Catching up with AI

When AI moves fast you need to build a map that can guide you to the relevant details that matter to you. Your focus is finite and without a guide you can spend your precious focus on the wrong things

I returned from a trip to Colorado with a cold. It was a bad week to be away as last week was a big week in AI. As I recovered, the FOMO set in. My inbox was flooded with information and it was hard to focus on any one piece of news as everything seemed so urgent.

To give you a sense of this urgency, a friend sent me this YouTube video of Google’s new ability to generate videos with audio:

Last week, my entire feed of news felt this cool and impressive.

I needed a place to start. An ability to see the landscape and understand each major announcement well enough to discover where I wanted to focus. I needed a map.

There aren’t many good sources for ready-made and current domain-specific news maps. Social feeds like Twitter/X aggregate influencer opinions but lack direction. Those feel like the last place to look but are often the first thing people see.

Newsletters consolidate announcements, but they often group links without a broader view or perspective. Publications excel at pointed statements and discussions, but struggle to show the larger picture.

This is a curation problem. It’s difficult to get signal from noise when AI is moving so quickly. I think AI can help.

Creating Info Maps

As I lay in bed thinking about what could be done to get me up to speed, I realized this is actually a space where a bit of AI-assisted research could go a long way. Tools like Perplexity Research and OpenAI’s o3 model have gained notoriety for being excellent at evaluating information and coming up with novel approaches to problems.

I scanned over some of the news I’d been sent and started building out a prompt to give to Perplexity Research. I dropped in the following prompt, including some of the keywords I’ve been seeing as I recovered:

What are the latest AI updates from the last week. I know about Claude 4, openai MCPs, google announcing new things, and figma config Ai things. But please review other major news and categorize the updates for me to be able to see at a high level and review

As a result, I received a comprehensive map of the week, including an executive summary, details of recent platform changes, enterprise adoption, regulatory changes, tech infrastructure changes, and emerging specialized tools. The news expanded from my keywords to cover many more announcements, including the Quen3 release and corrected me that the implementation of Veo3 I was impressed by was actually made in a product called Flow.

Most impressively, the details are grounded in the sources directly from these companies. While there are some Reddit posts referenced in the sources, a lot of primary source information is leveraged to build out this summary. Now it’s also easy to get more high quality details.

Additionally, the prompt I gave curates the details for me. I asked for something high level that can be easily reviewed. If I wanted it to be brief or formatted in a specific way, it would be easy enough to do that too. When’s the last time you got a newsletter that was personalized to you? (← free startup idea!)

Paid Subscribers: At the bottom of this post, you’ll find a link to my full Info Map I discuss in this post alongside other announcements from this week.

Exploring the Map

Now the journey doesn’t stop there. Maps aren’t perfect replications of reality; if they were, they wouldn’t be very helpful as they’d simply be a mirror of reality. As such, the simplifications that are made offer entrances to unexplored depths. A map enables us to think like an explorer and venture on.

The summary was great, but I can tell that the Figma Config conference was overshadowed in the news. I wanted to get a few more details on that, so I asked the follow-up question:

Give me more on the Figma Config conference that happened. It may have been during the week before

Perplexity can limit search results to only include those within a specific time period. Since I wasn’t sure exactly when the conference was, I gave it an out to expand the search.

As a result, I got a great summary of the announcements at the conference. This was actually just a quick search and not a deep research.

However, upon reviewing the details here, I had a deep research question I was dying to ask:

How does what Figma announced stack up against Canva or is there another direction that there are looking to go?

Now, I’m using the context of this conversation about GenAI advancements to give this research question some context. We can see that in the Tasks that the research agent determined from my question:

This research agent has the context of all of the results in this conversation. That’s very helpful as that information can help Perplexity guide their questions toward more specifically the underlying question I have which is really about Figma and Canva both pursuing a similar line of AI product tooling.

Benefits of Mapping

As a result of this map, I was able to achieve Inbox Zero and get back to a sane place. I had a basis for understanding each of the updates, which gave me more selective focus. I didn’t need to look at each announcement with questions looking to see if there was an important announcement that related to my work.

The map gave me enough context to know the landscape and gateways to learning more. I’d encourage you to try this out yourself the next time you feel like a wave of information is hitting you. Maybe it’ll feel a bit less daunting once you’ve created a map to go off of.

I was a slow adopter to Perplexity, but now I’m really hitting my groove with it. In many ways, I prefer it to ChatGPT results because it has a different focus on information. That said, I still leverage o3 and believe it could produce a similar result to what I’ve shown here.

Announcements

A few weeks ago, we released Benny Chat, and it’s been steadily getting better by the week. I recently pushed some new updates around daily and weekly notes. If you’d like to check it out, you can either become a paid subscriber on our Substack here or become a member of the Discord directly.

A new video on Benny Chat will be coming soon! But here’s the announcement in case you missed it:

Paid Subscriber Announcements