An AI Research Assistant and Reality Shift

Hello, and happy Sunday! As summer turned to fall, Dan Shipper and Evan Armstrong revisited their priorities—writing, family, simplicity—amid a new season for us here at Every. ICYMI, we have a new mission and a new look. Read on for more details and our take on the latest tech news.—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

🔏 "Inside the Pod: The AI Research Assistant You've Been Dreaming Of" by Rhea Purohit/AI & I: Imagine having a conversation with all your random thoughts and ideas all at once. That's now possible with Google's NotebookLM, powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro. Best-selling author Steven Johnson shows how this AI tool can extract patterns from decades of book highlights, spark new project ideas, and even write documentary scripts. Read this if you want to turn your messy collection of notes into a creativity powerhouse. 🎧 This piece comes with its own AI-generated podcast version.

"Jumping Over AI's Uncanny Valley" by Nir Zicherman: The Uncanny Valley—that eerie feeling when AI gets too close to reality—might actually be a feature, not a bug, of the technology. Nir Zicherman argues that embracing AI's imperfections will lead to better human-AI collaboration. Read this if you want to understand why your discomfort with AI might be the key to its success, and how companies can navigate the psychological pitfalls of almost-human tech.

"Live Fuller, Not Bigger" by Evan Armstrong/Napkin Math: It is tempting to believe that happiness is just one more promotion, object, or experience away. Evan Armstrong is here to remind us that true happiness often lies in focusing on the simple things, not the additional things. Whether it’s morning cuddles with his dog or embracing spontaneity with his wife, he's discovered the art of "living fuller, not bigger." Read this if you're ready to escape the trap of constant achievement and find joy in the everyday.

"Admitting What Is Obvious" by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: Not too long ago, Dan Shipper felt like he was living someone else’s life—until he admitted the obvious: He's a writer, not just a founder who writes. This revelation transformed his approach to Every and his career. Read this if you're ready to confront the truths you've been avoiding and unlock your full potential, and learn how to build a business around your true passions.

"What Comes Next: A New Era For Every" by Dan Shipper: We're not just changing our look, we're updating our mission. Every is now laser-focused on answering one question: "What comes next?" With our daily essays, podcast, courses, and product incubations, we're all in on helping you build the future. Read this if you want to see how one of we’re evolving to tackle the most important question of our time.

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Fine tuning

New OpenAI Model raises new questions

Now that the new OpenAI model o1 has been released to the general public, the real conundrum is: What do you do with it? Our internal experimentation shows that it works best for prompts with multiple steps, like copy editing or analyzing a page of a book. Because its value comes from more challenging prompts and problems, I expect that o1 will have less immediate buzz than ChatGPT did but will ultimately be more impactful. 

What’s most exciting is how o1 represents a new branch of science in LLM research. The core insight of these models is that the more time they have to “think,” the better they perform, so you can scale both the volume of data the models are trained on and the time they spend thinking about a problem. Model improvements aren’t slowing down anytime soon (which helps explain our next story). 

Microsoft funds a restart for Three Mile Island. Large language models require an immense amount of power to train and to run—so much so that Microsoft partnered with nuclear power plant owner Constellation Energy to exclusively purchase power from the shuttered Three Mile Island plant. Constellation is putting in $1.6 billion, with every gigawatt of energy going toward Microsoft data centers. Wild.

Automated AI ads are more important than people realize. Amazon has a new tool allowing advertisers to turn a photo into a "three-second video." I’ve argued since 2021 how advertising as a business model has been the devil’s deal for internet platforms. You grow fast, and everyone gets free stuff, but the long-term social consequences may be deadly. AI will allow for more targeted and efficient ads by customizing each ad for the person who sees it, thus improving performance. If LLMs don’t do anything but this, they’ll materially increase the power of existing attention aggregators like Amazon and Meta. 

YouTube has already started juicing the video supply with AI. On the demand side of the ad marketplace, YouTube is letting creators automatically include AI-generated videos in their Shorts. Like it or not, this stuff is coming. For more on the implications of AI video, check out the piece I published last month. 

Substack goes after Twitch. Substack’s launch of live video is understandable: Newsletters were always too small of a market to sustain venture-scale outcomes, so the company had no choice but to expand to new mediums. However, there is something disheartening about how being a “writer” in the age of the internet means you are more of a performer who happens to write. If you watch interviews of David Foster Wallace—one of America’s greatest writers of the last 50 years—you’ll notice just how uncomfortable he is with being on TV. He wants to express himself in words, not sound bites. Every one of his answers is followed by a grimace. Similarly, if you search for “writer” on Instagram Reels or TikTok, you’ll see writers portraying the aesthetic of writing (typewriter, manuscript pages, candles) instead of showing off the work itself. Trying to to be an online writer requires a performance of the “ideal writer” rather than just doing the work of writing. You need a podcast, an Instagram account, or a YouTube channel—some additional medium that reinforces your status and skill in another. Substack’s moves into podcasts and videos are an acceleration of that trend. Writing something meaningful is becoming less important to having a writing career.—Evan Armstrong

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Keyword extraction

Nir Zicherman, who wrote about AI’s Uncanny Valley, shared one good listen: 

🎧 “What Is the Nature of Consciousness?” from The Joy of Why: “Quanta magazine’s podcast The Joy of Why is thought-provoking, covering a range of topics like AI, quantum physics, and human psychology. This fascinating conversation between host Steven Strogatz and neuroscientist Anil Seth reveals how little we know about what human consciousness is.”

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Alignment 

Urban awakening. I’ve walked this street 100 times with my head down, shoulders hunched, listening to Spotify. Thinking of everything but where I am, I miss the people rushing by and the quiet change of autumn leaves. Journalist Alexandra Horowitz calls this “blindness by familiarity.” In her book On Looking, she explains how our perception narrows the world, focusing us on what’s useful and dismissing the rest as background noise. Most of us live in that haze, existing but never fully aware. Horowitz takes you through Manhattan with a child, an artist, a geologist, even her dog—each offering a unique perspective on the subtle interplay of nature and urban life that most passersby overlook. Her work challenged me to ditch my headphones at home and practice observation. Now, walking down that street, I realize the world doesn’t need a soundtrack. It is the soundtrack.—Ashwin Sharma

Sentiment analysis

“I'm guilty of trying to live larger in many ways to the detriment of other things that are important. Reading this article was a good reminder to consider where and how I spend my time—then live with more intention.”—A fintech executive in response to Evan’s piece about priorities 

Want to chat? DM Dan or Evan on X.

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Hallucination

Space Jordans.

That’s all for this week! Be sure to follow Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.