Alexandra Samuel says the major AI platforms offer ready-made assistant builders that need no coding.
“All of these big AI platforms have these turnkey assistants that require no coding. If you can type, you can make an assistant”
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Alexandra Samuel
1 episodes · 14 quoted claims
Alexandra Samuel says the AI-written instructions can be pasted into the instructions field of a custom GPT or a Claude project.
“you can also take that and paste it into the instructions field on a custom AI assistant, like a custom GPT or a Claude project.”
Alexandra Samuel suggests choosing an assistant's background files by asking what you would give a new human hire.
“imagine if you were hiring somebody to work with you in this capacity instead of using an AI. What files would you give that person to help them get up and running?”
Alexandra Samuel says AI sycophancy is a well-researched problem in which AIs, trained to be of service, tell users what they want to hear.
“there is a very well established and well researched problem now, what's called AI sycophancy, which is that AIs are so deeply trained to be of service that they are quite obsequious by nature”
Alexandra Samuel gives a sample prompt asking an AI to act as a supply chain expert and list ten reasons a strategy is a terrible idea.
“I want you to be the world's leading expert on supply chain logistics. And I want you to tell me ten reasons that my current strategy is a terrible idea”
Alexandra Samuel says research tools she once built at great effort are now integrated into platforms like Claude and ChatGPT.
“all this stuff that I was doing, like, so arduously and painfully and expensively six months ago is now really well integrated into platforms like Claude and ChatGPT.”
Alexandra Samuel says she asks for peer-reviewed sources with at least ten citations from the past ten years to get trustworthy evidence from AI.
“I want peer-reviewed sources that have ten or more citations and have been published in the past ten years from these fields.”
Alexandra Samuel says some paid ChatGPT subscriptions still use users' conversation transcripts as training data.
“even some of the paid subscriptions to ChatGPT still turn your transcripts into training data.”
Alexandra Samuel pays for ChatGPT's team edition, which requires only two seats and by default keeps conversations out of training data.
“I pay for the team edition of ChatGPT because when you have the team edition, which only requires you to pay for two seats, then your conversations stay out of training data by default.”
Alexandra Samuel argues that AI confidentiality is no worse than that of other cloud services, since information is only as secure as the weakest one.
“your information is only as secure as the security practices of your sloppiest cloud service.”
Alexandra Samuel built a custom AI in ten minutes to help her son learn to drive, with the car's manual as a background file.
“I have a custom AI that I created in ten minutes to help my son learn to drive, and it has the manual for our new car as a background file.”
Alexandra Samuel says AI assistants complete tasks without distraction, complaint or forgetting, which can make her more impatient with human colleagues.
“if I give a task to the AI, it does the task, it doesn't get distracted, it doesn't complain, it doesn't forget.”
Alexandra Samuel describes MCP as an emerging standard protocol that lets external resources be plugged into an AI.
“the development of a new protocol that's sort of emerging as a standard in the AI world that lets you plug external resources into an AI.”
Alexandra Samuel set up a connector letting Claude on her computer read a folder holding her past conversations with her custom assistant.
“I set up essentially a connector that lets Claude on my computer connect to a folder full of files on my computer.”