On to Year Four!

I feel like I wake up to this every day.

This now begins my fourth year at Moose Lodge here in Missouri. To say the time flew is a gross understatement. I’ve always felt very lucky to be here, and there has never been a moment when this wasn’t where I wanted to be. I’ve never been able to get enough of it, even after the prior three years. It’s still where I can do more for my clients than anywhere else.

Yet, I paid a lot for this sacrifice to build my own life here. It’s cost me dearly. While I’m sustaining loyal clients, building new relationships moves much slower than I anticipated. But that’s the Midwest. It’s nothing like the pace on the West Coast. The East Coast somewhat mimics the Midwest to some degree, with pockets of West Coast speeds.

In Seattle, it would be common for me to have West Coast calls at all hours of the day and night—not so around here or back East. We were in the office around 4 AM at OAC, and we’d work until 3 PM, then relocate home to work a few more hours, all to remain on top of our work and avoid commuter traffic. That pace just doesn’t exist here. Yet, my work habits remain deeply ingrained. I’m writing this at 4:49 AM on a Sunday morning.

I’m also facing an entirely new set of challenges. It’s exciting and different but also complicated. I have the daunting task of remaining on top of the rapid changes in AI. I now spend about an hour every morning just reading about the advances and milestones since the day before. The day before! This is no exaggeration.

My day once began with CB Insights and Slashdot and not a lot of big changes. Not anymore. Now I start every day with the Rundown.AI and all the links. By the time I get through that, and often some offshoot reading, at least an hour has passed. It’s happening so fast that I can’t take the time to do the latest tutorials on each new AI solution to better understand what’s useful. Some updates, by the way, are not practical at all.

Through this process, I’m seeing the large gaps in logic with AI and now consider it in a state of a fancy database. It’s fine for editing and modifying some things, but it lacks the ability to reason and find comparative errors without me prompting first. For example, using the three best tools—GPT-4o, Grok 2.0, and Perplexity—it’s not able to give me four data sets for four major cities and spot the one in four that is wildly in error by a factor of 10X. It doesn’t even notice the outlier. It does not yet have the means to compare and contrast on its own. That will come, but it’s not here yet. The upshot is, I can’t yet fully trust its results.

This is a wild time for me, and so my silence isn’t because not much is happening to write about. No, just the opposite. It’s impossible for anyone to keep up, but this is temporary. AI will eventually help me do just that and capture only what’s relevant. This is just like the early days of the PC when so many companies were making new claims.