242 | Inside the Friday AI Hangouts: Real-World Wins, Woes & WTF Moments with AI

0:00Hello and welcome to the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage GI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar, Maitis, your host, and we have a special episode for you today. For over a year now, a community of amazing business people from all around the world who are all AI enthusiasts who want to learn together have been meeting every Friday for what we call the Friday AI Hangouts. There's usually 15 to 25 people every week. As I mentioned, different places around the world, different sizes of companies from large corporations to solopreneurs and everything in between.

0:39And everybody brings ideas, questions, solutions, things they've learned, systems that they found, and so on. And it's just a fascinating conversation every single week. It's completely open to anybody to join. And there are endless number of golden nuggets from these meetings. And I thought it will be interesting for you to listen to segments out of these AI Friday Hangouts to see if that's something you might be interested in joining as well. So this episode is going to be snippets out of different community meetings. Many of them are extremely tactical and valuable, and you're going to learn a lot from them, just like you learn from our regular Tuesday episodes.

1:21But it will also give you an idea of what it feels like, so you can decide if you want to join us or not. If you do want to join us, there's a link in the show notes. Click on the link, register. It will appear on your calendar. And then obviously you don't have to join, but whenever you're available on Friday at 1 p.m. Eastern, you can do that. I will obviously like to see many of you and to get to know you better and to welcome you to our amazing community. And now to the episode. I wonder if anybody has any experience sort of taking what they did in a custom GPT into the new GPT, chat GPT projects.

1:57And the context is this, I built sort of like a prototype for a client. They had new apprentice starting, they've never had an apprentice before, and they had no clue how they were going to deal with it. And so I ended up finding like, what the apprentice's like three year plan was and put that into the GPT. And then I found out what systems they used in house and created this thing that they can talk to it and figure out how to teach the person, give it to the kid to learn his things and stuff. And yes, now they love it and are going to want to use it and build on it. And I realized that it would be so much better to have it in this new, like GPT projects, because then everything stays in the same place and I can control it, but have more different users.

2:36So I'm just wondering, do the instructions still work as well? Has anybody tried that migrating? I will let other people answer before I answer. Anyone? No one? Okay. So a few, how many of you need an overview of projects in general before we dive into what are the differences okay so the the biggest two seconds on the biggest difference between projects and custom gpts custom gpts follow instructions and do them and that's it and that's the end of the thing and a project is think about a project as a mini private version of chat GPT. And in that mini private version, you can give it its own universal context.

3:24You can give it special set of instructions, but very different than a chat GPT. You can have conversation basically a regular chat, just like a regular chat with chat GPT, only inside your little universe. And it has also, it has its own memory. So its own memory. Here's where I'm going. it has many benefits right now over custom gpt's the first one is you can have free form conversations with it versus in chat gpt it just follows the instructions right you can't just have a regular conversation in there so that's a big benefit the other big benefit is that you can upload more files than you can upload into custom gpt's inside projects which is obviously a big The third thing, which is huge, is what Jonathan just said.

4:15It has its own memory in its own little universe, which means in addition to the information that you gave it when you trained it to do the thing and you gave it access to files, it was over-technic because you give it more information as you're having conversations with it. so as of right now there's really no reason to create new custom gpts it makes a lot more sense to build them inside projects because of all the things that i just said uh those who already exist in custom gpts the answer is it depends and the reason it depends if it's working it's working like there's there's no reason to move it over like if it's doing the thing that it needs to do let it do the thing that it needs to do.

5:00But if it doesn't or if you wanted to have the ability to have free form conversations with that in mind or you wanted to learn over time or all these kind of things then literally all you have to do is upload the same files on the project side copy the instructions to the instruction sections and that's it and you're off to the races. So it can work and if you think about it projects in Claude, that's what they've done for a while. Like in Claude, you don't have these two different animals. There's one thing, which is projects, which you can use kind of like projects in ChatGPT or like custom GPTs in ChatGPT, depending how you want to use it.

5:44And so I think when ChatGPT came up with project was to partially mimic, but they should have just converted ChatGPT, like custom GPTs into projects. And I think that just to not confuse people going, whoa, where'd you watch a GPT? Like custom GPTs go. So right now it's kind of like duplicate. The only thing is that you can't, you can't do connectors or something, right? At the moment with these new... So there's a few things, there's a few things you cannot do. Like the only real benefit of custom GPTs right now is the whole section on the bottom where you can write code and do all these kinds of things that does not exist inside of projects.

6:25yet. But again, I think what makes sense is that it would merge the two things into one thing that has all this functionality. But I think that's the only thing right now that doesn't exist. Okay. And have you tried sharing it with people and using the different permissions and stuff? Oh yeah. Hold on. So that's the biggest thing. You cannot share. Oh no, now you can share everything. They changed it like a couple of weeks ago. yeah exactly brand new and here like two or three weeks ago you couldn't share projects you could only share custom GPTs and now you can share projects as well you can even share them I'm confusing I'm using so much of Cloud recently in Cloud you can share projects with anyone like you can share projects with the world and they don't see the instructions and the data behind it but they can use the project in chat GPT I don't remember how they get it but I know you can now share projects in chat GPT that you couldn't a few weeks ago.

7:21So yeah, you can share a project. Well, I'll keep working on this and I will report back how it goes. Awesome. Because I also want to like have different permission levels. I think it would be good if the apprentice can use it but only in study mode or something, right? Whereas the people that have to work. Yes, I think in that case you probably want to create another version of it that would be for the apprentice and I think that would make it a lot easier to control where you give it slightly different instructions. Yeah. And just before, before, while I still have a floor, I just wanted to say thank you to Ken for sending me a podcast after the last session, which was really helpful to my last last week's issue.

8:02Thank you, Ken. This is not about me. This is about us all helping each other. And there's nothing that makes me happier than, you know, that if I die tomorrow, this team can continue being helpful to another. Actually, I've been listening to a lot of your podcasts every week and trying to use the tools and the frustration level is unbelievable it took gemini to write me a script to merge a bunch of doc google docs into one doc 38 script attempts and everyone said i got it right now i got it right here to just cut and paste this into the script it's the json no problem oh it didn't work oh send me the error stuff okay here's the oh i know what went wrong this will fix it 38 attempts so the frustration of these things just don't seem to be ready for prime time every i did another one where i asked it to create a prompt where i could prepare for a meeting for someone you one of the use cases that you right so i said give me this prompt and uh so i gave me the prompt i gave it the person's url on LinkedIn, their name, all this background.

9:13And it went and gave me a wonderful brief, snapshot brief of questions I could ask this person to start the conversation, except it was the wrong person. And then when I questioned it, I said, oh, I can't look at LinkedIn profiles. That's all private. Well, what if I gave my login? Oh, no, I can't do that either. So the frustration level I'm having actually accomplishing any task that I'm trying to automate is unbelievable and trying to learn any end and your last podcast you had last week with the guest for the french lady like this is uh when she said the learning curve is steep it's unbelievable and i'm a relative i've been you know it a long time it's relatively savvy guy this is but i'm not a coder it is unbelievably steep learning curve and i don't know what the group's experience has been, but the consensus seems to be that don't go with the easy ones like Zapier or Make, go with the harder one, but it is a way lot more complex.

10:17Okay. I mean, Make.com is significant, is still, even the other ones have a bit of a learning curve. So if If NAN is considered hard at that point, then yeah, I'd definitely look at the, you know, make.com is actually really nicely laid out and it's fairly, and it's very powerful. Yeah, so I agree. I always tell people get started, start with Make. From value to investment, it is by far the best one right now. It is not as flexible and capable as N8N. It is way easier to use and definitely way easier to get started. Even just connecting accounts, like connecting your Gmail account or your Microsoft Outlook account.

11:10make is you go in, you give it your password and you're done. You're connected. Doing it in NA10, you go to Google Cloud or to Microsoft Azure and you have to open a project and you have to assign permissions and it's like 20 steps that you need to be an IT manager to do. So 100%, if you're not now in the process of I'm going to automate my entire business and it's going to save me a lot of money uh doing it through an 8n just go with make uh i'm actually in the process of automating a lot of our business uh but i'm designing it all in make first yeah yeah and once i have all of that in make i'm going after the ones that use the most operations and I'm going to move those over first and use it as an optimization problem.

12:07But designing it in Make is so easy and so fast that it's just to get stuff out there as an initial tool, it's great. Now I understand why there's a whole business out there for people to build your N8N agent for you because it's so complicated. So there's the buy the build it, there's the build it yourself, and then there's an easier way to build it yourself apparently i'm wondering is there anything where it's pre-built you just so you know we all want to go i want to check my emails i want to monitor my emails and if this email comes in i want to do x with that email i want to reply and i want to customize reply so i need a little bit of a brain so i might have agent kit but like what's been pre-written these seem like pretty standard business business processes business is simple, get the business, do the business, get paid.

12:54A lot of similar processes. Is there a library out there of pre-written NNN agents that do specific things? 100%. So both on Make and on Zapier and on NNNN and all of those, there are thousands of existing templates. Most of them are free. And some of them will cost you, okay, pay me 30 bucks. I'm like, okay, I'll pay you 30 bucks to save myself the three hours of agony. And what I do in many, many cases is I mix and match segments of these templates. So there are long templates. It does all these things. I'm like, okay, I just need this. But now I have this building block that I can reuse. And then there's this other thing that does the other part that I need.

13:43And all I have to figure out is how to connect them and make them talk to one another. And the same is true in Make and in NA10. literally thousands of people are sharing them all a lot more than thousands probably tens of thousands of people are sharing them on the internet and you can if you just search uh for template this now the thing that i'm still puzzled by and i'm sure it's coming and there's there's third-party attempts but not inside of anything and make there's zero reason right now why you shouldn't be able to say in English what you want the system to do. And then it will just create the automation for you.

14:22A to Z, soup to nuts, the whole thing. Test it out. Verify. Check that it's working. Ask me for what you need for me. Like I need your API key for this. Here's the instructions on how to go and get it. I need your login to this. Just give me your login. I need, and you will give it all the stuff and it will run. The two closest things that I have right now that I'm using, and I shared that with you in the past, but since you're new, I'm going to share it again. One is I have a Claude project that has an NA10 MCP server with a whole set of instructions on how to use the MCP server that I never got to work 100%, but it gets me 85 % there, which is way better than I can do on my own in five minutes.

15:07It takes a little bit of time, but it's not a big deal to get the MCP set up and connecting it to Claude and then running it. so this is one good shortcut again it's not perfect but it's going to save you x percent the other one is i now do 100 of my entertainment work in the comet browser that is now free and available to everybody so you don't have to pay or be a member of anything uh and comet has been really good at helping me solve any 10 issues that i'm running into uh sometimes it will be similar to what you experienced and like oh yeah i solved it for you like okay it still doesn't work ah okay i know why i'm wrong and kind of like that uh but usually within three or four attempts with the right prompting and the right reference materials which is a very big deal i'm gonna get to your first point in a minute uh it actually helps me a lot so i do all of my n8n work in comet and it helps me solve a lot of problems i don't know how to solve on my own and it's kind of funny because despite the fact I'm asking it to do the thing every time it's like oh here's how you do this I'm like no just do it I'm like ah okay and then it goes it goes and does it and you have to do it every single time but it but it works uh I I now going back to what I said in the beginning I'm shocked literally shocked that anything doesn't have a built-in tool like this already uh and it could be a paid separate tool like pay me 20 bucks a month to build yeah sure no problem.

16:35I'll pay it. Just to have that tool run and build automations and test them and verify and everything. So basically, run your own MCP server, know how to test it, know how to install it and so on. I'm shocked it doesn't exist yet, but I'll be really, really surprised if it doesn't happen in the near future, but I've been saying that for at least six months. So how many of you use Claude's skills? Oh, four, four, four, four. okay so about about a month ago when when when the new Claude came out i don't know when that was like x number of weeks ago and then we'll go to you richard but uh they came out with skills so what are skills skills are like little pieces of instructions that could be anything because it's basically like a fancy prompt with knowledge so think about okay the best way to describe it is like a library of prepackaged custom GPTs or broad projects in this case that it can pull at will whenever it needs to get access to it.

17:46So think about, I think I showed you this many times before. Do you know, I showed you that in a regular chat in ChatGPT, you can use the at symbol to call a custom GPT. Did you know that? Yes? No? No. Okay, so I'll show very, very quickly and then I'll show you the clod thing. Cool. Do you see Chachupiti or Maching Shanteos?

18:14Yeah, so if you hit the at symbol in a regular chat in Chachupiti, usually, maybe it needs a little refresh to wake up.

18:33Obviously when you want to demo something, it doesn't work. Yeah. In theory. I had the same thing. Um, if I was trying to do it in five or five, one, I could only, I'd have to change to four. Oh, if I created the GPT. No, no, I've did this a gazillion times in the past two weeks. So not in five, one, but I definitely did this on five. So let's go to a GPT five.

19:01thinking about that

19:10interesting well try it out it conceptually works like it gives you like a drop down menu of your that never happened to me that it didn't work so i'm wondering why it's not working maybe the update took the friend away again yeah maybe uh so usually what happens when you hit the add sign it opens like a drop down menu that shows you didn't work for me either i just tried it never did not existed but it doesn't do anything for me

19:44weird so never mind but what it used to do is to allow you to it allows you to use several different what you're saying in 4.0 it works that's right just just to show you that it's working uh it definitely worked in 4.0 but they didn't Hold it around. Five. So it is working. I used it in five for sure. But you can kind of see here, right? So you can add whatever this, and then you can give it whatever you want to give it. And then the idea behind it was that you can use several of them in a single conversation. So if you have like a three-step process, you can use the step one, and then the step two, and then the step three just by adding it.

20:27And then it knows what happened before, and it uses that as the input for the next step.

20:34So, Claude Scales is kind of the same concept, only it knows on its own to use the scales. So, if you look at Claude Desktop, which is the way to get them or create them, if you go to your settings, and you have to install Claude Desktop, but if you go to your settings and you go to capabilities and you scroll down then you have skills and then you need to turn them on and then you can have all these things that it already comes up with out of the box and you need to turn each and every one of them on um canvas is so good on your excel and word documents is that like a new skill that it has so so yes but i think some of them are are are built in and you don't even have to turn them on okay right so but you can see two very interesting ones one is called mcp builder and the other is called skill creator so if you have skill creator on and you tell it that you want to create new skills you literally have a regular a conversation with it, and it will give you a package that you can download.

21:50Once you download that, you can upload it here and create a new skill. So I have a new skill of my brand guidelines. Atone, I like to use examples of that, the actual documents with my color coding, and so on. So if I now go here, and I start a new chat, and I say,

22:15please create a document that will promote the Friday AI Hangouts, which is a great community of people talking about AI. It needs to be no more than five paragraphs long. Describe the benefits and why people should join. Created as a well-designed Microsoft document

22:45oh sorry stop wait you know what i actually wonder if it would have done it anyway oh use my brand guidelines

22:59there you'll see what it's going to do thinking thinking about referencing brand guidelines identify task requirements prepared to consult brand and now it's reading the file because it knows reading multiply i brand guidelines directory to understand the brand identity so it's actually so these these uh skills are are packages they have instructions and knowledge base just like all the other stuff and so in the knowledge base it has my brand guidelines the color coding the fonts that i use all these kind of things it has my logo so it can use my logo because it's going to write html code and it can take the logo and place it inside the html it's stuff like that.

23:37But you can create them for literally anything. Like you can have, and it knows how to pull them in real time. Now, the biggest benefit of putting them in real time is that until it needs them, they don't use tokens. They don't take part of your context window. So it's freaking absolutely brilliant.

24:01So that's flawed skills. and it's it's again relatively new but you can create them with the creation skill inside of skills which is kind of meta this is this is how it works and to call that skill you literally want to tell it you want to create a new skill and then you'll say oh i have a skill to create skills then you'll you'll learn that and then it knows how to create the package but then you can download and re-upload which by itself is a little stupid like if i told you i want to create a skill i don't need to download it and upload it just save it wherever it needs to be saved but that's a whole other thing.

24:37So here we go. Let's see what it did. And you'll see that it's going to have the colors of my shirt and stuff like that in my logo. Pretty cool, right? And how did it get the context of that data? You uploaded something before, or it's going to your website? Yeah, so, by the way, you can see it here. So, perfect. I've created the Affinity and Guards of it. Here's your document. the document includes, brand aligns, so it knows how to pull the colors. So these things come from that scale that I created. And the way I created the scale is having a conversation, asking it to create the scale. And then I gave it the brand guidelines, my tone of voice, stuff like that.

25:19It creates a package. You re-upload the package. You're done. And you can do this for literally anything. Specific formatting of invoices, is like literally anything it needs to know. You can create a skill and it will call the skill when it needs it, which is freaking amazing. I need help from all of you geniuses that work developing and doing all the cool coding stuff and that happen to know the evils of Microsoft. So I know I probably lost half of you guys, but the other rest that are interested in, we developed we had to go back and develop our own chatbot and it's a technical chatbot for all of our part numbers and all of our stuff and we're doing it in copilot studio which is it's not as bad as it sounds it's it's pretty good what we're finding is that i see you laughing isar i see i'm not i'm not i had good and bad experiences with with microsoft copilot so so what i'm finding is everything went fantastic we uploaded the whole catalog and this is uh thrilling stuff i know all of you guys are losing your minds over how exciting this looks like I know.

26:43I'll send you guys one. It has all of our part numbers, and each part number has different variations of we uploaded everything, and then halfway of reading the chart, it starts to hallucinate and create part numbers by adding a 1. So, for example, part number 101, 64, instead of 04, it says 05. The weirdest thing. So we got in with the Microsoft folks with the Copilot Studio team. They looked at it. They gave us a couple of suggestions. It didn't work. And then they sent us to deal with OCR. We've been playing with OCR, but that thing is a monstrosity. We're way over our heads with this. Any suggestions?

27:37Has anybody had experience with OCR? so i i do but my question is don't you have a digital version of this thing why do you need ocr well according to the copilot studio folks from copilot studio they say that we need to add or add this toggle button in copilot studio to allow ocr as a connector so that it can read that table better

28:11but okay i'm i'm going back like the master document right yeah like if the document if you have the raw data of the document versus the final version kind of like print ready copy of the document yeah just use the raw data Yeah, we uploaded that. Yeah, we have the digital catalog. And for some reason, it cannot read. It stops reading like halfway the table. And that's when it starts hallucinating.