Using AI In Times of Uncertainty
Like you, I woke up yesterday to some intense financial news about the U.S. and global stock markets experiencing a significant selloff and some pretty heavy volatility.
Naturally, I checked my positions in Stocks and Crypto and had one of those gasp moments, like many others as well. No one likes to hear news like this, know that they’re affected and feel helpless.
And while I’m not minimizing the fact that this could be isolated to a blip on the radar or as big as the start to another big correction/recession – what I do want to be sure you know, is this time, you’ve got an armada of support.
The next thing I did was open Perplexity 🔗 and typed out what the GIF above shows “explain what's happening to the stock market”.
Immediately after a few seconds of waiting, I had a simple, clear, and organized list of facts as real-time as it gets. All the data is cited, it’s written in plain English, I’m not being sold by an advertiser and I’m not faced with the choice of learning from the “wrong” link.
We live in a world now where AI can be there for you for everything, big or small. Don’t believe me? Let’s take it a step further.
Perplexity has a great feature that offers related “follow-up” questions. Here are just a few they asked me if I wanted to expand deeper on:
- What are the main factors driving the current stock market decline
- How are global markets reacting to the U.S. stock market downturn
- What impact is the jobs report having on investor sentiment
- Why did Berkshire Hathaway reduce its stake in Apple
- How are Treasury yields influencing the stock market
Now we’re talking.. these get me thinking, and curious to keep going deeper.
Sometimes we just need to make life even simpler.
One of my favorite features of Perplexity is you can refine your search by continuing the conversation in true AI fashion. I asked it to “explain everything happening here like I was 5 years old” and you have to read this response:
Imagine you have a piggy bank with lots of coins inside. Those coins are like the stock market, where people buy and sell tiny pieces of companies called stocks.
Right now, many people are worried that the companies might not do as well as they hoped. They think people might buy less stuff, which means the companies won’t make as much money.
When people get worried, they start taking their coins out of the piggy bank really fast. They want to keep their money safe. That’s what’s happening in the stock market – lots of people are selling their stocks because they’re scared.
This is making the prices of the stocks go down, just like if everyone wanted to sell their favorite toy at the same time. If too many people try to sell and not enough want to buy, the price of the toy goes down.
The same thing is happening in other countries too, not just here. People everywhere are taking their money out of the stock market because they’re worried.
It’s like a big game of musical chairs – everyone is rushing to sit down and not be the last one standing when the music stops. But don’t worry, this happens sometimes, and things usually get better after a while. The important thing is to not make decisions based on fear and to think long-term, like waiting for your piggy bank to fill up again over time.
—
Incredible.
Not only did it break down a real-time, global financial event, it reframed the situation to an optimistic one and reminded you how to think through it in the simplest of terms.
AI isn’t just there to automate your content and support your business. AI can be there to support you too.
You Won’t Believe FLUX Is Real – And Open Source
You guessed it, both of these images were generated.
Black Forest Labs, the team behind Stable Diffusion, just unveiled Flux – a new open-source text-to-image AI model. It’s big, with 12 billion parameters, making it the largest open-source model of its kind.
What makes Flux special?
It uses a technique called “flow matching” instead of the usual diffusion approach. This means faster image generation and a unique visual style.
Here’s what Flux brings to the table:
- High-quality, high-resolution images
- Realistic human anatomy (especially hands)
- Accurate translation of complex text prompts
- Fast generation – up to 10 times quicker with the Flux Schnell variant
Flux comes in three versions:
- FLUX.1 [dev]: The open-source base model
- FLUX.1 [schnell]: A faster open-source version
- FLUX.1 [pro]: A closed-source version, API access only
The open-source availability is a big deal. It allows developers and researchers to build on and improve the technology and removes the pricing barrier for everyone who wants to generate images at the same quality of Midjourney.
You can try Flux through Replicate for free & costs range from $0.003 to $0.05 per image for the pro version. And it’s fast, with generation times of only 1-6 seconds! Or, if you’re tech-savvy, you can download and run it locally, completely for free.
Flux represents a significant step forward in open-source AI image generation. Its capabilities and open nature make it a strong competitor to closed-source models like Midjourney.
This is How I Can Help
My private AI Slack community is one of my favorite ways to help you. I’ve opened it up for a short period of time and when you join, you’ll get:
- Direct access to me and a community of successful entrepreneurs
- Personalized guidance and answers to your questions
- Proven roadmaps and frameworks I’ve used to build multiple thriving online businesses through my projects
- A 20-minute 1:1 connect call with me to discuss your business and goals
- Live monthly calls where you can ask me anything and learn from others using AI
- An AI clone I made of myself you can text or even call with your tech questions
- All my latest AI finds, posted frequently each week
- Support and encouragement whenever you face challenges
- Celebration of your wins together!
Slack Community Cart Closes 👉🏻 This Friday. Join Today 🔗
