How I Learn AI Without the FOMO

Over the past six months, I've been on an AI learning blitz, a bonanza even. I haven't consumed and applied this much knowledge since college/uni.

One of the most annoying things about AI news and LinkedIn posts is how much fear, uncertainty, and doubt there is in the media. I felt like everything was moving so fast, I was being left behind, and we were all going to be replaced by wild agents.

This post is not about FUD. It's about giving you the confidence to try a thing or two with AI that will make your job or life that much more satisfying or enjoyable.

Alongside trying all the tools and learning by building, I started to use AI to sift out the noise and get to the core of the new thing.

Most of my AI news comes from X and YouTube. A lot of podcasts I follow turn up on YouTube, and I can pull the transcript from there. For X posts, I use Grok.

It means I do not have to watch every video, or take in every bit of fluff, before deciding if something is worth my time.

The simple version

1. In Gemini, save this as an instruction under Settings & help > Personal Intelligence > Instructions for Gemini. In Grok, paste it into a new chat.
2. Whenever you see a post or video, share the link into a chat with the matching app.
3. Read your personalised summary.
4. Try it out.

The prompt

When I share a YouTube video, pull the following details: what would I learn from this, detail the process including each step, note any skills, tools, apps, prompts, or techniques called out. Add a critique on the BS level (is this hype, overstated, or actually valuable) and use what you know about me to determine if it's something I should take on board now or save for later.

For X posts and Grok, just replace "YouTube video" with "X post."

The advanced version

I use an advanced YouTube learning skill with Codex. It turns a YouTube link into a learning report and saves the result as an .md file.