How to Stay Sharp on AI Without Burning Out

The system I use to go deep in AI fast - without wrecking my schedule or sanity

I have two major announcements to make before we get into the post (they’re quick and very important I promise)-

1. My Legal AI startup- Iqidis- is looking for some lawyers to work as testers for our platform. Iqidis has gotten amazing reviews from our users (our research assistant is free for everyone if you want to check it out), has great traction (100+ users in a month after which we decided to mostly close signups), and we’re building next-gen legal technology. We need some lawyers who can help us test the product and provide feedback on the quality of different responses. Reach out- devansh@iqidis.ai. On another note, we’re going to open-source our Editable Knowledge Graph technology soon with payments for the best contributors, so keep your eyes out for it (we will also give active contributors higher preferences for roles Iqidis).

Also looking into Diffusion as a first pass for our more advanced reasoning system. The goal is to use this to capture a “global view” which is fed in as input to the later stages. This should give us more “context” for large legal matters that have HUGE sets of documents. Essentially the diffusion layers act as as a low dimensional signal that allows LLMs to have better hints. This is still early stage experiment, so I would love to hear what you think.

1. Legendary Hackers Shawn Fanning and Andrew Frame are teaming up to create Ami- a new generation social media. They’re looking a passionate Backend + ML Engineer to work in their startup, in-person in NYC (apply here). It’s a startup founded by two highly accomplished tech people (Google them, ‘nuff said) and is backed by powerhouse VCs- Founders Fund and 8VC. I’ve also met some of their team, and this is a phenomenal opportunity to work with some of the best people in the industry. Yes, this post also serves as my not-so-subtle brag that I know Shawn Fanning and Andrew Frame.

On with the actual article.

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AI headlines are constant. Breakthroughs, tools, warnings – the noise is relentless.

You see it. You recognize AI's growing importance. But you're also leading teams, studying the constantly changing markets for the next move, and managing a demanding schedule. And don’t even get me started on the kids or family/romantic commitments (although I have a solution for that below)-

The kind of genius advice you won’t find anywhere else.

Whether or not you are willing to follow the advice above, one thing is clear- you don't have unlimited time for deep dives or chasing every new development. "Learn AI" or "read more papers" ignores the reality of your professional life. You could go back to school for an upper-level degree, but Grad School-

1. Won’t help you with your day-to-day and will make you learn random theory with very little connection to what’s going on.

2. Make you build things from scratch and put you further behind the cutting-edge.

3. Costs a lot (time and/or money depending on your circumstances).

4. Doesn’t really help you with your career goals (unless you’re younger than mid-late 20s and want to work in research). The reality of the current job market is that older newcomers in AI will have a horrible time breaking into the space due to ageism.

5. Who really likes school?

Most paths of trying to keep up with everything either lead to burnout, superficial knowledge, or both. This isn't efficient or strategic.

If anyone has a bright idea of dropping another major AI release in the next week, I will personally start burning down data centers

Yet, ignoring AI is a significant risk. It's already impacting your industry, competitors, and team's future needs. AI has been shown to:

1. Improve individual performance, allowing them to match the performance of teams- Individuals working with AI performed just as well as teams without AI, showing a 0.37 standard deviation improvement over the baseline. This suggests that AI effectively replicated the performance benefits of having a human teammate – one person with AI could match what previously required two-person collaboration.

2. Breaks down knowledge silos allowing people to produce more balanced (incorporating more perspectives) work. Poor performers saw additional productivity gains, bringing them closer to experts. “AI effectively helped people bridge functional knowledge gaps, allowing them to think and create beyond their specialized training, and helped amateurs act more like experts.”

3. “People using AI reported significantly higher levels of positive emotions (excitement, energy, and enthusiasm) compared to those working without AI. They also reported lower levels of negative emotions like anxiety and frustration. Individuals working with AI had emotional experiences comparable to or better than those working in human teams.”

All 3 quotes are from

Ethan Mollick

’s piece - The Cybernetic Teammate.

The key is in being informed, but not killing yourself. And that’s what we’ll discuss today. In this article, I will give you a system for learning AI. This is the system that I’ve personally used to cover hundreds of pages of research papers, engineering reports, market analysis, etc for years without burning out. This system has helped me learn complex AI topics both faster and with a solid level of depth (it’s the secret to how I churn out deepdives on so many AI concepts so fast- our Llama 4 deepdive took ~9 hours to read and break down from me first hearing about)

Even covering topics I’ve never looked into before, the system lets me produce good work very fast.

A lot of you have asked me how I read so much. This article will give you that secret.

One caveat- this is not a learn AI in x days or 100 AI tools to master piece. If you’re hoping to find something like that here, then you’re wasting your time.

PPS: This approach will not make you a master at anything. Instead, it will help you get to a high-intermediate level veryb quickly/sustainably so that you have more time to dedicate to mastering your main craft or just chilling out. The only way you get to mastery is by putting in the many reps, and I don’t know any other way. If you’re already able to keep up with AI w/o issues, then this approach wouldn’t significantly enhance your life. However, if you’re struggling, then this approach is going to be golden.

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