching just this domain. There are several AI tools that can be used to create 3D images. 3DFI AI. If I click this little one here, you can see it opens up 3Dfi AI on future tools. Kdim is an AI powered tool that enables users to generate high definition 3D models from 2D images in minutes. If I click the citation here, you can see it opens up KDIM here ON Future Tools 3D Preso Snow Pixel. It shows you all the various tools right here that can help you create 3D images. And it searched just the Future Tools domain. So if you don't want to use this search engine, you want to actually use natural language to find something specific that you're looking for, you can just ask the question straight into Perplexity and it'll help you find it on the site. I actually search my own site using this Perplexity tool, but eventually I want to build this kind of tool directly into future tools. But for now, Perplexity does a really good job at it. Now, one thing Recast doesn't do well and Perplexity doesn't do well is read PDFs. For example, I like to go to HuggingFace Co and find all the latest research papers and read up on them. For example, here's a universal source separation with weekly labeled data. You could see it took a input and it separated animal sounds, human sounds, music, et cetera. It was able to separate out all the various audio files. Well, I want to learn a little bit more about this paper. So if I view the PDF, you can see it's a 16 page PDF here that explains how this works. Well, if I try to read it in Perplexity and I say this page and I say what is this PDF about? It says the search results do not provide a clear answer to what this PDF is about. So Perplexity can't read this PDF. If I try to use let's Recast, I can click on let's Recast here and click Recast it. I get this email that says your submission to recast from archive.org can't be processed. We detected as a PDF file which is not something we currently convert to a Recast. Thanks for your understanding. So neither of those tools can do anything with this PDF. Now for PDFs, I used to like to go to this PDF GPT IO, but they recently changed the pricing where they now limit how much you can do for free. Before, you were able to enter your API key and it didn't seem to limit it much, but now they have, you know, monthly fees and limits on what you can do. And I've essentially stopped using this one as much now and ever since it stopped allowing me to use my own API key, it seems to actually be a lot more buggy. It doesn't actually give me responses and the PDFs seem to fail to upload more often and I don't know, they just seem to change a bunch. I hate to say it, but they kind of made it worse. I tend to use Chat PDF instead. I like that I can just upload it straight from a URL. So I can grab this PDF URL here on archive.org, jump into chat PDF, import from URL, paste the URL in and say, go get it. So it read the PDF and it gave me some example questions here, but I always like to ask this one first. What does this research aim to achieve? Explain it like I'm a 5 year old and it says, this research is about teaching computers to listen to sounds and separate them into different parts. For example, if you hear a song with many instruments playing at the same time, the computer can learn to separate each instrument sound so that you can hear them separately. This is important because it helps us understand and analyze sounds better. So now I have a very, very basic overview of what this PDF does and I can dive in and ask it more questions to better learn what this PDF and this research is. So when I make videos about, here's the latest research, here's the latest technology that's coming out, I usually go through this process, read the research paper through something like Chat PDF to get a better idea of it, and by the end of having a conversation with it, I'll have a much better idea of the explanation of how this research paper works. So these are really the tools that I'm using to sort of outsource my brain to AI. And now I know there's gonna be a lot of criticism. I'm already expecting it, where people are gonna say, oh, if you're outsourcing your brain to AI, it's just gonna make people dumber and they're not gonna have to think as much and they're not gonna have to read as much. I found exactly the opposite to be true personally, since AI has entered My life and tools like these have entered my life. I've become ten times more curious. I go through so much more content. I read a ton more research papers. All of this has done is made me go deeper down these rabbit holes and learn about more things. It's given me the ability to access more tools, more research, and better understand them. When the wording is over my head, I use tools like this to bring it down to my level a little bit and better understand it. And then the next time I read complex papers, since I've already brought it down to my level a little bit, they feel a little bit less complex. Later on, I found that this helps me learn way more. It's made me way less lazy, it's made me more curious, and it's made me want to go down these rabbit holes even deeper. Yes, it may make some people lazier, but I highly doubt the types of people that are watching my YouTube videos on this kind of tools are the people that this is gonna make lazier. If you're watching channels like mine, you're probably the type that's super curious, that loves this stuff, that loves going down these rabbit holes, that wants to use this technology to be able to consume more, not to be lazier. That's my take on it at least, and that's how it's played out for me so far. Now, there is one last tool that I want to share with you. It's not an AI tool, but it is a tool that helps me tremendously on my day to day processes to not go insane with all the conversations that I'm trying to have at any given time. And this tool is called Texts. And you can find it over@text.com and it's a single app, just a single tool that combines all of these. Apple iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram Signal, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, ChatGPT, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Google Chat, Slack, and Discord DMS. It brings all of those things into a single tool. So all of your communications on all of the various chat platforms just use one single tool. This is what text looks like when you're actually using it. And there are so many cool features of this tool. So you can see I'm having a conversation here on Twitter. This is a conversation on Discord. This is a conversation on WhatsApp, Twitter. This is a telegram conversation here. I could scroll down Twitter conversation, Twitter conversation, Facebook messenger conversation, Twitter conversation, Twitter conversations, a Discord conversation. So you can see that all of the various messaging apps all end up in one platform. And the people that I talk to the most frequently, I can actually pin to the top. So this is one of my team members here that helps me keep future tools up to date. You can see I've got his conversation pinned to the top because he's somebody that I talk to on a daily basis. Same with Mark. He's my editor here. I talk to him on a daily basis, so he's pinned to the top. I've already read his message for today, so I can actually mark as read. Let's say I haven't actually read his message and I just glanced at it real quick and I don't want it to be read. I can actually mark it as unread. And it doesn't matter which platform you're talking to these people in. You can mark it as read or mark it as unread. You can schedule messages to go out to people later. So I can say, thanks for the help on this. Come over here to this little arrow and click Send later and say, go ahead and send it in an hour. This is now scheduled to send at 5pm my time, which is an hour from now. If DMs keep popping up and you don't want to see them anymore, you can mute those conversations. You can archive conversations so they pull out of your main window here. You can create labels to organize them into labels like other important work, personal, etc. You can snooze messages by clicking Remind later and it will hide it and then bring that message back up a day from now, a week from now, when you need to respond to it. All of the cool features that we get in tools like Gmail now and the various email platforms we can have in our messaging platforms with something like text.com. if you've ever used a tool like Superhuman for email, this is like Superhuman, but for all of your dms all in a single place. And I absolutely love it. Again, I know it's not an AI tool. It's just a tool that's made me 10 times more productive because I'm not going to Twitter, DMs and Discord and Slack and messenger and all of these different places to keep in the loop with these conversations. They all just get dumped into this one place. And I just have one giant listing of all the conversations I'm in the middle of right now. Now, with text, you do have to get on a wait list and then they let people in off the wait list over time. But I highly recommend checking it out and getting on the wait list. They're not a sponsor or anything like that. I just managed to get early beta access and have been using it for a couple months now. And it has absolutely been game changing for my productivity and keeping in the loop with all the conversations I'm in the middle of. So there you go. That's pretty much a breakdown of my daily workflow. The AI tools that I use on a daily basis. If there's any other AI tools that I use on a daily basis, I would also add Midjourney and Stable Diffusion into the mix. They didn't really fit in with the context of the rest of this video, but I use those every day as well to make my thumbnails for my YouTube videos and to make things like memes for Twitter. And if I'm editing a video myself, sometimes I'll generate some AI images for B roll for the video. So I do use midjourney and stable diffusion quite a bit, but I've made other videos about that and that's pretty much my daily workflow. That's how I keep my finger on the pulse of everything going on in AI. I use those handful of tools. That's how I keep up with conversations. I use my mind to toss anything that I want to circle back to or make content around in the future. I started using Recast and Chat PDF to help me better understand articles and research papers and things like that. I use Feedly to stay in the loop with all of the AI news that's coming out. And I use ChatGPT as sort of a personal advisor when I have questions or I'm kind of struggling with what to do next on YouTube or Twitter or something like that. And then finally, I use tactics to keep all the conversations going and to make sure that anybody that's dming me that I absolutely need to respond to. I see. All right, that's all I got for you. I'm done rambling. Thanks so much for nerding out with me today. If you like to nerd out about all these cool Tools and the AI world, head over to FutureTools IO. This is where I add new tools that I'm coming across pretty much every single day. I keep the AI News page up to date, so if you don't want to go through all these steps to stay in the loop with the research, I'll do it for you. And if you just want to get updated once a week, join the free newsletter every single Friday. I'll send you a handful of News articles, the five coolest tools that I came across a few YouTube videos and one cool way to make money with AI. It's every Friday. I don't send any other emails during the week but that one newsletter. On Friday you can join up at FutureTools IO. It's completely free, just click this Join the free newsletter button. Thanks again for tuning in. If you like videos like this, make sure you give this one a thumbs up and subscribe to this channel. And I'll make sure more videos like this show up in your feed. Really, really appreciate you. See you guys in the next video. Bye.