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Christopher S Penn
What’s missing from AI outputs is pride. When you do the work, you take pride in your outputs. When you don’t do the work, you don’t have any stake in the outputs. It’s the difference between a meal you cooked yourself – even if you didn’t quite nail it – and a meal from a…
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Christopher S Penn
A few people have asked my take on both Amodei and Shumer’s recent pieces, both of which are excellent reads: https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening TLDR: AI can do pretty much whatever you want it to and it’s self-improving generationally, and it imperils ALL knowledge work https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology TLDR: AI could be its own country and would be an existential…
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Christopher S Penn
Here’s why agentic AI matters, in a word: parallelism. All of the tasks agentic AI does, regular AI also does (because logically, agentic AI is built on top of regular AI). And the tasks that you’d do with agents, you can absolutely do in serial, one at a time, one after another. It’ll work. It’ll…
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Christopher S Penn
It’d be nice to have some precedented times. It’s been 6 years since COVID turned over the apple cart that was “normal”, and 3 years since we last asked you what YOU wanted to learn from us. So here’s that chance, a ONE QUESTION (two if you count your email) survey to fill out about…
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Summary In today's episode, I walk through how to set up and use Claude Cowork on the Mac desktop app to automate complex multi-step marketing projects like building a newsletter growth strategy. Here's what this means for you. You gain a repeatable framework for turning messy business tasks into structured AI workflows that run autonomously…
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Christopher S Penn
“AI is destroying creativity.” Then it was never there to begin with. Truly creative people NEED to create. They need to make things. They have ideas that are burning inside to get out. AI doesn’t suppress that. If anything, AI enables that. When I look at my work and play over the last 2 years,…
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Christopher S Penn
Web traffic is a poor measure of AI adoption. There are tons and tons of infographics floating around proclaiming the top tools in generative AI based on estimated web traffic data, most notably from A16z but also from many others. This is a very, very poor measure of AI adoption because it excludes a ton…
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Christopher S Penn
“Consumer spending isn’t driving company profits as much as reducing expenses and improving efficiency. That could be a problem.” writes the Wall Street Journal about this season’s earnings reports. Gee, you think? Anyone who’s spent more than a week in an Econ 101 class learned that you cannot cut your way to growth, and “lean…
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Christopher S Penn
At a private company workshop yesterday (I do those btw), one of the attendees asked a very salient question: “given how much AI is taking over individual tasks, what are the meta skills that people need to have to succeed in an AI first world?” The answer for this is simple but not easy. I…
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Christopher S Penn
Here’s a very blatant example of gender bias baked into an AI model. Each week, Katie Robbert reads aloud the Trust Insights newsletter. In preparation, I take the raw video, transcribe it word for word with NVIDIA Parakeet, and then give to Gemini 2.5 Pro to turn into a YouTube description. Now, to be clear,…
