Falling Out of Love With Michael Lewis, You’re a Developer Now, and More!

Hello and happy Sunday!

We just finished the second cohort of our How to Build an AI Chatbot course taught by Every co-founder and CEO, Dan Shipper. It’s a month-long course where we teach students how to build an AI chatbot with ChatGPT and GPT-4.

If you want to see what our students built in just 30 days check out the end of this email. And if you're interested in learning how to build AI with AI learn more here:

And now, on to the articles...

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Falling Out of Love With Michael Lewis

Evan Armstrong/Napkin Math 

Evan confronts his disappointment with author Michael Lewis, who presented a compassionate portrayal of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) in his latest book. Though he once idolized Lewis for his ability to humanize his subjects, Evan now questions both his reliability and motivations. He accuses Lewis of bias for the author’s apparent defense of SBF, painting him as a sympathetic character while ignoring or downplaying his misdeeds. In the process, Evan reflects on the role of a business writer—who must weigh both the imperative of truth-telling and the need to spin an entertaining narrative—and confronts his own flaws as one.

Read

You’re a Developer Now

Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought 

Dan explores how the boundaries of being "technical" are continuously expanding thanks to AI. The magic of ChatGPT is that it makes anyone with an idea to build something with a keyboard a developer—no longer do you need to teach yourself to code in order to bring your concept to life. He saw this first hand in a month-long chatbot course in which he taught people from different backgrounds and skill sets to build simple applications using ChatGPT. And once you can build something, you’re more likely to stick with it—particularly with the kind of one-on-one instruction that ChatGPT can provide. It’s not perfect, but it’s as close to being endowed with magical skills as we can probably imagine.

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Why We Don't Ship Software as Fast as We Used To

Thorsten Ball

Software engineering manager Thorsten Ball explores the complex reasons that software development has slowed down. He challenges the prevailing notion that software has become “bloated,” suggesting that it's much more nuanced than a simple comparison of memory usage or disk space. Thorsten delves into the intricacies of modern software development, citing increased customer expectations, the handling of different hardware, screen resolution, and network speeds—and much of it invisible to the user. He also suggests that slower software isn’t necessarily worse, because larger teams are faster at doing more.

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Who Can Commercialize New Technologies?

Michael Dempsey 

Investor Michael Dempsey considers the importance of founder pedigree in emerging technologies. Such technologies often attract investors who rely heavily on the pedigree of the founding team, especially in the early stages when the technology hasn't reached a breakthrough point yet. As the technology matures, the founder's pedigree—in, say, research—may not always equate to successful commercialization; instead, understanding the rate of knowledge proliferation in a breakthrough area could be more crucial. Michael also highlights the potential for novel techniques to emerge from non-traditional backgrounds, cautioning against an over-reliance on pattern matching and emphasizing the importance of creativity and speed in shipping products.

Read

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What Students Made in Our Chatbot Course

Here are some of the most interesting and impressive projects that students created in our How to Build an AI chatbot course:

Panl

By Adrian Pearce

Meet your new personal team of AI assistants on Panl, where whether it's nutrition advice, accounting assistance, or career coaching you seek, we have a virtual professional ready to help guide your way. We're still growing our team, though our first AI, Nina the Nutritionist is here to help. Try It

Meditations Bot

By Frank Kurka

Tap into Marcus Aurelius's wisdom with our chatbot. Beyond offering ancient insights, it teaches the lost art of meaningful inquiry. Engage, learn, and master the skill of asking profound questions. Try It

Idea Vault

By Thomas Leigh

This chatbot is created to gather user ideas on how AI can be used for social good. Instead of answering questions, it asks users to share their unique insights on the positive uses of AI. Once submitted, the chatbot vectorizes the input and adds it to a publicly accessible Obsidian knowledge vault. The goal is to create a comprehensive database of ideas that can support the ethical and beneficial advancement of AI technologies. Try It

TT Build

By Thomas Officer

TT Build, helps you get the ball rolling with missing middle housing development, generate an investment, hypothetical estimate some rehab costs, and a cash flow potential. This will help you figure out an investment crowdfunding strategy. Try It

movetogermany.ai

By Muneeb Ahmed

movetogermany.ai is Germany's first AI-powered immigration consultant, offering skilled workers and students expert advice, eligibility checks, and visa guidance for a seamless relocation experience. Try It

ReminderBot

By Brian Choe

ReminderBot is a personal reminder assistant. Schedule reminders for yourself and others by simply telling it what and when. Engage in a quick, intuitive chat, and it crafts the reminder, delivering it exactly when needed.

Try ReminderBot:

Whatsapp: +1-614-324-6966

U.S. SMS: (317) 489-6755

Kumpel.ai

By Daniel Bennett

Kumpel.ai allows you to connect any or all of your notion workspace with a personal private chatbot powered by the chatGPT API. Want to summarize notes from a meeting? Get help prioritizing your tasks for the day? Find something by meaning instead of keyword? Kumpel is your helpful friend and assistant, who has read nearly all of the internet, and is always ready to lend a helping hand or a fresh perspective. Try It

HubermanBot

By Karthik Mukund

A chatbot based on Andrew Huberman's podcasts. It's a one-stop shop for anything health!

Project Overview Brief Generator

By Bo Bergstrom

A chatbot to help you quickly generate an overview brief to hand a service provider (dev shop, marketing agency, etc.) as the first step toward working with them. Try It

SunScreen Bot

By Amanda Zhang

A chatbot that has been trained on 400 ingredients commonly used in sunscreen products. It answers questions about your interested ingredients and their functions in plain English so they are easy to understand. Try It

Freudinho

By Jonathan Korn

Get your dream's analyzed by Freud. I trained a LLM on Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams". Try It

Journ-E

By Claudio Rossi

A bespoke in-house Al chatbot that is trained on an organization's existing style guides and training manuals, augmented with international best-practice in the news industry. Try It

MentorBot

By Arundhuti Gupta

A chatbot based on tips from mentoring experts featured on MENTOR’s 'Becoming a Better Mentor: Strategies to Be There for Young People'. Try It

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Did you enjoy looking through these? Think you can create one or want to learn more about how to build with AI? Sign up for the next cohort!

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That's all for this week!