#065 – AI & Spreadsheets

Good morning everyone,

Hope you’re having a great week!

Let’s jump in.

read online on my website 

read time 3 minutes 

#065 at a Glance:

• Quote: The shortest answer.

• Podcast: 15 minutes with the CEO of Rio Tinto.

• Article: AI is making the internet worse.

• Tool: The Spreadsheet Page.

• Tweet: The writing warm-up routine.

Quote I’ve been thinking about:

Podcast I listened to:

AFR’s 15 Minutes with The Boss: Kellie Parker

Kellie Parker is the Australian CEO of Rio Tinto, one of the world’s largest and most prominent mining companies.

Really enjoyed hearing how one of the industry’s top CEOs went from being a worker on the ground in WA to reaching the heights of corporate in Australia, what it’s like managing 23,000 people every day, how she switches off from work, and the need for continuous learning.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

[Podcast Length: 18 minutes]

Article I read:

AI Is Making The Internet Worse 

Another excellent article by one of my favourite writers on the internet, Jack Raines.

Is AI making the internet worse?

Some of my favourite extracts from the article:

• “Why do generative AI companies want so much publisher data? My guess is to eventually displace the publishers themselves. Generative AI platforms provide answers to user queries based on their training data. Access to archived and real-time articles lets them (you guessed it) provide more detailed responses, becoming psuedo-search engines in the process.”

• “I don’t understand why publishers are signing licensing deals with generative AI companies that will likely steal their traffic. OpenAI pays you a multi-million dollar licensing fee, they publish (potentially inaccurate) summaries of your journalists’ work in their results (with attribution links, of course), users skim those results, don’t bother with going to your site, and continue with their day. It feels like a broken internet.”

• “From a user standpoint, using ChatGPT as a fact finder for current news seems efficient, especially if it can summarize current events. Getting a breakdown of the US inflation situation, for example, is useful. But there’s no guarantee that the provided summaries are accurate (LLMs match patterns, they aren’t search engines), and in the longer term, if users come to rely on generative AI companies instead of the underlying media sources, the system stops working.”

• “ChatGPT needs articles from publications to generate accurate answers, those publications need paying users to operate, and many of those users may opt out of their subscriptions (or, for free sites, ad revenue may plummet from loss of traffic) if they can get their answers from ChatGPT. When too many readers stop visiting media sites, the system breaks down.”

He was able to articulate some of these ideas which I have still been processing and trying to flesh out myself.

Without real people feeding the LLMs like ChatGPT, there is going to be less information for the LLMs to ‘aggregate’, but simultaneously, those LLMs are starting to neutralise some of those traditional creative mediums whose information from which their value-add is ultimately derived.

And it’s just a downward spiral from there…

Tool I’m using:

The Spreadsheet Page

Came across this awesome website earlier this week called The Spreadsheet Page.

Basically, it’s one of the best excel resources on the web.

The site is incredibly well-structured and has a tonne of useful Excel tips compiled by a Microsoft Excel expert.

Within each category there are heaps of genuinely useful templates that have already been set up and formatted with linked cells.

Just some of the categories on the site include:

• Business

• Finance

• Planning

• Health

• Household

• & More…

Unreal resource.

Check it out here.

Tweet I liked:

A great checklist to go through before undertaking almost any creative/work-related task.

Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.

Stay hungry, stay humble, stay curious. ⚡

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