1) Grok: Quick and effective for fact-checking tweets.
2) o1 Pro: Best for queries. His primary daily tool.
3) Deep Research: Ideal for long-form (10-page) reports; extremely impressive but less practical for personal routine; occasionally useful for teaching; significant for replacing human labor.
4) Claude: Darn good writer — thoughtful, philosophical, and versatile.
5) DeepSeek: Sends data to China, though Tyler is personally comfortable using it.
6) Gemini: Good for multimodal tasks and handling large or thick documents; best for legal work and integrating with video and YouTube.
7) Meta (Llama models): Integrates with WhatsApp; strong in marketing and open source; important globally, though not part of Tyler's regular routine.
— —
Tyler's thoughts on Gemini are particularly interesting:
"Gemini can do some things other tools just can't. I personally don't use it much because I don't deal with very long or complicated documents.
But if you do, Gemini is often the best choice — especially for legal work. Soon, you'll see versions of these tools where you won't have to send your data anywhere else. Right now, that's limiting their use, especially in sensitive areas like legal stuff.
But pretty soon, you'll probably be able to do it right on your own hard drive. I'm not sure exactly what you'll lose in terms of quality at first, but people are actively working on solving that. If you're following AI, you already know it's coming. Right now, people say things like, 'I can't send my data to Gemini 2 or Google,' and that's fair. But pretty soon, you won't have to.
Gemini really shines in multimodal tasks and dealing with thick, heavy files."
This is one of the few podcast episodes I actually watched on YouTube instead of just getting an AI summary. Such good material. I loved hearing how he Tyler incorporates AI into his teaching of PhD students.
Excellent insight. AI content might initially be good enough for us to consume in the short term, but its lack of genuine humanity will prevent us wanting to come back for more.
It would be interesting to hear about the environmental impact of AI, and whether that will be sustainable. I'm thinking of all the material resources we need to store data, water to cool down processors and so on...
Liked the answer about not using AI to write. I see it too as a thinking buddy and a 24/7 editor.
How Tyler Cowen Uses AI
1) Grok: Quick and effective for fact-checking tweets.
2) o1 Pro: Best for queries. His primary daily tool.
3) Deep Research: Ideal for long-form (10-page) reports; extremely impressive but less practical for personal routine; occasionally useful for teaching; significant for replacing human labor.
4) Claude: Darn good writer — thoughtful, philosophical, and versatile.
5) DeepSeek: Sends data to China, though Tyler is personally comfortable using it.
6) Gemini: Good for multimodal tasks and handling large or thick documents; best for legal work and integrating with video and YouTube.
7) Meta (Llama models): Integrates with WhatsApp; strong in marketing and open source; important globally, though not part of Tyler's regular routine.
— —
Tyler's thoughts on Gemini are particularly interesting:
"Gemini can do some things other tools just can't. I personally don't use it much because I don't deal with very long or complicated documents.
But if you do, Gemini is often the best choice — especially for legal work. Soon, you'll see versions of these tools where you won't have to send your data anywhere else. Right now, that's limiting their use, especially in sensitive areas like legal stuff.
But pretty soon, you'll probably be able to do it right on your own hard drive. I'm not sure exactly what you'll lose in terms of quality at first, but people are actively working on solving that. If you're following AI, you already know it's coming. Right now, people say things like, 'I can't send my data to Gemini 2 or Google,' and that's fair. But pretty soon, you won't have to.
Gemini really shines in multimodal tasks and dealing with thick, heavy files."
This is one of the few podcast episodes I actually watched on YouTube instead of just getting an AI summary. Such good material. I loved hearing how he Tyler incorporates AI into his teaching of PhD students.
I learnt a lot from this. Thanks.
Excellent insight. AI content might initially be good enough for us to consume in the short term, but its lack of genuine humanity will prevent us wanting to come back for more.
Thanks for putting up the transcript, no more copy/pasting from YouTube's auto-generated ones 😅 And for the episode, obviously!
To answer the headline:
1- It might kill published writing
2- No it won’t kill personal writing (journal)
Writing is thinking.
It‘s a necessity.
I use AI for reading my and having my devotional as well . It’s so good.
Yeah! Absolutely.
hmm
In the next century?
I'm thinking next 10.
It would be interesting to hear about the environmental impact of AI, and whether that will be sustainable. I'm thinking of all the material resources we need to store data, water to cool down processors and so on...
Liked the answer about not using AI to write. I see it too as a thinking buddy and a 24/7 editor.
Big fan of the highlights and the transcript! Makes reviewing certain sections so much easier!
really enjoyed this one!
https://johnshanewayofthepoet.substack.com/p/song-of-the-monstrous-grid-john-shane?r=4max28
Great conversation - thank you so much for sharing Tyler and Your practical ideas.
This interview was fantastic. It’s definitely worth paying for everything at least for 1x month to check how things are progressing.
Love the new approach of putting everything in one post