π€ The highlighted path to self-discovery
Dear curious minds,
You should always think of your future self while taking notes. Practicing this will also help your future AI to uncover insights.
In this issue:
π‘ Shared Insight
Collecting Book Highlights for Insight: An AI-Powered Journeyπ° AI Update
New GPT-4 Turbo Claims Top Spot on Chatbot Arena Leaderboard Again
π Media Recommendation
Tiago Forte's Hidden Productivity Gem: Design Your Work
π‘ Shared Insight
Collecting Book Highlights for Insight: An AI-Powered Journey
With the shift from paper books to e-books, I also started to take more notes while reading non-fiction books. And from Tiago Fortes teaching I learned that I always should think of my future self while taking a note. In the context of reading a book, this means that every time something resonates with me, I highlight it and write down why I did this.
You might think that this is not worth the time, as I likely will never go back and read the highlights I created again. But that is not true as I use a (paid) service named Readwise which collects all these highlights and resurfaces five via mail or app every day. And as I already do this daily review for more than 1000 days, it will be difficult for me to stop this.
But thanks to current developments in the generative AI space, I can start to work with my highlights on another level. Current text-based AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude allow to upload files which are used to answer my request. As Readwise allows to easily export my highlights including any notes and tags I added to them, an export of all highlights I created while reading a book can be used as input for AI requests.
The most obvious request would be to summarize my highlights, but what I discovered to be way more interesting is asking the AI for patterns in the highlights I created. The screenshot below shows the results created by Claude 3 Sonnet from 68 highlights I created while reading the book "Design Your Work" from Tiago Forte.
While reading the reply from Claude, I started to understand a bit better what I was looking for while reading this book. This approach might even be the key to figuring out which values I like most and live by. In addition to using all highlights from a single book, I can also use all highlights I ever created in the same way. The possibilities are endless!
π° AI Update
New GPT-4 Turbo Claims Top Spot on Chatbot Arena Leaderboard Again
The latest GPT-4 release from OpenAI, referred to as gpt-4-turbo-2024-04-09, was made available via API on April 9th. Since April 12th this model is also available for paid customers in ChatGPT.
Key enhancements include better performance in writing, mathematics, logical reasoning and coding.
It is also the first non-preview release of the vision capabilities in the base model. This allows the model to process uploaded images to answer the request.
The newest GPT-4 release already entered the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard and placed again in the top position. Furthermore, you can now, besides the overall ranking, also compare the models in various domains like coding, long queries and multi-language capabilities. Besides exploring this yourself, you can get a quick overview in the corresponding post on π.
My take: Still no GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 but only a minor improvement. Nevertheless, this was enough to get back on top of the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard. Maybe the announced Grok-2 by x.ai will change that in May? At least Elon Musk is confident that this will happen, as he states in a space on π. Exiting times we are living in.
π Media Recommendation
Tiago Forte's Hidden Productivity Gem: Design Your Work
Tiago Forte's "Design Your Work" is an excellent complementary read to his bestseller "Building a Second Brain" (BASB). While I would advise everyone to start with BASB to learn Tiagoβs foundational principles for personal knowledge management, "Design Your Work" adds additional valuable thoughts on productivity and creativity.
It is noteworthy that "Design Your Work" is part of a four-book series that explores various aspects of optimizing work and creative processes.
As a reference, I marked 68 passages while reading "Design Your Work" and a stunning 229 for BASB.
Disclaimer: This newsletter is written with the aid of AI. I use AI as an assistant to generate and optimize the text. However, the amount of AI used varies depending on the topic and the content. I always curate and edit the text myself to ensure quality and accuracy. The opinions and views expressed in this newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the sources or the AI models.