TL;DR: I fine-tuned a large language model on my personal notes and embedded the resulting model in my everyday workflow. Personal experience, Roam Research, AI Safety.

Building a 'digital person'.

Holden Karnofsky asks you to imagine yourself as a digital person - a copy of yourself that runs on a computer and that has the potential to vastly increase both productivity and output. An easily deployable digital person has the thrilling potential to not only reduce the effort a task requires (like other productivity tools might), but additionally to scale up and dramatically raise the ceiling of your output.

As Balaji S. Srinivasan points out, the biggest bottleneck in productivity might be the human in the loop:

We really should be in the middle of a golden age of productivity. Within living memory, computers did not exist. Photocopiers did not exist. Backspace did not exist. You had to type it all by hand. […] For example, maybe we have it wrong with productivity apps. Maybe the goal isn't writing up a Google Doc so another human can understand it, but hitting enter on GitHub so a computer can do it.

Instead of assigning each other tasks in one big circle of shifted responsibility, we might want to factor out subtasks and automate them away aggressively.

I used a two-week vacation to take these thoughts to heart by fine-tuning a large language model on the text I have produced in the last decade and by integrating its capabilities into my daily workflow. This post summarises some of the things I've learned in the process.