The AI Download #020 April 18th, 2025 Dear Reader, Let's be honest: the AI tool landscape in 2025 is a mess. Every week, a new "game-changing" tool drops. One promises to write better than Hemingway. Another will build you a SaaS in your sleep. Before you've even tried one, five more show up on Product Hunt with cooler branding and a "lifetime deal." It's exciting. It's overwhelming. And it's kind of exhausting. Here's the truth: you don’t need all of them. You just need a few that save you...
7 days ago • 3 min read
The AI Download #019 April 11th, 2025 Dear Reader, Creative writing is experiencing a significant transformation thanks to advancements in Artificial Intelligence. Writers now have the opportunity to use powerful language models directly on their personal devices via tools like LM Studio, dramatically enhancing storytelling, character generation, dialogue creation, and immersive worldbuilding, all without working in someone else's cloud. If LM Studio sounds familiar, you're right. I wrote...
15 days ago • 4 min read
The AI Download #018 April 7th, 2025 (this is an image-heavy edition - make sure that you permit your email client to display them) Dear Reader, If you thought to yourself: Jim missed sending his newsletter last week. I bet he was too busy creating Muppet versions of himself and his buddies with that new ChatGPT 4o Image release... ...you'd be wrong - I've also been using it to create Studio Ghibli-esque images and all sorts. In case you missed it, last week OpenAI unveiled a significant...
22 days ago • 6 min read
The AI Download #017 March 21st, 2025 Dear Reader, Have you ever wondered how we (as a species) determine if a machine is truly "intelligent"? Long before ChatGPT entered our daily lives, notable mathematician Alan Turing was already thinking about this question. His simple yet profound test has shaped how we evaluate AI for over 70 years--and as these systems grow more capable, the ways we measure them continue to evolve in fascinating ways. The Original Question: Can Machines Think? In...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
The AI Download #016 March 14th, 2025 Greetings from rainy and wet Valencia, where I’ve been deep in research mode for my latest project. This has me thinking about how dramatically our research methods have evolved in just the past year. If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been exploring alternatives to traditional search engines. Today, I want to share why this matters for your business and how early adoption of these tools can give you a significant competitive edge. Let’s get to...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
The AI Download #015 March 7th, 2025 Dear Reader, Ever felt like you're getting stuck in circles with ChatGPT (or other chatbots, for that matter)? You're not alone. Despite their impressive capabilities, AI assistants lack something fundamental: human intuition. They don't naturally question their own methods or adapt their communication style to match your needs. This is why your prompting strategy matters more than you might think. Be Direct: Clarity Creates Better Results When I first...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
The Download #014 February 28th, 2025 Dear Reader, I spent the majority of time this and last week keeping my poorly kids entertained at home while trying to look for contract work and create an online course, with video. It became clear very quickly that I wasn't going to be able to do everything, but I had nobody else on hand to help me hit my targets. That is, unless you count...me. On one of those days I had an unexpected two-hour gap where there was nobody in the house - that's all the...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
The Download #013 February 21st, 2025 Dear Reader, With more countries blocking access to DeepSeek, an AI model linked to ByteDance, the conversation around AI privacy is heating up. As AI tools become an integral part of our workflows, it’s worth asking: How much control do we really have over our data? Most AI tools—ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini—process your inputs on cloud servers, meaning they handle your data externally. While these companies have varying policies on storage and model...
2 months ago • 3 min read
The Download #012 February 14th, 2025 Dear Reader, This week: AI web search, OpenAI's Whisper, Qwen AI and more. I've written with relative frequency that AI search is starting to dominate traditional search. I'm a huge fan of Perplexity Search, but this week OpenAI has dropped the sign-in required to access ChatGPT's Search, making it a viable contender for all. If you're only used to traditional web search and haven't tried AI powered search yet, I suggest you give it a try now. Once you...
2 months ago • 3 min read