407: AI + Education, BingGPT Ads, Yvon Chouinard, GPU Shortage, Adobe Firefly vs Midjourney, John Carmack, Life Expectancy, and Mario

"the man who drowned in a river that was only 2 feet deep on average"

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

—Toni Morrison

A tree in front of my house.

🥶🌧️🔌👦🏻🧒🏼 The best laid plans…

So the past few days were supposed to go a certain way, but instead, my province was hit by a severe ice storm that left almost 1 million people without power, including my family. It was the first time I ever saw so much thunder and lightning during ice rain!

Schools and daycares closed, so with the long Easter weekend, my kids were home for 6 days in a row, giving me mild pandemic lockdown PTSD flashbacks.

That’s why there was no newsletter on Friday. My mental batteries are pretty drained from having two rambunctious boys jumping around and screaming since last Wednesday. I’m looking forward to some quiet time this week 😮‍💨

🍋🥤🍫💝My 9yo boy started having entrepreneurial ideas, and it’s been fun to watch.

His latest venture is to create hand-drawn animation flipbooks with a friend to try to sell them to friends and family members.

Another one of his ideas was to purchase silicone molds and bulk chocolate to make various appealing shapes of chocolate candies.

I didn’t really have that as a kid. I only became interested in business much later.

The best part was when my son told me something like: “Ever since I started my business, I feel more free.” I asked what he meant, and it comes down to realizing that he can do stuff on his own, make decisions, build things, and solve problems.

Kids’ lives can be so structured by school and parents, it’s good for them to have their own thing, and it doesn’t have to be entrepreneurial. I’m sure that artistic projects, organizing activities with their friends, tending their own small garden in the backyard, learning to cook a recipe by themselves, or designing and building a treehouse can have some of the same benefits.

It doesn’t matter if he sells anything, it’s about creativity, agency, experimentation, and nurturing that voice inside that comes up with interesting ideas. The lessons from that are worth a lot and I hope they stick with him all his life!

🤖 I decided to test GPT-4’s ability to handle spelling mistakes and missing letters.

It turns out, it isn’t bothered by spelling mistakes at all! It’s very un-computer-like in its ability to extract meaning from something that isn’t the actual text tokens it was trained on:

It isn’t just predicting its next token, it’s also predicting my tokens too!

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🧑🏼‍🏫🤖 AI + Education: Democratizing 1-on-1 tutoring?