AI | Productivity | Second Brain
How to Talk to Your AI Assistant
It was the cutest of cute meets. I was having dinner with a business associate of mine, his wife, and his stepdaughter, who was to be my date. He’d been bugging me about meeting her for months, and I finally agreed just to silence him.
When I walked into the restaurant, I saw my colleague at the table. I started walking over when I caught a glimpse of a woman at the bar. She was tall and leggy and all Barbie-like. I held up a finger towards my friend — just a minute, please — turned and walked over to speak to her. Turns out we were both on blind dates. We exchanged phone numbers (on cocktail napkins) and agreed to meet up once we’d dumped our setups.
I walked back to the table and was introduced to the wife. Handshakes all around but no step-daughter just yet. I sat and waited. The beautiful woman from the bar, with her hands full of drinks for the table, walked over and sat. We laughed. Apparently, she hadn’t been expecting much either.
We ended up talking all night. The conversation was a constant back and forth. We didn’t expect one question to give us a complete understanding of each other. We asked follow-up questions. We got more and more specific. The longer we talked, the better we got to know each other. We learned the type of questions that delivered the best responses. Answers sometimes lead to connections or interests we had in common. We were learning about each other.
And this is exactly how you should approach your conversations with AI.
Working with AI is like a good relationship
Everything starts with good communication. If you can’t articulate what it is that you are asking for, you’ll never get a good answer. If you ask the same questions as everyone else, you will get the same rote answers.
We don’t know what we don’t know. So it’s hard to build, or craft, or ask, the perfect question or prompt. If we’re talking to a person, we ask a question. We listen. We ask another question. And in this way, we hone in on specific points that will help us build a relationship.
Just as it helps to know something about the person we are talking with to create a great conversation, it helps to know how your chatbot works to be able to create a great prompt.
So let’s introduce you to ALANI and the world of chatbots.
ALANI vs. Chatbots
ALANI is our bundleIQ chatbot. But ALANI has a little secret. ALANI is not a predictive model like ChatGPT. ALANI is a contextual model and, as such, is designed to understand, interpret, and create content based on the context or meaning of your data.
But let’s back up a little bit. First, we need to understand how predictive models work.
What is GPT?
GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) technology is a type of machine learning model that is designed to generate natural language text.
GPT uses a large amount of text data, applies algorithms, and statistical analyses to create patterns. A complete sentence becomes individual data points to be read. Once a pattern is created, it can predict what the answer would be based upon the algorithm.
ChatGPT uses a data set called Common Crawl. Common Crawl is a collection of available websites with billions of pages. Data sets (or LLM’s, Large Language Models) are constantly evolving and increasing in size and may include things such as books, news articles, and sites that are not currently available such as Wikipedia.
GPT is, therefore, a predictive model because it analyses the data it is fed and tells you what the most likely outcome will be to your question.
ALANI is contextual.
Instead of breaking the data (LLMs) down into individual data points like predictive models do, ALANI breaks things into chunks. So instead of processing a word in isolation, ALANI will process the whole sentence and the surrounding data or sentences to try and understand the complete meaning. In this manner, you will get more contextual answers.
ALANI also factors in your personal notes and data that you have collected in bundleIQ. In this manner, you will get more contextual answers plus answers related to your own data.
And ALANI supplies sources for easy reference.
Since predictive models break everything down into individual data points, you cannot know which sources were used in the model. This can lead to hallucinations or incomplete answers without a means to check the accuracy of the sources.
The importance of a well-crafted prompt
Now that we know who we are communicating with, we can write better prompts. Use these prompt keys to get the most out of your AI chatbots:
- Be specific — predictive models work best with clear and precise queries that seek specific answers. “What will the weather be like tomorrow?” is a general question. “What temperature will it be tomorrow?” is a more precise question.
- Read the room — give some historical background. This will often help a predictive model use additional data from historical events it can add to its model. You are helping to contextualize the model by defining the data set further. This is not as critical in contextual models.
- Ask follow-up questions — just like in any good conversation, you automatically ask another question related to the answer you just received. The same goes for AI models. Ask for clarification. Or ask for a different format. Get the conversation going.
- Add Related Ideas or Concepts — This will help the model add specific data points (i.e., Consider both economic, cultural, and historical factors. Why did ….). You can also add concepts such as answers like a college professor, a grad student, or your favorite politician. It changes the data and gives you a different answer.
One last thing on prompts. ALANI can be directed to your own personal data. Adding in your curated data and notes and collected data gives you the most precise and reliable answers.
In this manner, you can ask a simple question and get a relevant, detailed answer, including sources, that can be verified.
Good conversations lead to amazing results
Asking the right questions/prompts will create more complete answers. You will produce better, more thoroughly researched, content. You will understand your topics clearer and deeper. And if you’re lucky, a good conversation will change your life. Mine did. Within two years of my first conversation with the beautiful woman at the bar, I was married.
Still am, to the same gorgeous woman, and each day is filled with conversations built upon conversations.
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