Azeem Azhar

I'm not trying to bootstrap my way into Notion or into Obsidian.

I'm saying this is the particular set of workflows and analyses that I find useful and I've defined it.

I've got another bit of software that keeps track and up to date with the 40 or so startup investments I've made.

If you're one of my founders, one of the reasons I have a better sense of what you're doing and how to help you is because I've built an application that processes your updates and helps me understand what the key points are, what the hotspots are, what you are struggling with, where you either need help or you are going so fast, you just need more introductions.

And really trivially, but again, I'm not someone who loves admin.

I've built an app that automates my expense tracking, that goes into my email, that pulls out my expenses, that pauses them, that decides whether they are company expenses or personal expenses and puts them in a spreadsheet and takes a copy of the invoice or makes one as a PDF and drops it in a Dropbox.

It's better than Expensify, which was a product I was using before because it's really, again, tailored to the way I want to work.

And so what we're starting to see from personal stories, and I think every single one of you share them in the chat, we'll have different examples of how you are using these tools, are expanding.

And it's quite difficult to keep track of them.

Some of the foundation model companies have gone off and done surveys, but the numbers that come back are meaningless.

What does it mean to say you use AI at work?

What does it mean to say you're...

using it for educational tasks.

It's really hard to break that apart and get any sense of it.

But if you talk to your friends or you look at your own logs and histories, you will get a sense of just how diverse those tasks are and how many of them are in a way brand new to your behavior.

So these are exactly the sorts of things that you'd expect to see from a general purpose technology.

And with an exponential technology that is bringing the costs down so rapidly and bringing the capabilities up so fast, it's no surprise that we are leaning into it and inventing all sorts of these new behaviors.

A quick note.

If you want to support us in bringing more of these conversations to the world, please consider subscribing to the show.

The Exponential Age is...