The Power of Closing the Self-Gap, AI Updates & Embracing the Future

This week we bridge the gap, navigate the AI frontier, and try to imagine a bright future. Tough, I know!

But you can do it! 😉

Thing 1 - Mind the Gap: The Mental Health Impact of Self-Discrepancy

How does what you think of yourself affect your mental health?

This research paper looked at 70 studies to answer this question.

Let's dig in.

Self-discrepancy

Your ideal self is how you want to be.

Your ought self is how you think you should be.

Self-discrepancy is the gap between those two views and your actual self.

They found that people who have a bigger self-discrepancy gap also tend to have more mental health problems (depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse disorders...)

What you can do about it

• Know your self-discrepancies
  Find out what you need to change or accept about yourself.
• Talk to a therapist
  They can help you close the gap between your actual self and ideal or ought self, or change how you see yourself to be more realistic and positive.
  Maybe you're better than you think. 😉
• Be aware of your surroundings and culture
  It can influence how you view yourself. Don’t let unrealistic expectations or harmful standards make you feel bad.
• Do things that make you happy
  Reduce the negative effects of self-discrepancy and increase the positive effects of being yourself.

(source)

Thing 2 - AI of the week

Most people hear "AI is advancing" these days and think of ChatGPT and friends. Sure they are great, yet there are so many other things that seem unrelated. At some point, they'll start converging in interesting ways and explode in usability.

And still, the greatest changes will come from how people put their creativity into all these new tools.

• Project Stardust - Adobe's object-aware editing engine preview
  Kinda related tech to the next bullet
• Meta's Segment Anything paper got Best Paper: Honorable Mention at ICCV

• Telling Bing a sob story tricked it into solving a CAPTCHA
  So computers can now "prove" other computers that they aren't computers. Strange times...
• Meta published "Decoding speech perception from non-invasive brain recordings"
  Brainwaves to speech - reads brain activity that corresponds to the movements of the vocal tract.
• Meta opened applications for Llama Impact Grants
  Apply if you want to use Llama 2 to address challenges in:
  📚 Education
  🌳 Environment
  🌍 Open innovation
• LLaVA: Large Language and Vision Assistant
  Large multimodal model that combines a vision encoder and Vicuna

Thing 3 - What if the future's great?

born too late to explore the earth, born...at the absolute coolest time in history, about to be able to explore absolutely everything else

the scientific discoveries of the coming few decades will be breathtaking

- Sam Altman

What if AI doesn't end us, but instead opens the door to a whole new world of possibilities we never knew existed?

I asked this in some groups of people and the initial response made me feel like they want to be doomed. But Z, the dangers...

Yes, there are dangers, and I'm not immune to thinking about them.

So, hey, what if what you're feeling is just the fear of the unknown? Let's also be open for the future to be spectacular.

Cheers, Zvonimir