Learning to work with my AI Assistant; Second Mover > First Mover a.k.a where the advantage really lies for your startup
I need to redo my personal website, a task I dislike enormously, and I thought hey, let’s see if Copilot can help.
If you are not familiar with it, Microsoft Copilot is an “AI companion that helps you with various tasks and activities through a simple chat interface”. It’s based on Chat GPT-4 and other AI technologies and I’ve been trying it out for various things, with more or less success. (Not to write. I’ll do the writing myself.)
So, while I am not asking Copilot to do anything for my website, I have been using it to brainstorm things like an outline, design, colour scheme for a specific purpose, key content, etc. After working on this with Cp a bit I have to say it is not amazing - but it is pretty good. It has given me a decent outline, a solid checklist and some useful points I had forgotten were important. So far, I have found it better than chatting with Chat GPT directly, partly because Cp also gives me the links to the articles and posts it references. And it’s been using reliable sources.
All in all, this AI-assisted brainstorming is much better and faster (and more fun) than just thinking about things and trying to pull everything together. It’s not just the research. It provides summaries and pointers, which are short and straight to the point. Which is great for a task I otherwise don’t enjoy doing.
Someone I respect in the AI space referred to this kind of back and forth as co-thinking. It’s an interesting thought.
I am still learning how to use AI this way. It’s a bit like having a very junior but fast-responding trainee. It’s not immediately intuitive for me probably because I’m not used to working with junior people. I am not used to having to break everything down into small parts and be so pointed and descriptive. So this is an interesting process for me as well – making me think differently.
Basically, when you are dealing with experienced people there are so many common touchpoints, so many things are a given that you never think about articulating those things. But when you have someone with no experience, everything is new to them, they can’t second-guess or pre-empt or do alone and you have to force yourself to break it all down. That’s a bit what it’s like, working with Cp. It has a lot of information but no way of using it alone. But what it can do, it can do immediately, so the process is actually fast.
If I can get used to this way of thinking and working, and as the model keeps improving, I can see AI assistants becoming essential. Especially once they’re able to reliably do certain tasks too. But for now, brainstorming or co-thinking is my AI use case.
First Mover < Second Mover
I don’t believe in first-mover advantage. And I am not alone. Though it seems some founders and some investors still get blinded by the idea.
First-mover advantage, i.e. being the first founder/startup to attack an issue