AI, 🛒Carts & Cyclones
AI powers holiday shopping & hurricane forecasts. 4 mins.
Welcome back! Cambridge neuroscientists recently published a study showing that we move through five distinct “brain phases”: from birth to about 9 (childhood phase), 9 to 32 (adolescent phase), 32 to 66 (adult phase), 66 to 83 (early aging), and “late aging” from around 83 onward.
So… if you’re under 32, can you really call yourself an adult? 🤔
Anyway🙃, let’s dive in.
On deck:
📡/🔊 AI Shopping & DeepMind’s Hurricane Model
🔦 AI Tools Spotlight: Perplexity
💡 Concept Corner: Opportunity Cost
🥊 Face-Off: Ideogram 3.0 vs Nano Banana Pro
🍵 AI News Quick Hits
📡Signal Behind the 🔊Buzz
Demystifying trending AI stories with infographics.
Spotlight🔦 by Toolfetch
Smart Tools, Clear Choices. Powered by Toolfetch.ai (coming soon)
This week’s 🔦 is on Perplexity.ai, an “answer engine” that uses multiple AI models on top of live web data to deliver direct, citation-rich answers.
It’s like Google Search with an AI that reads the links and summarizes them for you, instead of link lists.
Launched in 2022, it now handles hundreds of millions of queries each month. It has generous free and paid tiers, plus features like Deep Research, Spaces, Labs and Assistant.
Takeaway: Perplexity has grown into a serious research companion: fast, citation-rich answers, Deep Research, Labs and an ad-free interface make it great for researchers and content creators.
Just note the opaque limits and occasional accuracy hiccups, which are improving as more powerful models roll out.
If you’re a casual user, the free tier is fine; heavy research users may justify paying for Pro or Max.
Concept Corner💡
Quick, practical insights for boosting your efficiency and productivity with AI.
What it is: Every time you say “yes” to something, you’re inevitably saying “no” to a host of other things.
Opportunity cost isn’t just about money lost; it’s the value of the next best alternative you sacrificed to make your current choice.
It’s the hidden, often ignored price tag on how you spend your limited time, capital, and attention.
Real-world example:
We often emotionally overvalue immediate savings over abstract potential earnings. AI can act as a dispassionate calculator, modeling the financial reality of the road not taken so you don’t shortchange yourself.
Use this prompt:
Act as a strategic analyst focused on opportunity cost. I’ll describe two or three options I’m considering. Before running the analysis, ask me (1) what my time is roughly worth per hour right now, or help me estimate it from my income, goals, or constraints, and (2) what I’m primarily optimizing for in this decision (e.g., short-term income, long-term upside, learning, wellbeing, relationships). For each option, estimate realistic upside, downside, time cost, and risk based on typical benchmarks, then translate these into an implied “value per hour” aligned with my chosen priority. Go beyond simple pros and cons by modeling the highest-value alternative use of my time, money, and attention that I’d be giving up in each scenario — that is, the true opportunity cost. Highlight where I may be underestimating that cost, and recommend what I should drop, delegate, or defer. If my inputs are too vague, ask up to three focused clarifying questions before giving your final comparison and recommendation.
🥊Face-Off🥊
AI models vie for supremacy. In the words of Bruce Buffer, “IIIIIIIT’S TIME!!”
Prompt: Create a spectacular, scroll-stopping banner ad for an orange that feels original, visually striking, and optimized for high engagement.
Last Week’s Result: “Gemini 3.0 Fast” defeated “GPT 5.1 Instant” in the Thanksgiving poetry contest with 67% of the votes. If you want to check out the contest, click here, and scroll down to Face-Off.
Quick Hits🍵
💰 Amazon pledges $50 B for AI cloud: AWS will invest up to $50 billion to expand AI supercomputing for U.S. agencies, adding 1.3 GW of secure cloud capacity by 2026.
🫱🏼🫲🏽 Meta eyes Google’s AI chips: Meta is in talks to spend billions on Google’s TPU AI chips for its data centers, casting Google as a serious rival to Nvidia.
💪🏼 AWS debuts Trainium3 chip: Amazon’s cloud unveiled Trainium3 UltraServers for AI workloads, with 4× the prior gen’s performance at 40% less energy use. Testing revealed 3x higher throughput per chip while delivering 4x faster response times.
🤖 AI can replace 12% of workforce: An MIT study finds AI can already handle work equating to nearly 12% of U.S. jobs, from coding to paperwork, prompting companies to rethink entry-level roles.
🎶 Warner Music embraces AI songs: Warner Music settled its lawsuit with AI music startup Suno, clearing the way for licensed AI-generated music models (with free-tier tracks stream-only and paid download limits)
What do you think of this week’s newsletter? Hit reply and let me know.
Also, let me know if there are prompts (text or image) that you’d like me to try for the Face-Off segment and with which models, and I’ll put them to the test.
See you on Thursday!