A Conversation With Alex Banks
Chatting with the creator of the popular AI newsletter "Through the Noise"
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The world is awash not only in a sea of new AI products, but blogs, podcasts, and an endless list of Twitter “thinkbois” as well. Which makes it all the more impressive when one person can build a massive and engaged audience with superb content.
That is exactly what Alex Banks did with his popular AI newsletter “Through the Noise”. While Alex only started Through the Noise in early 2022, he’s already amassed an audience of 30K subscribers, along with his 145K followers on Twitter and 45K on LinkedIn.
Last week we had a chance to sit down with Alex to ask him about what drew him into the world of AI, tips and tricks as a content creator, what he’s excited about today in the world of AI, and his new journey as the founder of Aloy, an AI-powered “second brain”. This is the first time we are publishing an interview on Aspiring For Intelligence, and we couldn’t have picked a better person to do it with than Alex.
This interview was slightly edited for clarity and the transcript is powered by Deepgram!
Enjoy!
Part I: Through the Noise
What got you interested in AI and how did you start writing AI newsletters?
AB: I started writing at the beginning of January 2022 and saw AI as on-demand intelligence. It’s way cheaper and faster than what we can get from humans, so this fundamentally sparked my curiosity. Now, if you look at the explosion of stuff people are building, AI is the platform people have been waiting for.
There will never be technological advancement in our lifetimes that will diffuse as fast as AI. And I think the beauty now is we have tools that can augment human potential and allow anyone to become a storyteller. For me, the storytelling piece is foundational. I am a big believer that the most important trait of an entrepreneur is someone who can tell a story. Many people didn’t think they could be storytellers—I didn't think I could be as I was always quite reserved as a kid. But now, there are tools that can augment our own human creativity. Text tools like ChatGPT, Video tools like RunwayML, and Image tools like Stable Diffusion. Now the barriers to entry have never been lower to create something that everyone can read, watch, or listen to, and that fundamentally excites me.
Did you have any prior experience in AI? Or was this something you had been watching as an observer?
AB: For me, it was something I was consciously aware of. A few of my close friends were in the space and my Co-Founder of Aloy (more below) was consulting Fortune 500’s, implementing knowledge graphs and AI decision-making models into their organizations. Then, all of a sudden, I saw this catalyst of ideas and events that started to take shape. Coming out of COVID into 2021 and early 2022 there was all of a sudden a lot of activity and now we are riding high on the emergence of powerful LLMs.
So in 2021, I decided to do a lot of personal education. I don’t have a degree in Artificial Intelligence or Computer Science. Instead, I’ve taken the time to give myself a foundational understanding of how these models work and the components that come together to understand where value creation will occur.
There is a great course on Deep Learning that I recommend for anyone to tackle AI with very little prior experience necessary. I feel you don’t have to be an expert when you start, you can simply share what you learn. This was exactly the strategy that I employed when writing on Twitter. The beauty now is there’s an abundance of resources online for free.
How did you come up with the name “Through the Noise”?
AB: As I was beginning my writing journey on Twitter, I was always looking for nuggets of wisdom that I could infuse into my writing. I realized that my Twitter feed had become noisy and there was a sea of chatter. It always felt difficult to ‘cut through the noise’. I found that creating Twitter lists was a good way to get a curated feed that I could ultimately digest and take learnings from. I asked myself: who do I trust, who do I respect, and how do I deploy this in my own writing so that I’m not only telling stories but also delivering insights at the same time? It was a problem that I faced personally where far too many individuals were saying far too many things and taking up a lot of my cognitive bandwidth. I ultimately just wanted a highly selected curated list from which I could pull insights from trusted parties.
So how do you actually cut through the noise and what’s the strategy you use? Once you’re known as a curator, there is almost a responsibility to continue curating well.
AB: I tend to draw inspiration from a wide range of resources. I think one of which is most pertinent is Reddit and a few subreddits. Specifically the Singularity, AI and ML subreddits. Through these sites, you can often find insights that are not discussed by the mainstream media. These are nuggets of news that individuals have found and the community has derived a lot of value from them. On a more technical side, there is arXiv which is run by Cornell University that has a lot of excellent research papers. Other than that, I think Twitter is a phenomenal resource as long as you're following the right people. Specifically, Twitter lists is an undervalued tool that can be helpful.
Alex, you have over 150k followers on Twitter, over 50k followers on LinkedIn, and over 30k newsletter subscribers. That’s pretty amazing! What are the secrets to success? Because to preface this, there are many people that write about AI and never get to these numbers.
AB: There is a steep learning curve, but the key is to learn how to optimize and streamline processes in a systematic way. If your systems are great, you will be too.
And so for me, building writing systems where I know between x and y hours every day, that is my writing time and nothing else matters. My phone's on Airplane mode, emails are off and I'm just homing in and zeroing in on writing. For me, that was a real game-changer. Knowing or at least compartmentalizing my calendar when I'm producing versus when I'm reading/consuming content. I think a lot of people often merge the two and in turn, they are half as productive and then they take twice the amount of time. So being deliberate with how you manage your calendar is important to make sure you just do one thing at a time.
And so how do I draw out that writing process? Throughout the week, I gather resources and tag them as “read later”. These are various resources that I find useful and might want to write about during the week. As I come across useful information, I will add quotes to my “second brain” (more below). Then on Friday, I review all the resources that have been saved and then dive into a little bit further. I filter the best ones from that list that I've created throughout the week, then it's time to add some commentary for the Sunday Signal newsletter. This piece of content ultimately informs the following week’s content creation schedule.
I write my threads every other day. I schedule them for the following day to make sure I’m not there rushing or trying to get them live at the minute. I think the power of scheduling is wonderfully impactful and people should leverage scheduling tools.
All of those habits, all of those systems are important because if you could complete a task manually yourself, and then if you can document it correctly, then those systems can be replicated by another person. And so that's exactly what I've done. I've documented all the processes that I've done with my newsletter to scale the business.
Part II: Aloy, the First AI-Powered Second Brain
Alex, beyond the success of Through the Noise, you’re also working on something new. You are the co-founder of a new AI company, Aloy. Let’s switch gears and talk a little bit about this. What is Aloy and what made you decide to dive head first into becoming a founder of a tech and product company?
AB: Yes, it was a fascinating transition and perhaps I can give you a bit more insight into it. So for me, I started writing at the beginning of January 2022 and I spent hours crafting each piece of writing. In the beginning, nobody was reading my content and it was disheartening. Nobody was liking or engaging with my content. So, I started to ask myself “where am I going wrong”? Ultimately, generating 40 original thoughts was already challenging enough, let alone making them go viral. So, in order to overcome this limitation, what I started to do was transfer the notes that I took into an AI system. I got the system to essentially learn my writing style.
Then one day, I was sorting my notes into OpenAI's GPT playground and I thought, what if AI just had access to my entire knowledge base to personalize my work? And that really made me think ok, that would be great and all, but what's the bigger problem at play?
The bigger problem is knowledge workers spend almost 4 hours searching for information every day. And after all, your mind was made for having ideas, not for storing them. So, what if you could actually add your individual notes, knowledge and insights to AI to remember past conversations and ideas and ultimately use it to personalize your future work? That question was ultimately why we founded Aloy. Our vision is to solve the limits of the human mind and we are doing that by building the first AI knowledge worker that acts as your “second brain”.
Is the vision that there will be an AI-powered knowledge hub that allows you to do search and create new workflows? Can you elaborate on this?
AB: I think all of us are knowledge workers here. We know how much time is involved in just reading documents and taking notes and storing knowledge. There is no comprehensive solution that can capture, synthesize, and find information for us.
Traditional note-taking tools are fundamentally broken. I might write down a note on a piece of paper. I might store something in Apple Notes. Or I might leave something over in Notion. Notes end up becoming unmanageable leading to lost insights and lost opportunities for creative thinking.
The way the world currently works is if I'm learning something I'm going to write it down. But oh, it’s been a few weeks or months or years and now I've forgotten about it. To me, that doesn't seem quite right because inspiration is ultimately perishable, and so we have to act on it immediately. So, how should we think about capturing information right now? It is rather inefficient because I can't capture information at the speed of thought. I have to get out my pen, get out my notepad, I have to write it down. I can't then cross-tag that with my Notion page about the newsletter I want to write next week. Storage, as you know, is this pile of notebooks that just gets larger and larger.
There is no existing system that can compound the value of your knowledge through personal insights and collaboration. It could be friends, it could be teams. A lot of this individual knowledge is stored in people’s minds, not as a centralized team resource. So how we then think about a second brain—it's about how can we bring our unique perspectives to the world and tell new stories alongside extracting insights from your knowledge base and turning them into action. How do you extract insights and turn them into action?
With Aloy, we believe it’s a three-step process:
Aloy is the knowledge engine that turns raw ideas into insights and actions for you and your team. So lightning-fast capturing mechanisms, which then allow you to sort your insights into a centralized knowledge repository and this will then have integrations to your current workflows.
I think the key for me is you often see individuals spending hours linking or tagging information. As we scale Aloy, we want this to be done automatically for you on the backend as Aloy learns more about you as a person and also as a team and then it can grow with you.
The second part is around knowledge storage. Your notes and insights will be linked to see connections that you didn't know you could make, and Aloy will ultimately create these new insights that would otherwise have just been untapped if you were to have gone about your work alone without Aloy as your copilot.
And then the final part, the third part of this mechanism is the retrieval. Knowledge work doesn’t currently compound, it’s static in nature. Aloy will create new insights for you based on your current action. If you're writing your next thought piece on your newsletter and all of a sudden a relevant insight from a conversation that you had with someone 6 months ago were to appear dynamically as a suggestion from Aloy, as you were writing, all of a sudden, these rich insights you can fuse into your writing and into your work. As soon as you can add that last part into that cycle, which is putting your ideas into action and getting ideas suggested from your second brain, based on the current task you're completing, that really gets me excited.
Alex, this is super fascinating. While there have been attempts at this in the past, I think that in this new paradigm with AI, there's a real ability to create a solution here. How do you marry the writing that you do with this new product, Aloy? Where do you see the biggest challenges for you and your co-founder?
AB: I see two necessary components to a successful business. The first is the product and the second is the distribution. You have to have a product that people want and you have to have the distribution to get eyes on your product. One without the other is no good. Also, if you can go where your audience already hangs out, and we can see a lot of people interested in using AI tools on Twitter, then you can build out those distribution channels. What’s more, when you have that 1-1 relationship with an audience or with a customer set that is already suffering similar problems as you, then you can build a great product.
As we build Aloy as a knowledge engine and solve these problems that not only I face, but the community that I'm building faces too, then I feel that ultimately makes a mark for something quite compelling. So by tying these together, it just seems like a natural line of progression.
There’s a great Paul Graham quote where he says essentially the best way to get startup ideas is not to look for startup ideas, but it's to solve problems, preferably problems that you face personally. And I think that couldn't be more relevant to what we are building today.
Part III: Lightning Round Questions
What lessons have you learned in building an AI brand over the last 2 years?
AB: The number one thing I’ve learned is to just get started. There is a story of two fishermen, one spends hours finding the best guidebooks and best fishing gear and the other guy grabs a rod and starts fishing. It's the guy who just gets out there gets into the lake and he learns at a far quicker rate than the guy who's just sat back onshore gathering gear. The moral is just get going. Start then learn.
What are you most excited about in AI right now?
AB: Ultimately for me, I'm a big believer in Generative AI. That’s where we're building on the application layer at Aloy. And, I think coming from a creative angle, one company that is doing really well right now is Runway. I think video as a medium can be extremely stimulating. So not only, you know, to disintermediate Hollywood, but this opportunity to tell new stories in very different and new ways.
What type of value creation will AI bring?
AI is going to bring close to $5.7 trillion of value to the global economy by 2030. The labor force is going to see a lot of benefits from augmenting and complementing our current processes. The beauty is in the not-too-distant future, we’ll have an AI for everyone for personalized experiences across the board from healthcare to education.
Reference Links:
Deep Learning Course: https://course.fast.ai/
Reddit:
Singularity: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/
Artificial Intelligence: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/
Machine Learning: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/
ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/
Funding News
Below we highlight select private funding announcements across the Intelligent Applications sector. These deals include private Intelligent Application companies who have raised in the last two weeks, are HQ’d in the U.S. or Canada, and have raised a Seed - Series E round.
New Deal Announcements - 04/28/2023 - 05/10/2023:
We hope you enjoyed this edition of Aspiring for Intelligence, and we will see you again in two weeks! This is a quickly evolving category, and we welcome any and all feedback around the viewpoints and theses expressed in this newsletter (as well as what you would like us to cover in future writeups). And it goes without saying but if you are building the next great intelligent application and want to chat, drop us a line!