Ugh. Is AI going to lead to human extinction?

This is not an April Fool joke, I promise! My second newsletter in a week, which was slowly written each night of the past week between 11:00 pm and 12:00 am when I had a moment to breathe.

The growth of this newsletter right out of the gate has been a lot of fun, and I want to provide more content because growth is really addicting.

I would also love to hear from you. What’s valuable? What’s a waste of time? What do you want to know?

Soon: rewards for referrals to this newsletter. I have some cool ideas. 👀

🧪 My new favorite AI app - Gamma

Those who know me know that I love the Incredible Hulk. This app is perfectly named, and it blew me away last week.

What makes it great? Incredibly fast design and implementation of ideas on the page. We typically build these in Canva, but I loved this experience MUCH more. Plus, doing things slowly sucks. AI should make us move faster.

Gamma uses AI to help you create presentations, websites, or anything you want with incredible templates and an AI (beta) helper. The templates are great. The builder is great. The AI is great. The combination is incredible.

Every week in our leadership meeting, I tie a known principal or law to the company. Gamma is going to make this presentation my best yet.

Gamma has awesome themes out of the box, but you can go in and update colors, fonts, images, backgrounds, and more. That is fantastic.

Here’s the theme editor:

Here is a sneak peek at my presentation:

I know a few colleagues and employees subscribed to this newsletter—and you all will have to wait for Monday.

🔗 Check out Gamma here.

🚨 A huge week of AI news (possible end-of-the-world scenarios, sorry)

I really don’t want this to become an AI news repository. If you all really want that, fine. It will bug me, but fine.

That said, a ton of crazy shit happened this week, and I need to share it with you.

• 🔗 Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Andrew Yang, and more incredibly smart people you’ve heard of have signed an open letter asking all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. Read more here.

• 🔗 A TIME article asks if the above letter is enough and speculates that AI will lead to human extinction. Do you think this is the beginning of the end? I was just getting to finally relax a little, too. Read more here.

• 🔗 Italy has banned access to ChatGPT. Now you’ll have to ask yourself if a week in that place you’ve always wanted to visit is worth not having ChatGPT for a week. Read more here.

• 🔗 People are falling in love with AI bots, and a single update can really break their hearts. Reminds me of the movie HER. This is the future of loneliness, isn’t it? Read more here.

🤖 AI apps for you to check out this weekend

These are a few apps I have been playing with and enjoying this past week.

• 🔗 Gamma - Create beautiful presentations fast with AI.

• 🔗 Scribe - We are testing this against Loom for internal documentation at my company.

• 🔗 AMA App - I am the worst at texting back. Now there is an app that can understand and respond to your texts.

• 🔗 Rationale App - An AI assistant to help business owners and leaders like me to make tough decisions. I tested it. My decisions are probably still 50/50 at best.

• 🔗 PromptPerfect - An AI that helps write prompts to help you talk more clearly to AI. I feel a perfect loop coming on.

No seriously, check these out and let me know what you think. Reply to this email or tweet me directly.

🔨 The best use of Midjourney I saw this week.

I love the Avengers. I love AI. I love this so so much. Please check out the Twitter thread below.

⭐️ My big thought of the week: protect your stars.

In a recent leadership meeting, I talked about Price’s Law.

Price’s law says that 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people participating.

Read more about it here.

My thoughts on this - if you don’t demand greatness from members of all levels of your organization, your stars won’t be happy. How does this tie into AI? Well, at some point, AI will make B and C players obsolete.

Be an A player.