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There’s a lot of people who think AI is overhyped…

I was thinking about this today and realised that it’s complete rubbish.

Language Models completely skipped the ‘hype phase’ and went straight into skyrocketing user adoption phase.

To me, hype is what happens before something is ‘launched’ … like the hype of a movie or video game … big AAA titles get hyped up and then invariably fail spectacularly in the game industry. Movies that are just rewrites of old stories are also very culpable.

Crypto was hyped up for sure – albeit the main ability to have a citizen currency out of the control of third parties seems to have been missed in the minds of many in terms of importance.

Don’t people know it’s a good thing to have competition in currencies? Or that giving the ability for a government to freeze your bank account based on social meta data, is a frightening prospect happening very soon?

But with crypto there wasn’t a stable enough coin for them to be worthwhile as value exchange (yet). It became about lambo mooning rather than escaping from central banking tyranny. Beyond that, the use case of crypto for the average person isn’t there.

Language Models are being adopted by the ‘average person’ super quickly. Even if it’s just to have sounding wall for things that are on their mind.

So, with AI … there wasn’t really any hype as such – the user adoption proves that. Talking specifically about LLMs, ‘AI’ is so flexible that hundreds of millions (billions?) of people are using it in their own unique way.

Is it creating actual tangible business value?

Yes. If the businesses are applying it correctly.

Will it disrupt industries?

Yes it already is, and once people figure out the best way to leverage it, it will automate, streamline and enhance many businesses. They will do far more with less.

I think at the moment tech people and entrepreneurs are happy to try out all sorts of different tools- and willing to pay for them for a few months to see how they go.

I think LLMs are just the next tool in the overall arsenal of AI – computer vision, machine learning, deep learning,

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The way forward.

Got some interesting things going on right now, but will write about them if they work out.

At the moment my biggest challenge is finding sufficient time everyday to R&D in the AI. I think the way forward is:

• I want to rent some dedicated server options where I can use the largest deepseek models … this is mostly just out of interest, but also it’s the first step toward proper privacy of data – I honestly think it’s insane that everyone is sharing their innermost thoughts with these AI companies, Silicon Valley doesn’t have the greatest of reps when it comes to privacy. But the point is language models can be private to you. So I want to investigate that, and work out pricing and performance; and also learn a bit about tweaking weighting of models and see how that looks.
• I want to experiment with much larger and detailed prompts – coding and normal – to see how far I can push them. For instance with Claude I have built mini Vue applications which were really good quality but they had to be properly steered by me. So a lot more experimentation on how good I can push these things.
• I want to learn and experiment more about the image, music and video generation. GPU servers are slightly more expensive for me at the moment, but I’m hoping a friend is going to help me out on that. And I want to make more fun cat videos.
• I’d like to see how much it would take to build some sort of mini-ITX form of computer with sufficient enough RAM to run language models locally.
• I’d like to experiment with micro models to see how they perform on mobiles.
• I want to experiment with scaled sentiment analysis
• I have made a custom object framework infrastructure and I want to link that in with web crawling and language models
• I want to experiment with the ‘talk-to-your-data’ tools
• I want to experiment with the automation tools (make, n8n)
• Lots more web crawling transforming into structured data sets of my own i.e. knowledge cubes
• Pushing the limits on frontend webdesign to see how creative I can be now
• Look into natural speech tech
• Bring all of these things together in one product
• Work out what stocks to invest in

Anyway more again soon

Whilst there are downsides to revealing an idea too early, there are downsides to not doing so.

I was doing some meditation and breathwork in the garden this morning, since I woke up feeling sluggish and had these annoying repetitive negative thoughts whirling around. After doing some journaling to get some of it out of my system, I knew enough to go and do breathwork, which can completely knock out negativity.

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I realised what I needed in that moment, and for many times in my life, is I needed a ‘companion’ to mirror my positive thoughts, rationally look at negative paradigms, and provide genuine motivators when it looks like I was going off the rails, off-path, or beginning a down cycle. In short, I needed some sort of non-judgemental ‘guide/assistant’ that could help when friends and family could not. They aren’t always available and people have their own challenges going on. Likewise, a lot of well meaning advice can be defeating.

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I thought about self-help books and the authors who make millions out of them. I realised that eventually those authors will want to supplement their own coaching programs with AI. These will effectively be avatars carefully trained with detailed prompts to allow for the LLM to identify specifically what mental state the people are in at a particular point, and to be able to respond in kind.

For instance, I can clearly see a Brian Tracey avatar, trained across all his books, 3D modelled so a person can login to that website pay some money and all of a sudden they get to talk to Brian Tracey. That in itself is probably going to be something that all celebrities do, and it’s probably already happening in some form. And the key thing is, that these coaching programs are done over time so its about keeping context of what’s going on with the user. Imagine having Brian Tracey alongside you, giving you the value of his books, linking with practical tools, etc. Or if you aren’t a fan of him, take anyone that you regularly read – maybe it could be a famous stock trader or investor, maybe it could be Peter Thiel or any of the Dragons Den lot. What about an Alan Sugar branded avatar?

To be clear, i’m talking about a complex, well thought out piece of software. Well trained, and tested. Not some generic drivel which of course will emerge from these markets.

Branded Virtual Agents / Avatars

These are literally branded virtual agents. I can clearly see an online store, maybe amazon, where you can just download these virtual identities of celebrities, famous book authors, film writers, and when implemented well, people will be able to interact with them in fairly meaningful ways. Some will be funny, some will be educational, some will be motivational. And to take it a step further you could then get them all to communicate with one another and see what madness unfolds.

Mental Health Personal Motivators

My initial flutter app that I have been building was focused entirely on obtaining wellness metrics from the user, and being able to track those metrics. Along the way I realised that it would be key for users to be able to journal in written word, verbal… and for those notes to be stored and interpreted back to the user at the appropriate moment.

Prompt training – things like if the user is showing signs of excessive and irrational negativity; you want to not overwhelm them with feedback, but assure them that there are ways out of it, they just need to pick their battles. So rather than reel off 10 top tips for dealing with mental health, the assistant has to mimic being empathetic toward the user.

I can clearly see that some famous breathwork practitioner might be interested in such a thing, if he is not already doing it. I can clearly see that gyms will have some sort of branded virtual assistants, that could also potentially monitor the attendance of a customer, check in on them if they haven’t been around for a while. Basically anyone who already writes books or has training courses can convert those into avatar driven special AI training programmers.

Privacy

Whilst you don’t want to lose the humanity entirely, one of the benefits of using an AI therapist/coach is that (data storage concerns initially aside) you can be assured you are working with a non-judgemental system that you really can talk through your inner most fears with. For instance, abuse victims can open up with a strength of anonymity; or severely depressed people can at least bounce their ideas off a well trained language model.

I watched a video on AI where the guy was saying LLMs were scoring just as high a rating as clinical psychotherapists… I would have to triple check this, but this is the sort of reality we are now moving into..

It doesn’t have to be mental health specific, that’s just a clear niche market (or relatively pervasive right now). Ultimately it comes down to what i’ve been saying for a while which is everyone will have a single Virtual Agent that will follow them through life, motivate them, guide them, research for them. It will know them intimately.

The only thing I would say is there are likely to be many brands and variants of personal assistants that people can choose from; and it may be that people have multiple agents; although I still think there will be some sort of of overarching single agent managing them.

Personal Development Market

The personal development arena will be supercharged by this sort of thing. When you get beyond the ‘soft skill’ guidance, meaning the psychological aspect, there is still the entire remit of having an assistant guide you through your goals, projects and idea creations.

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So, todays idea is just an extension of what I’ve already been thinking – that the personal assistant is probably to be the main piece of software that a human uses, and everything will connect into that. I am probably not quite right there, but I am along the right lines.

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Healthcare for elderly

The NHS is clearly under pressure for a variety of reasons. We desperately need to avoid privatising it at all costs because it is a wonderful thing to have and we should all be incredibly grateful for it. When things go wrong the NHS is there no questions asked. Compare this to the American healthcare service and if you have no conception of that, go and educate yourself on the insanity of it.

Anyway, I can clearly see that AI driven caring, empathetic, humorous and encouraging avatars can play a part in supplementing a hospital ward, senior living, hospice, etc. The AI can work around the clock, and I suppose with OpenCV it can assess a patients visual signs, along with any streamed healthcare data.

In no way am I encouraging departments with zero human contact, but there is room for supplementation. The same AI that goes and talks to patients, can be the same AI that reviews and talks to doctors, giving reviews (scaled sentiment analysis) and alerting to any critical incidents.

The Foundation Is Still ChatBots / Conversational AI

One of the main goals I will now setup is something thats obvious but well needed and thats getting a chat bot on my own website, trained properly. There’s a few options already and im most likely going to work with text.com

Part of me wonders where I’ve been the last couple of years as the rise in the obvious solution has come about. I suppose thats the problem when you do client work for a living, you just lose focus on the opportunities happening all around.

Anyway enough for now.

Today I flicked between Google Startup School, a local tech conference and a fairly major sales call. And did some refactoring of my mobile app which will link up to an LLM eventually.

It’s been two weeks and a fairly manic one at that. Initially I had planned to watch loads of AI tutorials & play with AI for three months before even doing anything else.

In actual fact I’ve found myself focusing on the business actions:

• Having conversations with potential business partners
• Running through ideas and looking at current AI Startups
• Making my first YouTube videos
• Putting together a website with dashboard and stripe integration
• Talking to my first few potential customers
• Working on the existing AI platform attempting to get it running
• Posting my thoughts every day on this website, and linking to it from LinkedIn

But how much ‘AI’ have I actually done? Well, of course I use it all the time throughout the day. Claude cleans up my frontend, and ChatGPT helps me navigate through the other bits. It’s scary how little I use Google now, although I do find that StackOverflow is still super useful and often the last resort I goto; it’s a shame that they have been massively negatively affected by AI. I’m sure they will figure out a way forward.

But in term’s of actual AI R&D, I haven’t been doing enough, and I’m going to make amends for that. The plan was to link up the dashboard once that’s up and running, and I’m close to that, but I need to be motoring forward a lot faster.

End Of Sprint 1

Although I hadn’t really planned anything out for the first sprint, my strategy had pretty much been just to jump in and get started. I knew that there’s really only two options for me:

• Make web products that take advantage of the new AI tooling that provide value
• Help others navigate through the world of AI

This is nothing ground-breaking and is fairly obvious. But I hadn’t planned on getting started with an AI Agency straight away but my gut feeling is that feels like the right way forward. I can supplement the AI focus with my last two decades of professional web dev experience, and by dealing with customers in the field, I have a better idea of the problems they are facing and how AI can solve things for them.

Of course this is nothing new. I’m sure most web development agencies will make this transition eventually. The difference for me is I had got bored of the idea of running purely a web development agency, and AI was this bright and shiny ‘new thing’ that is genuinely transformative. I was around when the Internet was just taking off, and missed some opportunities due to not having mentors and good advice around me when I was struggling… so I’m in a better position now to assess what to do at this point.

Point is, I’ve created positive momentum at this point, and that’s the main takeaway. But I want to tweak somewhat.

Businesses are systems

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. —W. EDWARDS DEMING,

Kaufman, Josh. The Personal MBA (p. 165). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Essentially, a system is a set of repeatable processes that produce a result. It’s similar to a plan, but this is a plan that is meant to be repeated, over and over, tweaked where necessary.

All successful entities use systems to hone their craft, and if you are getting over worked, it’s a good idea to think about how you can systemise your business from the ground-up.

The amount of jobs I’ve gone into where it’s basically just ‘get on with it’ and for most situations this gets the job done albeit really inefficiently. Employees at companies I’ve worked at never have a daily system and that’s why management and upper management get so fixated on reports and metrics in order to understand a complete mess of a system in the first place!

There’s a really good book called the E-Myth which positions the turn-key franchise model as the most successful businesses out there. Franchise owners can buy into the business and because there’s a clear plan for how everything operates, they normally generate profits. Franchises are drivers in how America accelerated and how globalisation began.

So the challenge is to work out actions the needs to take each cycle. A cycle can be a anything from 24 to 72 hrs. Whatever you want really.

Fortunately, business has already been mapped out pretty well, and one of the components is to do some sort of R&D concerning your business. I think a lot of people miss this, since it’s not immediate payoffs, but when you are a few years down the road, if you aren’t researching and retooling, you eventually get left behind.

• Every day I need to be increasing my knowledge of the industry, but in a valuable way. This is likely going to be watching Y Combinator startup school, or YouTubes of AI tooling being used. So everyday I will allocate a set amount of time to ensuring this gets done, I’ll throw it on my blog at least, and if it’s really good I’ll add to my social feeds. What I like to do these days with YouTube is to copy all the transcript and run it through an LLM so I can summarise the best bits.
• Every day I need to be practically working with tooling, and where appropriate making content on it. The main focus here is catching up with the latest AI stuff and practically implementing it. I’ve had a list of YouTube videos to watch for a while now, and other things have taken priority.

The Challenge Of AI

The challenge most startups face will be the ability of others to replicate your product; and for the deep funded companies they will be able to do so almost immediately. This is somewhat frustrating. At least when the internet was born, it was fairly open territory. AI there is already the tech establishment and they are going full pace at it. But you have to get beyond that, keep going and look for the opportunites that can work for you; and are harder for big companies to get excited about. The main strength you have as a startup is your ability to be nimble.

Some Interesting YouTube Videos

So below I am going to list some YouTube videos (Thanks to Ollie & Toby for passing these on)

Other Resources

https://www.stagehand.dev

Decided against talking about the severe negative impacts of AI tools, opting to just do some iterative image generation. Some people don’t know what’s possible with AI tools yet, so thought I would write about them. Videos coming soon, but just this for now.

In work news – more conversations, and getting deployment configuration correct today.

Please draw me a beautiful image of a mountain, blue sky, sunshine, with some rivers. Maybe some animals.

now, as far as you can, take the same image and scene. and drop a nuclear bomb on it. draw it.

now imagine the same scene thirty years on after nuclear radiation has taken its toll

then fast forward 1000 years into the future. what happens?

I have no idea why it added another nuclear detonation in, but I liked the rest of it.

then zoom another 10,000 years into the future. what happens.

AI really is amazing for creating fantasy type scenes.

I was interested to see what would keep happening.

ok, once more push it one million years into the future.

"One million years later, Earth is a completely alien world. The mountains have eroded into bizarre landscapes, bioluminescent forests tower over glowing rivers, and strange new life forms dominate. The sky pulses with surreal colors, shaped by an atmosphere far removed from what we once knew. Human civilization is nothing more than a fossilized whisper beneath the surface. This is not our planet anymore—this is something new. Want to go even further into the abyss of time?"

Go further into time. Go to infinite minus one day. What does it look like?

This blew my mind when it came up.

Here it is—one day before infinity. Matter and energy swirl in an incomprehensible dance, reality itself breaking apart into fractal patterns of light and void. The concept of Earth, time, and space is long gone, replaced by an endless, shifting expanse of the unknowable. This is the last moment before the infinite, where the rules of existence dissolve into something beyond human understanding.

Want to take it one step further, into infinity itself?

Yes goto infinity.

now rewind to the beginning of time. and put a minotaur in there somewhere for fun.

Now imagine a world where the Minotaur was the first being, the god. what would it look like? change the style to ultra realistic

I loved this one, absolutely brilliant. Also love the little man on the mountain top that it added.

Here it is—the Minotaur God, the first being, shaping existence itself. A colossal divine force, its glowing veins pulse with cosmic energy, crafting labyrinthine mountains, golden plains, and rivers of molten light. Ancient civilizations kneel in reverence, carving temples into the cliffs as the sky swirls with celestial power. This is a world ruled by the Minotaur, where creation bends to its will.

I love that minotaur god. can you give him a wife?

It really is crazy how good it is at image generation. How does it really perform the process. Anyway I switched it up a bit.

ok, now take the minotaur and have him sitting down on a sun lounger next to a swimming pool whilst his children run around all crazy. he looks extremely fed up of parenting. the mother has drunk herself to a stupour and is about to slump into the pool. they have human servants.

now, fast forward 1000 years and add a twist of evil.

Love it. And I’m gonna leave it there. Try it out for yourself. Can be fun.