đżď¸ Full Unemployment - The Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter
Originally published 12th February 2024
Anarchist Abbie Hoffman and capitalist Steve Jobs agreed on one thing at least: we should be automating drudgery and letting the machines do the dirty work. Youâre not alone if your packed schedule and lengthy to-do list seem to give the lie to this dream, but below are two bleeding-edge tech advances coming down the pike that can soon make a real difference in productivity for you and your organisation. (I have no financial interest in either, by the way!)
Zenfetch. Iâve been saying for over a year that ChatGPT and its friends are way too boring to produce any text worthy of publication, but that large language models can function wonderfully as speedy but naive research assistants. Iâve been waiting for someone to build a startup around this and Squadron members Gabe and Akash have finally done it!
Unlike other services restricted by a short âcontext windowâ of at most a few hundred pages, Zenfetch is designed to handle all the data you can throw at it and then answer useful research questions for you. (The geeks among you can think of it as RAG-as-a-service.) For instance, Iâve had it capture all my livestream videos and Squadron forum posts, plus the text of Agile Conversations, and itâs now coming up with provocative topics for me to discuss based on ideas Iâve neglected or forgotten aboutâonly 30% or so of what it puts out is actually useful, but I only need one or two âhitsâ to get the juices flowing. (A challenge: can you tell which of my recent scribblings have been stimulated in this way??) Iâve started uploading my collection of strategy books and provocative writing from numerous authors, so Zenfetch has even more sources for controversial concepts.Â
My brother worked in document management at Shell Oil for many years, and he showed me shelf after shelf of dusty manuals and forgotten blueprints that he was working to digitise so his colleagues could protect derrickmen and redesign refineries; imagine what he could have done with a tireless, speed-reading assistant to race through the documents and find relevant information. If you or your customers have similar troves of valuable, inaccessible information, you should be watching Zenfetch and the many competitors that will surely pop up soon (this is an obvious direction for Google Workspace and Microsoftâs OneDrive, for example). Warning: the service is barely three weeks old, so expect teething problemsâbut in true Y Combinator fashion, the founders are super-responsive. (By the way, I have a one-page Squirrel Alert for investors on how âvector databasesâ like Zenfetch fit into the AI landscape; hit reply if youâd like me to send it to you.)
Apple Vision Pro. Youâve already heard a lot about this one so Iâll keep it brief. (If you havenât, see Stratecheryâs excellent analysis, and donât miss Casey Neistatâs wild New York adventure, linked halfway through Benâs review.)Â There is a direct and massive correlation between screen real estate and knowledge-worker productivity, and âspatial computingâ means you have essentially infinite pixels to work with, limited only by how far you can turn your head and how big your room is (Iâm personally going to put Zoom on the ceiling and lie on the sofa all day). Yes, Iâm sure itâs fun to watch movies on a honest-to-goodness cinema-size screen and yes, the personas and fake eyes are totally creepy, but those are a sideshow for me; once Apple works out the kinks (itâs a crime to allow only one Mac window!) AVP will make a huge difference for those of us who conduct orchestras of data. Look for it first on bank trading floors and in design studios. Serious offer to Americans: organise an event in your city in the next couple of months and Iâll travel and speak for free, while sneaking off to the Apple store to get my hands on one of these broken, overpriced, transformative headsets that havenât launched here yet.
This first appeared in my weekly Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter which is received as part of the Squirrel Squadron every Monday, and was originally posted on 12th February 2024. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here:Â https://squirrelsquadron.com/
