I clipped a Jensen Huang (CEO NVIDIA) quote from Lex Fridman’s podcast last week using Snipd (like Readwise, but for podcasts). Huang argues it’s much more feasible for AI and robots to use existing tools (made for humans) rather than building custom solutions for them:
Does this [robot] hand turn into a 10-pound hammer in one instance, turns into a scalpel in another instance, and in order to boil water, it beams microwaves out of its fingers? Or is it more likely just to use a microwave? And the first time it goes up to the microwave, it probably doesn’t know how to use it. But that’s okay. It’s connected to the internet. It reads the manual of this microwave, reads it, instantly becomes an expert.
Six months ago, I tried to build AI-generated slide decks for client proposals. Claude couldn’t work well with Google Slides yet, so I built a workaround: let Claude create slides in HTML, something it could do well.
Clever in theory, fidgety in practice. I spent days on it, but it never quite worked.
The layout was always a bit off, and getting the presentation into a PDF that looked good was impossible. I sent one client the presentation as an HTML package; they were intrigued at best. The HTML presentation builder has been gathering dust on my drive ever since.
Last week I had another deck to build. I’d read somewhere that Claude had gotten better with slides, so I asked Claude Code to build a Google Drive MCP with full Slide support, and it worked. Templates, layouts, styling, alignment; it supports everything a good deck might need.
Then it hit me: my HTML system were Jensen’s robot laser-fingers. I’d been trying to create a custom approach for the AI, instead of trusting the model’s evolving capabilities would grow into our existing tools.
It’s an important lesson: if the AI shows early signs of being able to use an existing process or tool, even if it’s currently buggy or imperfect, you can bet it will be able to do it well six to 12 months from now.
#494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution →
Joining The AirOps Champion Program
I’ve joined the AirOps Champions program, a cohort organized by Jordan Miller (an Animalz alum) that brings together content engineers, or people who’ve gone way past the “I can write a good prompt” stage.
More on my LinkedIn:
“Content Engineering.” When I first heard the term, my reaction was: absolutely not. →
Reads & Listens
Here’s what stood out in my reading and listening this week.
Could AI usher in the content brand age — or save us from it?
Paul Graham’s latest essay, The Brand Age, is about the Swiss watch industry after the quartz crisis. When quartz commoditized accuracy in the 1970s, mechanical watchmakers couldn’t compete on that capability anymore. So they shifted to heritage, craftsmanship signals, and luxury positioning. As Graham puts it: “Brand is what’s left when the substantive differences between products disappear.”
The parallel with content (and other creative outputs) is hard to miss. If AI commoditizes writing the way quartz commoditized accuracy, we can expect the same shift: the content’s packaging — design, distribution, brand — becomes at least as important as the writing itself, as it signals quality to stand out from bland slop.
Welcome to the content brand age.
Except content has a twist watches didn’t.
You can tell a good essay from a mediocre one by reading it. Google’s traditional search approach couldn’t really do that, but AI-powered search might. That would even give great content with poor packaging a chance to be found.
So it could go either way: AI could usher content into the brand age, or save us from it.
Outside interests: I asked Claude what to read
I just finished Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, Luke Sullivan’s classic on advertising copy. Great book, but I was ready for fiction again.
I fed my list with 10+ years of reading (incl. 1–5 star ratings) to Claude Code and asked for a fiction pick based on what I’ve loved before. It pulled out the pattern — my five-stars for Nathan Hill’s The Nix and Yanagihara’s A Little Life — and came back with Wellness, Hill’s newer novel.
A few chapters in, and it’s landing exactly right. Beautifully written, funny, and relatable if you’re in a marriage with kids.
Thanks for reading!
Tim