I first heard Ethan Mollick on The Ezra Klein Show in April 2024 (“How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?”). He offered sensible, practical ways to use AI without the hype. Shortly after, I read Co-Intelligence and have followed his writing and talks since. In a recent interview with Sana Labs founder and CEO Joel Hellermark, Mollick argued that the traditional apprenticeship path is shifting in...
AI voice dictation is having a moment. These tools do more than transcribe—they read context, add punctuation, and learn your style. Many creators say they work two to three times faster. Two weeks ago I started using Wispr Flow Pro. Here is what I found. The Good There is no doubt this has been a real productivity boost. It does not feel like the old dictation tools because the AI cleans up...
Dharmesh's post made me realize there’s a name for something I’ve been doing implicitly for a while—using AI to help me write better prompts. Strictly speaking, that’s AI-assisted prompt refinement. There’s a closely related idea called metaprompting—writing prompts that generate other prompts—which also makes a real difference, especially for deeper research. These omniscient models have been...
It happens to most of us multiple times a week: someone emails asking for a good time to meet, and before you know it, you're stuck in a back-and-forth scheduling spiral. It's a mundane friction that adds up. Four weekends ago, I decided to vibe-code my way to a solution. The result? A fragile but functional AI-native assistant I called Munshi (Hindi for secretary, pronounced moon-she). You can...
When I first learned about Gradient Descent about two years ago, I pictured it in the most obvious 3D way - where one imagines two input variables (as x and y axis in a 2D plane) and the loss being the third (z) axis. In terms of 'local minima' I imagined it as the model getting stuck in a "false bottom" of this bowl-shaped landscape, unable to reach the true minimum, the lowest point. But this...
I first wrapped my head around diffusion models in 2023, thanks to MIT 6.S191 Lecture on 'Deep Learning New Frontiers'. The idea of reverse-denoising just clicked for me—it reminded me of how our brains pick out shapes and objects in clouds or random mosaics. Yesterday my subscription from 3Blue1Brown surfaced 'But how do AI videos actually work?' a guest video by @WelchLabsVideo. That video...
This weekend I finally finished reading Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind AI (by Anil Ananthaswamy). It took me seven months—an unusually long time for a 500-page book. But the detour was worth it: the book kept sending me down side paths, like brushing up on linear algebra and derivatives—topics I hadn’t revisited in nearly three decades. Now that I'm done, the book feels like a...
Earlier this year, I began researching mitral valve surgery (specifically, valve repair vs. replacement) to help someone close to me. This experience introduced me to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tools, which made navigating such a complex topic much easier. If you’ve ever wondered how to tackle a complicated subject and organize a large body of information, read on—I think you’ll find...
Alright, OpenAI o1 is out. If you are anything like me, you first chuckled at the description that it was "designed to spend more time thinking before they respond". But once I delved deeper, it quickly became mind-blowing. (By the way, Ethan Mollick offers an excellent explanation of the power of dedicating more computational resources to “thinking.”) Developments like this deepen my admiration...
It's easy to feel the immense transformational capacity of Generative AI as a solution. And healthcare has no shortage of problems to solve. The real insight is in figuring out viable application areas and use cases. Things are becoming a bit clearer in that aspect and it's worthwhile to keep an ongoing list of where Gen AI application makes sense in healthcare. This post is always under...