A trick I used when I had to learn something new in a fast growing area was to a) subscribe to blogs from many writers, b) listen to as many podcasts about that topic and c) talk to as many people and ask questions.

It worked very well for me 20 years ago with community software, 15 or so years ago with social media monitoring, 10 years ago with crypto currency and 5 or so years ago with digital marketing techniques for eCommerce.

Well, with the explosion in Generative AI over the last 6 months, I tried the same mechanisms with a few changes. First, instead of blogs and RSS subscriptions, there are email newsletters. Second, instead of podcast I joined many Twitter spaces (or live audio).

The good news is I am aware of the high level overview and also some specifics in each area (Chatbots as a part of Generative AI).

The challenging part it is impossible to keep up, in Generative AI.

There are 5X the number of newsletters today in AI (over 400 newsletters with more than 1000 subscribers each and 20 with more than 20K subscribers) than there were 3 months ago. There is a lot of sameness, but the pace of change is dramatic.

Many of these folks are “hustle bros”, who curate their newsletters from other newsletters! They are easy to subscribe to and easier to unsubscribe.

The pace of change in Generative AI is also overwhelming, to a point where what you understood and knew 2-3 weeks ago becomes invalidated.

I thought it was overwhelming when there were so many startups created during the dot com boom and was overwhelmed again during the iPhone app revolution, but this feels 10X more volume.

Drowning in newsletters, I unsubscribed from a bunch of them. Now I have 3 AI specific newsletters, but I am not sure they are sufficient. I understand it might be just FOMO but this is a much harder to learn time.

Maybe it is best to let things slide for a while and let the dust settle. Are you drowning in AI content as well?