Watch the hour hand - not the second hand. ⏰

Sitting at Get Good with AI HQ this morning (round the kitchen table, large mugs of Yorkshire tea), wondering what would be the most useful idea we could share with you in a noisy week. 

When it hit us - the noise is the problem. One day it's a new breakthrough, the next a dire report screaming “this is the end of jobs!”, and every hour a new tool promising to transform your work. 

Do you feel a constant, low-grade anxiety that you’re missing out?

You’re not alone - even we do some days!

The problem isn’t that you’re slow; it’s that you’re watching the wrong hand on the clock.

Imagine AI progress as a clock. The second hand is the daily deluge. It’s fast, jittery, and clamours for your attention with every minor update, viral tweet, and breathless headline. It’s noise, and trying to follow it is a recipe for burnout/switching off. 

But the hour hand is the actual change. What’s really worth paying attention to.  

It’s moving slowly, deliberately, and marks the handful of breakthroughs that genuinely reshape what’s possible. This hand tracks real progress, and it moves at a pace normal people - people like us - can absolutely keep up with.

The whiplash we feel comes from trying to live by the frantic twitch of the second hand.

Consider this: ChatGPT was released in November 2022. In the nearly three years since, the hour hand has only truly clicked forward a few significant times. Yes, the noise has gotten louder, but the underlying signal has been steady.

These are the ticks of the hour hand - the foundational shifts worth knowing for regular people:

• ChatGPT and the chat-with-AI interface - Nov ‘22

• Text-to-image and text-to-video - 2023 onward

• Powerful AI reasoning models - Sept ‘24

• Agents and automation - 2024 onward

Everything else is the noise of that jittery second hand. Our mission here, and in our courses, is to help you master those four pillars, and let you know when there’s a fifth worth paying attention to. 

Every week, we’ll cut through the frantic ticking of the news cycle to give you a clear, calm look at where the hour hand is pointing. And what you can use in your day-to-day work and life to use AI as a partner and tool - to make your life easier, not noisier. 

Build/tool of the week

We love using AI dictation tools to write. Going back to using a keyboard feels unnatural now! In fact, most of this email was written by dictating, with a bit of tidying up afterward. The tool we’re using is Wispr Flow - but there are loads of other similar tools available. If you spend a lot of time tapping on keyboards every day, or aren’t a fast typer - strongly suggest giving AI-powered voice dictation a go. 

Meetup 

In London? We’re meeting up tomorrow night. By Warren Street, Zone 1. Join us for games, tools, drinks, discovery and new friends who are excited but confused about AI too. Free but registration required: https://luma.com/goodwithAImeet2

October Cohorts 

Join us for one of our October cohorts: https://goodwithai.org/

Henry, Cien & Ben