Three AI Sherpas

These are my guides in the AI high country.

These are the three people I follow for the sake of staying on top of the AI wave. This is not for everybody, I chose them specifically based on where I started, and where I am heading. Your personal choices, unless you are also a research technologist, will be different.

This is not a prescription, it’s a demonstration of how things should be working for you in principle.

Attention Conservation:

A brief summary of three YouTube educators who influence my thinking regarding Artificial Intelligence.

Patrick Ellis:

Patrick’s YouTube channel @PatrickOakleyEllis is one of two where I just watch a video only partially listening, because I know I’ll be coming back with pad and pencil in hand to get all of the details. This is the latest and it parallels what I was already doing - Claude Code on one side, Codex on the other.

This is hands on technology stuff, I watch, then try to follow.

Nate B. Jones:

Nate’s AI News & Strategy Daily is less news, more strategy. He publishes the prompts he creates on Github. Like Ellis, this is an area where I watch once, watch again taking notes, and then go try to replicate his work.

Matthew Berman:

I don’t typically rewatch @matthew_berman videos because they’re not as technically dense. He covers industry changes and I can usually get what’s important in a single view.

Sam Altman’s Predictions, from May 15th, is a marker of a life inflection point for me, where I started trying to shift from the Boomer mode of using AI as search engine to the Zoomer mode of treating it as an operating system. Altman’s predictions of artificial general intelligence triggered me to write AGI, Fusion & UBI.

Today’s video is again about Sam Altman. It will get a second viewing and perhaps an article of its own. “But make no mistake: what we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine.” That’s a little bit woo woo, but we are pouring vast sums of money into systems with emergent properties.

Conclusion:

Wave is a tiny little four letter word for what is happening in AI.

Berman is a weekly update. Ellis and Olsen are like college physic classes - four credits of lecture and a fifth credit for lab work. My study/work load is akin to a full time student who also has a full time job.

If we really do simultaneously birth both artificial intelligence and fusion, the only historical event I can think of that offers a parallel is the eastern hemisphere reconnecting with the western after 10,000+ years of isolation. Horses, steel blades, firearms, and novel diseases utterly destroyed the Americas that existed before Columbus. I don’t think AI/fusion is going to be destructive like that, taking out a whole hemisphere, I’m talking about the scope of change.

You either turn right into what is coming, with throttles full forward, like the steamer in Krakatoa, or you’re going to get swamped.