Hey Reader - it’s good to do this again.

Welcome back.

I’m going to be playing around with some different formats and approaches over the next few weeks as I look to work this into a sustainable habit again.

First things first - I’ve swapped things back to the original name/theme.

AI is here to stay.

I hate its well-documented impacts on energy and water consumption but am reminded of Robert Greene’s take on what to do about power:

So here’s some things that are happening:

• AI law passing in the US
• Barkus Montempelli
• Building machines that do things

US: Passing a 10-year ban on AI regulation by the States

A large budget reconciliation bill is moving through congress that includes a small clause baning state regulation of AI.

I won’t pretend to understand the bits and nuances of this, but the (limited) commentary around is what’s interesting to me.

Some excerpts from /r/ArtificialIntelligence:

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There’s a bigger discussion of the bill in TechPolicy.press which shares details about the bill originating from a conservative think tank called R Street Institute, and this pearler of a quote from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman re: less regulation at a committee hearing:

Another area discussions cropped up was in the subreddit /r/biglaw:

There’s not much concern in there, but I’m wondering if quotes like the below age well:

The fact that moments like this barely rank a murmur in what I can find is the other interesting part to this.

If I was betting the house on AI being an incredible power and had everything to gain from that being right, cosying up to lawmakers and burying amendments to laws to ratify that power would absolutely be the playbook I would be following.

Uninvited guests appearing in FB groups

Another sneaky change happened this week that felt weird.

For some context - I’m a huge fan of the AFL club Western Bulldogs.

We’re one of the less decorated clubs, have won two premierships (one in 2016 that I got to witness) and our team is in the colours red, white, and blue.

I’m active in one of the FB groups and we had a new member join this week:

Here’s the funny bits:

• The name is kind of clever - a play on words with dogs and our well-decorated captain: Marcus Bontempelli

Here’s the shit bits:

• It was added without any prompting. He was just added. The moderators hated it and advised the group to just “block him”
• The generated American flag imagery. I can understand why an AI might run with an American flag when the colours red, white, and blue are employed. But that doesn’t make it right. It felt putrid. Gross.

It reminded me of an IRL example of an American showing up and just annoying me out of the blue.

I was on holiday in Thailand and had been for a run before boarding one of the boats to get off the island.

I was wearing a t-shirt by The Oatmeal that read “I do not believe in the wall, I believe in the blerch”

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Cutting through my post-workout fugue was an irritating US accent:

“Is that t-shirt talking about OUR wall?”

At the time, Trump was crapping on about a wall.

Me: “Ahh, no. It’s from a comic artist I really like and is about running.”

Them: “Oh.”

Well this week the online equivalent of that just happened in my football group.

Building AI machines that do things

I finished a major project last week and have a lot of energy and curiosity about things I can be doing.

Something I’ve been exploring of late is building “AI machines” that do more complex tasks.

The current capabilities are better than ever, and if you know what you’re doing (or can figure it out), there’s gains to be made.

First, here’s an overview of the things needed:

• Workflow builder - these are tools that let you build “recipes” for connecting software and software functions together. It can be Make.com, n8n, Gumloop, or even Zapier
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• AI coding tool - this is what “vibe coding” refers too, I have Lovable, but there’s Bolt, Cursor, and others out there too
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• Scraping tool - tools that let you scrape/view the web as an agent, software or script
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• LLM API - access to any of the popular generative AI systems with an “Application Programming Interface” (API) - enabling you to feed data in to get a result, rather than prompts/messages/manual typing
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• MCPs - this stands for Model Context Protocol - these are sets of instructions that let an LLM (or LLM API) interact with a specific software without the need to set it up every time.
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  For example, a Zapier MCP lets a workflow point to it and get access to everything Zapier has access to without the need to build it/code it

There’s a growing hype community of these capabilities on YouTube like Voice AI calller, Video analyser, and 24/7 Sales agent.

You can take these with a grain of salt.

The vast majority of these are excited young people babbling about the possibilities of what they can do.

What they lack is connection to real-world business challenges and problems that need solving.

What I’ve been working on is connecting that knowledge and capability to those problems.

A couple of friends came to me with these problems and I’ve been building proof of concepts for solving them.

One is in the graduate recruitment world, and another is focused on how certain public companies commmunicate their results.

The beauty of this approach is that even if both of these opportunities fizzle, there’s merit to stress-testing them with the capabilities that exist right now.

A common task I’ve done as a freelancer is build digital strategies - dozens and dozens of them.

They follow a process:

• Data gathering, research, and interviews
• Findings and feedback
• Strategy document and execution plan

A lot these same processes can be fed into workflows, LLM APIs, the web, and produce output that’s comparable/similar to what I’ve produced, and become even more powerful with expert-level oversight.

So I’ll be investigating this rigorously over the next few months (and uncovering more business problems to solve) as I look to find new ways to build my business post-major project.

If you’ve got thoughts, comments, or questions about this let me know.

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Thanks,

-Marshy

p.s. I suspected this would be a long one, one thing I’m also thinking about is creating a tool for splitting up this content into smaller pieces for my website, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube