David here. (yes hair, no glasses). For the next week, I'll be taking over from Dave as he is on holiday. Which is good because I wanted to talk to you. It'll be a long one but packed with actionable tips.

I'm spending about 40% of my time talking to our students and over the last year I talked to thousands of people.

I sense a pattern that seems to be applying to most people in AI.

I want to see if this applies to you too.

Do you remember these headlines from a year ago?

Everybody went crazy that we will all lose our jobs, we will all die, we all went berserk, and influencers in the AI spaces started murmuring the same sentence as one:

"AI won't take your job but someone using AI will"

But then again, how exactly? The smartest piece of technology we have ever created being our doom and savior in one. Then you open up ChatGPT and it does this:

So about that pattern.

What I see is a lot of people I talk to are excited, terrified, hopeful and feeling a lot of different things about AI, but nearly every single one of them are CONFUSED.

So AI is so smart everyone is gonna get fired and it's something I need to embrace, but AI is so stupid it cannot even spell lollipop?

AI is not the Sorcerer's Stone

But we've been sold exactly that. AI will do this, AI will do that. When I talk to people, we often discuss age old plans that might finally be possible with AI. Because the media hyped this technology up SO MUCH that a lot of people started seeing it as a black box that magically solves problems.

Well, no. Gotta have to pop that bubble. GPT is still just a wrench.

A damn good wrench. But a wrench. Not Gandalf.

...and this is when things start to look a bit bleaker. Because then you start asking questions and nobody is answering them.

Looking for a tool that someone built? Good luck, there are over 12,000 of them. You try out a few and realize that the real cost of AI is not going to be using it. It's figuring out what to use it FOR.

So you play around with GPTs, move over to Perplexity, try HeyGen, ElevenLabs, use a few social media content creator apps like Munch, sign up to a hundred newsletters and by the time to realize it, the day is over: you basically bingeing AI content but it's still not doing its original promise too well: saving time for you. The personalization, the setup, the configuration of all these softwareseats up much of your time and it's still not really doing what you want.

Make AI work for you

...not the other way around. Maybe you checked online courses, but the course creator leave you in the mud once checkout is done. You're watching Youtube videos, but there's just SO. MUCH. TO. LEARN.

So that's how you end up feeling...confused.

Today I want to help you with that. I'll give you a simple process you can follow to make sure that you filter out the noise and only deal with information in AI that's actually valuable FOR YOU.

Over the last year over 10,000 learned from us via workshops, webinars, textbooks, university lectures, courses. It's humbling.

But what we see is that they usually go through the same evolution:

L1: Prompt Engineering

Dave talks about this a lot. It's about writing one prompt really well. This is the foundation, ChatGPT is like a gateway drug to machine learning and everyone starts with trying to get out the right output from Large Language Models. There's plenty of resources available online for this.
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​Skill to acquire: How to write prompts using the 6 key elements of a prompt naturally so you don't need to use prompt templates ever again.

L2: Custom GPTs

Once you're really good at prompting, you realize that typing is very exhausting. Maybe you could save some of the process into a Custom GPT. Maybe you could design the conversation beforehand. Maybe you could add different actions to your GPT so it can send emails, fetch data from the web, order a pizza idk. This is when you realize that beyond chatting, there's a whole world out there. You learn about knowledge bases and memory, understand RAG and other tools, learn how Zapier can complement your GPT.

Skill to acquire: Set up a Custom GPT with memory and custom actions through Zapier.

L3: No-code: Make

Pretty quickly you'll realize that ChatGPT interface is very limiting. Maybe you don't actually want to open ChatGPT every time you want AI to do something for you. Why can't it just do stuff on its own? Like read my emails every morning? Respond to support tickets? Collect news and write blog articles delivered every Tuesday? I want to delegate stuff to AI because if I have to actively use it I just replaced one piece of software with another, but I'm still sitting in front of my computer. This is when you start learning no-code tools. We're Make partners (our students get 3 months for free) because we believe that Make and Zapier are the two most powerful automation tools that are so easy to use that kids can learn how to build stuff with it.

Skill to acquire: Try building a bot that reads your emails every morning and uses GPT-4 to determine if you can ignore it. Make Academy is REALLY good and free to learn the basics of no-code.

L4: AI Models: HuggingFace

Once you're confidently building bots that are not just generating content but also integrating into your existing systems like Google Drive, Instagram, Youtube, etc, you'll probably turn to the next questions:

Is it all safe? How can I make sure that the data is mine? What about other models like LLaMa or Mistral? At this point it makes sense to learn how to run models with HuggingFace. After all, you'll know what to do with them: you'll just plug them into your Make bots.

Skill to acquire: Take one of your bots in Make and replace GPT-4 with any open source model you take from HuggingFace and see how it performs.

L5: Fine-tuning

At this point you can basically do anything you want to without writing a single line of code. You look back and wonder how much time you wasted trying to find the Best AI Tools Out There. When it only takes a few hours to build YOUR OWN, the one that works EXACTLY how you want and does EXACTLY what you want. But one thing is missing: adding your own data. Because you already know about RAG but how can you train your own thing to make sure it never makes mistakes?

You already know HuggingFace so at this point you turn to fine-tuning. You learn how to use AutoTrain in HuggingFace and then plug your own models into your Make bots. It takes a lot of effort structuring the data the right way but it's worth it.

Skill to acquire: Replace your LLM in one of your Make bots with a smaller, cheaper, fine-tuned model that is now even outperforming GPT-4 for the specific tasks.

What to build?

Take this path. With or without us, it's fine. You're not sending your kid to run the marathon when they're still learning how to crawl.

But there's one question you're very likely stuck with already:

"Okay but what do I build? How do I find the right stuff to automate? How will AI help me personally, how can I make it work, for myself?"

Those are damn fine questions. Very important ones. As you can see, the question is not the how anymore.

As Seneca famously said, no wind favors a ship without a destination.

This is why you need a personal AI plan. One that is personally built for your needs. Because not even the smartest AI and not even the best developer can extract that context out of your brain. Not even if they team up. (Maybe Neuralink will change that one day.)
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This is also why I decided that from now on, we'll add another thing to our Prompt Master AI Course:

We'll create your own personal AI plan for you.

So for $297 you will get:

• 12 hour course that takes you to L3 of this journey (same course we teach at university), all drip fed weekly starting next week
• over 20 hours of workshop recordings to help you practice and move towards L5
• a community of 1200 highly trained experts from all around the world
• an ever growing library of ready to deploy bots built by our community
• unlimited DM support to never feel lost and alone in the world of AI, ever again
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...and on top of all that, you'll get a free, complimentary 1 hour consulting session with your purchase. (Usually costs $500/hr)

We'll help you create a documented plan on how AI can serve YOUR life, YOUR business and make the biggest impact so that you don't have to sit in front of the computer all day.

We will talk about you, what interests you, your business, your job, your objectives around AI and where are the biggest opportunities for you personally about using AI. Then I'll give you a personalized learning journey on what to learn, what to build, what to do. Like a personal trainer creating a workout plan, but for AI.

I'd love to see you in the community. You'll see that we're a bit different from other educators because we have a human first approach.

When you join us, you'll be at home. We're all the same. Misfits, odd ones, looking to unlock ourselves with smart, ingenious ways of using technology, always trying to become better versions of ourselves. And we all do that together.

​Click here to get the Prompt Master AI Course and start creating your own personal AI plan.​

Talk soon,

David
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PS: We now have students who are at L3 of this journey and we're referring Automation Engineering clients to them. There's so much interest from small business owners to integrate AI into their work that we started involving our community in delivery. If you're a business owner that means that you'll have access to this talent pool by joining.