_Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How to Connect an AI Agent to a Data Source (2026-07-19) :: View in Browser_ The Big Plug 👉 New book! 21 Use Cases of Generative AI For Marketers 👉 Please take my 6-question Reader Survey to tell me what you want! The drawing winner for the summer survey is Tiina!…
PSA: Agents do stuff for you. In all the buzz about AI agents, very few people are using the term for what it means. Agents in computing are not new. We’ve had agents of some kind since 1963. Every time you take your phone and connect to a new wifi point, a slew of different…
What’s AI best at when it comes to innovation? Context. Specifically, the context in which your idea fits. AI is generally not good at completely net new ideas because they don’t exist in context, AND because by definition something truly innovative is low probability. AI by definition generates the highest probability items in a local…
Use the right model for the right task to save token budget. Planning? Use the biggest, smartest models. Execution? Use a midrange model that can follow directions well. Reading and summarization? Use a light, fast, dumb model that does well when it’s given all the data. If you leave your favorite AI tool set on…
_Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How To Do Feature Engineering with AI (2026-07-12) :: View in Browser_ The Big Plug 👉 Please take my 6-question Reader Survey to tell me what you want! Content Authenticity Statement 95% of this week’s newsletter was made by me, the human. The glossary at the end I made with Google’s…
“(Model) can’t even tell when to go to the car wash!” “(Model) reduced my workload by 84 years and built three new companies in an evening!” These are the two general hot takes on any new AI advancement, especially new models. They’re overly reductionist, absurd caricatures that don’t help us understand a new model and…
(Earned – Spent) / Spent = ROI A brief reminder that this is ROI, and nothing else is. Earned minus spent, divided by spent, is return on investment. Nothing else is ROI. If you do not know: What you earned What you spent You cannot measure ROI. Period, end of story. Lots of people are…
AI generally doesn’t think out of domain. There’s a technique in metacognition called lateral thinking, where you take a concept from one domain and you move it to another domain. For example, if you play World of Warcraft and you know how to win PvP at Arathi Basin, those same strategies and tactics can be…
