Artificial Intelligence. It’s the talk of the town right now.
From the many uses of ChatGPT from coding to creative writing, and from creating SEO outlines to building entire businesses with only ChatGPT’s advice, we are all trying to figure out how to leverage AI and use it to our advantage.
Is ChatGPT actually that useful?
Will some sort of future or present AI replace our jobs?
Can AI be used to help reach Financial Independence?
Is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) around the corner?
Look, I am no expert, but as a former software engineer and CEO…I have thoughts.
Everyone Now Has Access to a Virtual Assistant for FREE!
I’ve spent a good amount of time with ChatGPT over the last few months and found it extremely useful in helping me to:
- write article titles
- rewrite SEO meta descriptions
- write 1-minute video scripts
- vacation brainstorming
- rewrite blocks of content
- uncover semantic relationships between keywords
- write marketing emails
- code javascript
- and more!
Frankly, the more I use it, the more useful I find it as I discover the right prompts and the most efficient and effective ways for it to help supplement running my affiliate website and to research and write articles for AR.
Beyond ChatGPT, I’ve played a bit around with MidJourney, the AI that can build custom realistic or creative images with a single prompt like
/imagine a hampster scientist running experiments in the style of a cartoon 
Here is another fun one from my son:
/imagine a photorealistic fast and furious pink concept car with gold trim
Not bad!
Certainly wild to see what a little prompting and imagination can do. If you simply hop into a Midjourney room, you’ll see the varying and seemingly unlimited creativity being unlocked here.
But beyond the fun that you can have with it, the technology is extremely useful.
Everyone now has access to a virtual assistant for free!
Shawn Hill, used ChatGPT to help him build a website that uses AI to answer questions:
Nick responds on the same thread that ChatGPT has taken away the tedious part of his job:
As a developer, I still love ChatGPT. It takes away the tedious part (for me) of grunt-work coding. When AI acts as the junior dev, I can focus on QA, digital marketing, and any other business requirements.
Once you learn how to properly use an AI tool that is relevant to your job or life, you have now unlocked more of your own time.
But Don’t Worry, AI Is Not Coming For Your Job…YET
Let’s get one thing straight here.
ChatGPT and other AIs are currently not intelligent.
The programming around ChatGPT is based on deep learning models. Here’s how it says it works:
ChatGPT works by utilizing a deep learning model called GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) that has been trained on a large corpus of text data to generate human-like responses to user inputs.
– ChatGPT
So basically, a crap ton of data is used to train the deep learning models, and the program learns from the data by repeating this over, and over, and over, again.
GPT-4, the latest of those projects, was likely trained using trillions of words of text and many thousands of powerful computer chips. The process cost over $100 million.
Will Knight – OpenAI’s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over
ChatGPT and all other deep learning AIs are not cheap…AT ALL.
And on top of their already astronomical costs, deep learning models may also be reaching the limit of their capabilities in terms of what they can accomplish being trained in this way.
[OpenAI’s] CEO, Sam Altman, says further progress will not come from making models bigger. “I think we’re at the end of the era where it’s going to be these, like, giant, giant models,” he told an audience at an event held at MIT late last week. “We’ll make them better in other ways.”
Will Knight – OpenAI’s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over
As anyone can see by having a conversation (or using) the current AI tools, it becomes clear very quickly that we are not dealing with an AI that has general intelligence.
What we are dealing with is a very useful tool, that has been trained on vast amounts of data – or more than you or I would be capable of digesting in 182,500 lifetimes.
David Deutsch, author of The Begining of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality, as well as visiting professor of physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation has this to say about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence):
I don’t think we’re anywhere near it yet, I’d love to be wrong about that, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near it.
And I think that AI, although it’s a wonderful technology, and I think it’s going to go a lot further than it is now, AI has nothing to do with AGI.
It’s a completely different technology and it is in many ways the opposite of AGI.
And the way I always explain this is that with an AGI or a person, an artificial person, their thinking is unpredictable; we’re expecting them to produce ideas that nobody predicted they would produce, and which are good explanations, that’s what people can do.
David Deutsch – The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts
Now, David Deutsch could be completely wrong about this, and someone could be unlocking the secrets to an AGI tool very soon.
But chances are that we have gone down the wrong path altogether.
As Sam Altman has said, he thinks that the era of deep learning models has likely come to an end.
This doesn’t mean that there won’t be advances. There will be many, and they will scale quickly.
But you probably don’t have to worry about AI replacing your job anytime soon.
And that is good news because this will allow you to figure out how to harness AI to unlock more of your time!
Leverage AI to Free Up Your Time
In the short-term, there is a HUGE opportunity available to those who embrace AI.
With these new AI tools, we are able to easily accomplish tasks that otherwise would have consumed hours before.
It would have been impossible for me ever draw or create the Midjourney images, and yet with the right tool it can now be done in 60 seconds.
And there is no downside risk to trying out as much as you like.
You can send 1000 prompts to an AI and it doesn’t care.
You can keep iterating.
So once you learn how to leverage this technology, the opportunities to free up your time become unlimited.
This will be especially true in the coming days, weeks, and months as you will see ChatGPT connected with other applications.
Perhaps it will be a task that seems small but nonetheless takes up time, like writing an email response or organizing a schedule. Or it could be bigger, such as driving a car.
German Lopez. – Using A.I. in Everday Life
So you can imagine asking ChatGPT to write you’re marketing email for the week and then asking it to send that email out to your entire email list. ALL WITH ONE CLICK.
Some may simply point out that utilizing AI frees you up to work on other bigger and more important tasks. And indeed it does.
You should be using AI tools to leverage a promotion, seek a raise, or build a site hustle!
But you are also going to have a choice.
You can continue to stay in the rat race, the everyday hustle and bustle of our culture that causes us to work 10 hours when we could have worked 5.
Or you can choose to craft your life the way that you REALLY want to.
Because by utilizing these new tools, you can give yourself permission to opt out of this burnout culture that leads to nothing but decision fatigue and debt.
Only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.
– Greg McKeown, Essentialism
By learning to leverage AI, you can also give yourself more time to focus on what truly matters.
You can focus on growing and saving your income as quickly as possible to pursue Financial Independence and Retire Early.
You can also use AI to give yourself more time to reflect and think.
But most of all, you can leverage AI to accomplish your goals in less time and build a life where you:
- Sleep 8 hours at night
- Wake up refreshed and have a coffee
- Go on an hour-long walk/workout
- Do focused work for an hour or two on a project you are passionate about
Call it a day to do whatever the hell you want!
It doesn’t really matter what you do, but what does matter is that you can free up your time to live a life of purpose. Whatever your purpose is.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that you should learn to harness the power of new AI tools like ChatGPT, Bard, MidJourney, and the many variations that will pop up.
While you likely don’t need to worry about AI taking your job right now, as AIs improve it certainly could be within the realm of possibility.
We are at a pivotal moment with AI in which things will move rapidly.
And that is why you not only should know how to use these tools, but you should embrace them and fold them into your life as a virtual assistant.
Those who utilize this technology will not be left behind.
In fact, anyone who embraces AI fully may be able to opt out of the rat race altogether.
But even if you don’t, you’ll have more options available to you, because you’ll have more time.
And we all already know that time > money.
If you choose to embrace AI, you’ll be able to accomplish more in less time, rise the ranks, increase your income, and if you play your cards right, retire faster!