How To AI With WSJ's Chris Mims

Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tech Brew ride home. I'm your host as always, Brian McCullough. We are talking to a very old friend of the pod. You might be this might be a five timer thing like the SNL. We we need to get you a jacket, but maybe even more than that, Chris. This this is Chris Mims. Hi, Chris. Good. How's it going? Good. You all know Chris from me quoting him on the show all the time. But also Chris has a new book out that is insanely well timed in my opinion called How to AI Cut Through the Hype, Master the Basics, Transform Your Work by Christopher Mims. You can see it if you're watching the video. Chris, is this a guide for what we are all experiencing right now, which is, okay, the hype has been going for several years now, but, hey, it is really time to see if this is useful for whatever it is that I do. How can I fit this into my daily workflow? Yeah. Yeah. This is the guide for I say for the rest of us, but the rest of us means the other 90% of us. I mean, I think it's easy for folks like you and me, Brian, like, we're inside our bubble. We're we're scrolling x. We're reading about the latest mold bot drama, about how AI is up and and goading. And we forget that, right, there's this enormous population of kind of early to to mid to late adopters who are trying to apply AI to every other kind of knowledge work there is. And so that is what the that is who the book is for. And so I tried to really step back and explain, you know, kind of from first principles. This is what the fundamental architecture is here, you know, mostly transformer models and what that means, but I talk about other kinds of AI. And then how does that play out in fields where you wouldn't expect there to be rapid adoption or disruption? You know, the first chapter of the book is about the legal field, which is now absolutely being upended by this. I'll but I also went and and spent a lot of time with, like, Clorox. Right? The consumer packaged goods people who bring you, obviously, bleach and but also Hidden Valley Ranch. Spent time a lot of time with the construction industry, which is just fascinating because here's an industry which the productivity has actually gone down since the nineteen seventies. And here, they have this opportunity to, like, digitize in ways that they just couldn't before, and AI actually makes that easier. We're gonna get to some of those examples, but I feel like a lot of what you attempt in the book is like a sort of, conceptual reframing, like helping people understand exactly what these tools are like. You you you say it was a mistake …