I first
interviewed him in 2020 about how he leveled up from being an intern at Shopify to becoming the company’s director of production engineering by reading and applying insights from hundreds of books.
A lot has changed over the last four years. Language models have made it possible to access and contextualize information faster, easier, and more cheaply than ever before—and in this episode, Simon and I talk about how this changes the way he learns.
Simon is now the cofounder and CEO of AI startup
turbopuffer, which is building a search engine that makes vector search—an approach to information retrieval that uses machine learning to gather
context—easy and affordable to run at scale.
We spent an hour talking about how he leverages LLMs’ contextual intelligence to supercharge his learning, such as helping him pick up new words as a non-native English speaker, do odd jobs to maintain his rural cabin in Quebec, and articulate technical concepts in legalese. As we talk, we screenshare through his
Anki setup, including the flashcard template he finds most useful, and the custom AI commands he’s created in productivity software
Raycast. Simon tells me about the clutch of AI tools he experiments with for journaling, writing, and coding, as well as his thoughts on how language models will fundamentally reshape the way we learn. Here’s a link to the transcript of this episode.
This is a must-watch for note-taking aficionados and anyone who wants to supercharge their learning with AI.
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Want even more?
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Simon Eskildsen: @Sirupsen
Simon’s startup, turbopuffer: turberpuffer.com, @turbopuffer
What is AI & I?
Learn how the smartest people in the world are using AI to think, create, and relate. Each week I interview founders, filmmakers, writers, investors, and others about how they use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney in their work and in their lives. We screen-share through their historical chats and then experiment with AI live on the show. Join us to discover how AI is changing how we think about our world—and ourselves.
For more essays, interviews, and experiments at the forefront of AI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought?sort=newest.