Welcome back from holidays. Yet another late post, this time because I haven’t got access to my computer for writing a couple of days.
I have some news I will share during the next few weeks and I prepared some of the future posts already, but today I wanted to get back to business with a lighter topic and follow a trending topic on the internet. It’s going to be a very brief reflection, I hope you enjoy.
Takeaways (TL:DR)
New tools and technology can surely open up opportunities. Sometimes they can create entire new habits. If you keep this aspect under control and you search for actions and experience that you can translate into something else or that could shape your mindset in general, the choice of adopting tools and processes can really be the engine for change and growth where you want to learn a new skill.
🍊 Welcome to the latest issue of Already, Yet – a weekly retrospective about not feeling ready, but doing things anyway.
🙋🏻♂️ If you’re a new reader, thanks for stopping by. Feel free to check out this introductory post, which explains what Already, Yet is all about.
📬 To get future issues delivered to your inbox, please subscribe with your preferred email.
Weekly retrospective
Last week a new AI gadget has been presented. Is called the Rabbit R1, and is designed by the incredible industrial design firm Teenage Engineering, while the real product (the software) is called rabbit OS and is run by anew AI model able to operate actions on every interface, being it an app or a web page or something else. If you haven’t heard about it already, you can watch the launch keynote here.
It’s a bit of an evolution to the AI applied to chatbots like chatGPT that characterised 2023. If you want to have a second opinion after you watched the keynote, you can watch the video from Enrico Tartarotti, who’s a very smart product manager who talks about the behind the scenes of technology creating great content on youtube. He always have very clear and opinionated comments and the quality of the videos is really high, you should check them out.
I bought the gadget actually, and before clicking the “pre-order” button I thought a lot on why should I or should I not, and here’s a couple of reflections that stood apart from the more superficial thinking of the actual value of the thing to respect to the price it costs and my geeky love for tech gadgets.
Being a not-so-early-anymore adopter
It’s probably too late for being an early adopter to LLM (Large Language Models), early adopters are the ones who talked, researched and used AI 10 to 6 years ago. Now it’s cool, everyone is talking about it and after an entire here of chatGPTs and generative AI images and AI powered features in every tool, there’s a quite good amount of people already exploiting the potential of these technologies to various degrees.
I haven’t so much yet, I experimented with them as soon as they came out, I wanted to know what everyone is talking about, I even used it to generate several images for this newsletter or to explore ideas and help me review my writing in the first couple months of this newsletter. Yet I’m very far from saying that I really used the technology and I wasn’t able to integrate it in useful ways into may daily processes.
I think is important though to stay up to date, especially for my job as a UX designer, to be able to be part of the transformation, and have a grasp of the concepts and experience when designing digital products won’t be possible anymore without including any AI in the pot of the ingredients. It’s going to be very soon probably.
LAM (Large action model) in the rabbit OS is a new brick on the wall and enables AI to operate user interfaces with a different system then the usual API (application programming interface) connected to a chatbot. It opens up a new set of opportunities that finally could become part of processes and building automations, which is something I really like to think about.
It seems like the right time to jump on the train for myself, not so early, yet not too late.
Delegation and communication skills
The second topic is strongly related to another post I wrote a few months ago, about changing my mindset and habits by forcing little changes in the main interaction models with my devices. My experiment (which is still ongoing by the way) was to make keyboard and “search box” interactions the first option. This allows the switch and change mindset of interaction with digital environments from a “spatial navigation first” interaction into a more “language/search first” interaction, which means that I’m now relying less from remembering the position of things in the digital space and more to be ready to express in words what I need to find and use. It was as well some kind of preparation for getting one step closer to what LLM require to interact with them.
So, I agree with most of the reviews, about the fact that the Rabbit R1 device is pretty useless (although a great pieace of design from Teenage Engineering ) and the LAM is the real breakthrough but I really like the idea that, by having something tangible in my hands and in my sight, it will be much much easier to remember about the existence and opportunities that are in it and therefore have a bigger incentive to create an habit out of using it for more and more stuff each and every day.
As for the change towards the “search first” interaction, considering the “action” aspect of the new LAM technology, I believe is another little big change in mindset because in the long term moves your brain from preparing mentally to process an action or operation directly in the digital space and tools, towards be prepared to describe and express the need and/or the expected result to another entity as a first option.
Talking about growing as a leader, I really think this is a great habit and skill to build, as your brain learns to get comfortable with the idea of delegating, of becoming better at expressing expectations, and interact with the results of a process that has been operated somewhere else by someone else. It’s a great training in verbal communication skills as prompting requires you to understand how the software work and express our needs and expected results clearly.
What’s more, LAM from rabbit has a “teach mode” that is made to train the model in order to be able to teach it a new skill and operate a new action into a new (or known) interface. This is as well a very good training in developing the communication skills to describe and verbally express a process in all of its parts in orther to train and teach others doing the same stuff. Also being able to break down a process in steps is very useful as a a skill as a leader or a manager that finds themself designing processes for their teams.
What do you think? Did you read any interesting views over this new technology? I can’t wait to play around with it, if you know any interesting video or article about it please share it in the comments!
If you liked this post and you think some of your friends would like it as well, please share it with whoever you like.
Thanks for reading to the finish and see you next week!
Tobia