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Shotaro Tsuda credits his father, who once dreamed of becoming an architect, with teaching him to see and appreciate design wherever he looked: a thoughtfully arranged bouquet, a welcoming courtyard, the austerity of Japanese minimalism.

This early aesthetic education led him to study architecture as an undergraduate. But like his father, Shotaro turned away from the field before making it his profession. Instead, he shifted his focus to science and technology, moving to New York to earn a master’s degree in statistics. What followed was an entrepreneurial but artistically unfulfilling decade in machine learning and data science for e-commerce. “It was like I was putting a lid on my creative brain,” Shotaro says.

When he lost a close friend in a motorcycle accident, Shotaro retreated to a Zen temple in rural Nagano. There, he began painting again, then experimenting with graphic design and animation. After a year at the temple, he decided to pursue art full-time.

Still, he kept one foot in tech. At a gallery opening in 2023, he encountered AI-generated imagery for the first time. Shotaro saw that AI might be able to synthesize the elements of his nonlinear path — his analytical training and creative instincts, his Japanese restraint and New York enterprising spirit, his reverence for tradition and appetite for new technology. After using ChatGPT to help a friend mock up designs for a “dream home” architecture competition, he realized those different threads no longer had to compete. They could weave together into a new way of practicing architecture.

Shotaro now uses AI to visualize and refine design concepts, helping him explore more options and get feedback faster, and to research design references and envision how different architectural influences might work together. He’s especially interested in blending yohaku, a Japanese concept centered on the beauty of empty space, with warmer touches that promote community and connection, such as plant life and natural light.

Today, Shotaro is an architectural designer at Kengo Kuma & Associates, a Japanese firm known for contemporary architecture that harmonizes traditional Japanese aesthetics, natural materials, and surrounding landscapes. Outside his day job, he is redesigning his parents’ backyard, giving his father’s preferred minimalist style a contemporary, climate-aware twist. “I call it tropical Japonesque,” he says.

Here are six ways Shotaro uses ChatGPT in his personal architectural practice (the prompts have been translated from Japanese):

1. Transform a hand-drawn sketch into a 3D rendering

I’m competing in an architectural competition to design a ‘Sky House.’ Based on the following concept for my Sky House — “Humans long for the sky, and AI longs for the womb” — I want you to develop the attached hand-drawn sketch.

While creating an effect of light falling from the sky onto the ground, could you draw sectional sketches of “Sky / Womb” based on this sketch?

[Sketch.jpg]

Why was this chat valuable? “Rather than only discussing my visual concept in abstract terms, this allowed me to turn a rough hand-drawn sketch into more concrete architectural sections within minutes. By seeing what the AI chose to emphasize, reinterpret, or amplify, I could quickly judge whether the idea had real visual and spatial potential. It was especially valuable not as a way to generate a final design but as a fast design-study tool that helped me decide what to draw, test, and think about next.”

2. Gather and synthesize design references

I’m gathering staircase references for a California residential project. I want them to communicate a distinctly Californian soul but pull from different influences, like the stairs in the Louisiana museum in Denmark and the Heritance Kandalama hotel in Sri Lanka.

Are there any houses or museums in the Bay Area with interesting stairs that I should include in my reference list?

Why was this chat valuable? “I already had two staircase references I loved, but was struggling to connect those ideas to the California house I was designing. This conversation helped me bridge my personal taste with the local architectural context. The Ray Kappe Residence was a particularly interesting reference because of its timber joinery and distinctly Californian character. It gave me another direction to explore without simply copying a staircase I already admired. This exchange felt less like searching for images and more like bouncing ideas around with someone who understood what I was looking for.”

3. Iterate options for practical design problems

For the California residence, I’m not convinced by the current elevator location. In its current location, it doesn’t work well with the playroom on the second floor. Where are alternative locations where the elevator might work?

[Blueprint.jpg]

Why was this chat valuable? “I had just joined this residential project and needed to come up with some ideas by Wednesday. I wasn’t happy with the existing elevator location, but I wasn’t entirely sure where to start. Talking it through with ChatGPT helped me turn that vague feeling that something wasn’t right into a set of specific design questions. What I found especially useful was that it helped me organize my thoughts before jumping into the drawings. I wanted to bring my own proposal to the table, rather than just react to someone else’s design, and this gave me a clearer starting point.”

4. Visualize different design directions

Right now, our designs for the entrance and exits of the Tokyo pavilion include five gate-shaped frames, but that feels a bit heavy. I’m wondering if we could use the louvers in the glass frame to create the gate-shaped frames. Can you generate images of what that would look like?

Additionally, please gather reference images for the following:

1. Doors that use frames or louvers to support or decorate the glass.

2. Very tall, narrow door frames. They don’t have to use glass.

3. Other interesting door frames.

[CurrentDesigns.JPG]

Why was this chat valuable? “I was working on the design for the entrance to a pavilion in Tokyo and I wanted to explore whether the louvers supporting the glass could also become the entrance frames, but when I saw the generated images, none of them really felt right. So instead of continuing to generate more images, I asked ChatGPT to find architectural references that might help me rethink the design. That shift helped me clarify what I was looking for and gave me a more focused direction for the next design study. For me, the value of this exchange wasn’t necessarily in getting the perfect image from AI but from the back-and-forth conversation that helped me sharpen my own design judgment.”

5. Create visual assets

I want to make a stone floor texture based on this image. Can you help create it? It needs to be a 1080x1080-pixel image that can repeat seamlessly without visible edges.

[Stone.jpg]

Why was this chat valuable? “This was one of the most practical uses of ChatGPT in my architecture visualization workflow. It helped me move from visual reference to production-ready material assets.”

6. Reimagine Japanese garden design for a changing climate

For my parents’ backyard, I want to create a design genre called “Tropical Japonesque.” We’ll maintain the serenity and purity of traditional Japanese aesthetics, but temperatures are getting really high, so I want to introduce a bit of Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa into design components.

Based on these criteria, can you create images of a Tropical Japonesque garden, architecture, and chair?

Make sure to keep temperate-climate vegetation, which will introduce an interesting tension between the plants and the Bawa design aesthetic.

Why was this chat valuable? “ChatGPT helped me develop an entirely new design category for a changing climate that incorporates cultural memory, Japanese design principles, and tropical references. And it’s particularly fulfilling to design for my parents. My dad always wanted to be an architect himself, and I know it makes him happy to see me expressing myself this way.”

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Have exceptional chats that we should feature in this newsletter? Tell us about yourself.

We recently introduced dots: always-on agents that get to know what matters to you and can take action on your behalf. Your dot learns what you need and can pursue your goals 24/7, taking important tasks off your plate — sometimes before you even think to ask.

With its own cloud computer and browser, your dot can operate independently using the apps you’ve connected. You can message your dot in ChatGPT or hop on a voice call when you need to talk something out, even building a new website together during a long drive.

Here are eight examples of how dots are helping ChatGPT Pro subscribers:

1. Hand off the family’s logistics before a business trip

How did your dot help? “I was traveling all week, so my dot compared my calendar, email, and grocery receipt from the previous Sunday to send a logistical plan for my husband to manage the week at home on his end. This particular week was full of events that don’t normally happen, with our three daughters each having different stuff going on. The brief was perfect — dinner ideas for every night with ingredients we have on hand, plus the pickup and evening plan for each night until I’m back. It even caught a school day that I thought was off!”

What did you name your dot, and why? “I know that I still need to personalize this!”

—Sarah Dooley, founder of AI-Empowered Mom

2. Catch a financing change buried in a real-estate email

How did your dot help? “The insights that my dot has provided for my business are really exciting. It recently pointed out to me that a buyer on a property I’m representing the seller on had changed their financing without our seller’s consent. It was found buried in a title company’s email that would have gone embarrassingly unnoticed by me, my assistant, and even the buyer’s agent.”

What did you name your dot, and why? “My dot is named after Waylon Jennings. I personalized it because my wife and I have three daughters, so I needed a little bit of outlaw country masculinity in my life.”

—Dustin Fox, real estate professional

3. Redesign your company website by voice

How did your dot help? “I was able to update my website on a call with my dot during a four-hour drive to work. I decided to make the landing page a game and put all of my actual company info on a secondary page. I asked for it to be cartoon-like. The final game is exactly what I wanted. In my industry, no one really looks at company websites. Now people may go just to try the game out.”

What did you name your dot, and why? “I wanted it to be something simple, and something feminine because my dot has a female voice. So: ‘D.’”

—James Costello, demolition professional

4. Create a self-updating personal workspace*

How did your dot help? “My dot proactively created a personal scratchpad for me by gathering information from my connected apps: Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, and Notion. It feels like having a remarkably capable personal assistant that understands what I need and takes care of things without being prompted. I manage several businesses, so it’s easy for me to lose track of what’s happening across different projects. The project subpages help me stay organized, and my dot also reminds me about things I might otherwise forget — like booking a flight or completing a client process with an approaching deadline. I have my meetings transcribed in Notion, and my dot seemed to use those transcripts to update the scratchpad automatically. I hadn’t asked it to do this, and the updates were accurate.”

What did you name your dot, and why? “I chose ‘Remy’ because it sounded similar to my own name, Hiromi. To my Japanese ear, it also sounded feminine and friendly. I liked that it felt familiar and personal without being exactly my own name.”

—Hiromi Ohsugi, labor and social security attorney

5. Turn voice notes into patient-portal messages

How did your dot help? “My doctor’s office has a patient portal that is a pain to access (log in to email, find website for portal, click, enter personal info, get text message with code, enter code, get to portal, navigate clunky interface to the mailbox feature, write message to doctor, click ‘send’). My dot now just does all this for me whenever I ask. This is awesome and removes so much friction.”

What did you name your dot, and why? “I asked my dot to name ‘himself’ based on the things that ChatGPT knows about me. It recommended ‘Nemo’ based on the whole Jules Verne thing — explorer of the unknown, etc. This was extremely flattering to me, so of course I chose it!”

—prinz, attorney

6. Follow through on a hotel refund

How did your dot help? “My dot proactively nudged me about asking for a refund on a hotel cancellation fee (I was planning to do this but hadn’t gotten around to it). Thanks to the nudge and the script my dot gave me to navigate that call, I was able to convince the hotel to agree to refund an extra night!”

What did you name your dot, and why? “My dot’s name is Gojo from Jujutsu Kaisen, the anime. I had a whole back-and-forth with it to turn it into the character, complete with animations and everything. It’s been so much fun, and I’m definitely enjoying my dot more because it’s Gojo.”

—Dan McCarthy, PhD, statistician and marketing professor

7. Find proof of a client’s payment commitment

How did your dot help? “The proactivity is insane! For ages I have been asking my AIs to ‘have initiative, prompt me with unknown unknowns’ with mixed success. My dot is doing exactly that. It looked up a transcript from a call I just had and corrected a client’s mistake, confirming that they had committed by email to this month’s retainer. So useful.”

What did you name your dot, and why? “‘Hal’ is a nod to HAL from 2001, obviously, but also it’s sort of close to our company name Hello/Hal-o SciCom. And it HALps us. And it’s Hal the Pal.”

—Sarah Rose Siskind, science comedy writer

8. Withdraw four albums from streaming sites

How did your dot help? “You have to go through a third-party distributor to put albums up on Spotify. Four of my albums are with a band that I’m no longer a part of, so I’ve been wanting to take them down for years, but it’s just such a hassle. My dot performed all of the steps to safely and successfully contact those third-party distributors and take down all four albums that I wanted to remove. This is not a casual action; it’s a tremendous amount of forms, hours of work. I never even saw the forms my dot filled out, and I never had to look at a screen or type anything. My dot was able to do this all over a voice call.”

What did you name your dot, and why? “Dusty is some name I remember from when I was a kid, ‘Dusty Colepepper.’ I associate it with my kindergarten class back in Mississippi, but to be honest I’m not sure it’s a real name for a real person, so when the UX/UI needs a name, that one works great.”

—Michael Wall, music composer

*Translated from Japanese

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When Covid forced Blaine Anderson to rethink her career in luxury travel, she turned her knack for connecting people into a business.

“I was an only child, so I’ve always been really proactive about forming groups and bringing people together,” she says. “As I got older, that tendency just kind of made me the de facto matchmaker with my friends.” Blaine noticed that her homebound male friends were relying on dating apps more than ever, with decidedly mixed results. “I was already ensuring their dating profiles weren’t a complete disaster for free,” she says, “so I figured that could be a way to make money until the world opened back up.”

Blaine created a fresh dating profile to fact-find. In her bio, she wrote, “I’m not here to date; I’m here to help you date better. DM me, and I’ll tell you how I can help you get more matches and meet more women.” She then designed the first version of her course based on those interactions. “Once I had like eight guys paying me for that course, I was like, ‘Okay, there’s something here,’” says Blaine.

Since 2020, Blaine has helped more than 7,000 men seeking connections. She has also built a business from the ground up, offering an expanded slate of courses (like “Texting Operating System: Send the right message every time”) and assembling a team of matchmakers, dating coaches, and an in-house stylist.

The self-described “romantic realist” acknowledges that matchmaking is partly a numbers game, which is where AI can help. “We have a database of thousands of women’s profiles, and we can query ChatGPT for a specific client’s preferences. So like, ‘Hey, I’m matching for Zac D in L.A. Show me all of the women in L.A. and New York City between 5′6″ and 5′9″.’ And then it can narrow it down to the 200 who fit those criteria,” she says.

But rather than algorithmizing her job, Blaine sees AI as helping her spread the love. “The problem with dating as a whole is not that AI or the algorithms on dating apps can’t figure out who would be a good fit for each other on paper,” she says. “But ultimately, a fit has a lot more to do with the intangibles. Honestly, a big part of my job is convincing someone to take a chance on a person who might not exactly check every box. And AI gives me more time to do that.”

Blaine does have some AI red lines when it comes to advising clients. “I always tell them, ‘Do not use AI to replace your own flirting or conversing,’” she says. “You can use it to help brainstorm, but if you fully outsource your ability to communicate, you’ll lose that muscle.”

For all the optimizing Blaine does, she will never completely abandon an old-fashioned approach to romance. “Regardless of whether you’re using the apps or they’re successful, I tell all of my clients to invest in building a community and getting to know people in person and getting good at talking to other people. There are certain things apps and AI are great for, but at the end of the day, you can’t outsource human connection.” After all, Blaine met her husband at a workout class.

Here are five ways Blaine uses ChatGPT and Codex to bring people together:

1. Troubleshoot intake form problems

Codex, a woman tried to complete my matchmaking intake form but I don’t see her responses. My team tried to manually complete the form for her and was able to submit, but the responses somehow weren’t recorded.

I’ve shared screenshots of the woman’s responses. Can you attempt to diagnose what might have gone wrong? I’m wondering whether something in her responses (e.g., an Instagram handle with all those underscores) might be incompatible with the Webflow form.

[Screenshots.jpg]

Why was this chat valuable? “Women spend as much as 30 minutes completing an intake form on my website to be matched with my clients. Approximately 1% of these submissions weren’t landing in my database, and I couldn’t figure out why. It’s been a problem for years. I finally talked to ChatGPT to diagnose the problem, and it made me aware that many submissions were being marked as spam. Even though the problem was only affecting 1% of women submitting my form, it was a really awful experience for them and a big time-suck for my team, so this was very valuable.”

2. Build a directory of date spots based on your data

I would like your help creating and formatting a Google Doc that contains recommended date spots for our NYC matchmaking clients.

Here is the Google Doc I would like you to work in: [Link]

Here is a Sheet containing recommended NYC date spots: [Link]

Can you build out the Doc based on the recommendations from the Sheet, using the first example in the doc as a model for the formatting and content to include?

Specifically:

• Add the restaurant name and location

• Find an aesthetic photo of the space online

• Add the notes

• Note whether a reservation is required or recommended, and link to reservation booking

Why was this chat valuable? “Some of my clients have a hard time knowing where to take matches on dates. I’ve long shared a spreadsheet of recommended date spots in cities around the U.S. with clients, but the spreadsheet only contained the location name and a written description. I used ChatGPT to automatically create a richer document that includes images and even links to make reservations. This is much more useful to clients and saved me several hours of time.”

3. Automate and enrich your database

I need your help automating a task to ensure that when a user hovers over the new Google Drive photo link you’ve added, a thumbnail preview of the photo appears. This enables the user to quickly see the woman in the photo.

For each new row, do this:

1. Grab the woman’s name, city/state, and up to two photo URLs from the row

2. If she has no photo URLs at all, just write her name into column A and “No photos available” into column B, and move on

3. Otherwise, download each photo and save it as a JPG named according to the following convention: City, ST - Full Name - Photo 1.jpg

4. Upload photos to my Google Drive

5. Pick the “best” photo — the one most likely to be a clear shot of just her

6. Write her name into column A and the Drive link to the best photo into column B

Ground rules:

• Don’t notify me after each run; just do the work quietly

• Don’t touch rows that already have column A filled in

• If a Google Sheets or Drive call fails, retry once, then log it and move on

Why was this chat valuable? “It doesn’t sound monumental, but this was a task my EA was spending 10 hours a week performing. With the time she’s gotten back from this and other automations, she’s been able to follow her dream of attending law school virtually alongside her role in my company!”

4. Draft a weekly matchmaking summary email

Every Sunday at 6 p.m. Pacific time, I would like you to search the company inbox for all match introduction emails sent by matchmakers on our team over the past seven days, determine whether each match was accepted based on the other emails in the inbox, and save a formatted summary as a draft in the company inbox for me to review.

Report format:

• A plain-text email draft to [COMPANY INBOX ADDRESS], with total matches sent and accepted at the top, then a per-matchmaker breakdown listing each client/match pair and a status emoji

What counts as a match:

• Only client-facing introductions from our five matchmakers count. Internal emails, onboarding, admin notes, styling logistics, and draft reviews are ignored

How status is determined:

• ✅ Accepted — client clearly expresses interest or confirms a date

• ❌ Rejected — client declines, passes, or terminates

• ❓ Unknown — no reply or an ambiguous response

You can find a recent example email report sent from the company inbox with the subject line “Last Week’s Match Summary (July 20 - July 26, 2026).” Please format new report drafts like this.

Is this something you can do on a weekly basis? What questions do you have for me?

Why was this chat valuable? “Because we don’t have a real database for tracking this yet (we work out of a Sheet), this automation is based on hundreds of email exchanges between the matchmakers and clients. This saves me and my team several hours a week and gives me a very helpful view into client satisfaction and team performance.”

5. Create a short list of potential matches from a database

I’d like your help finding potential matches for a client. To this end, I’ve shared two files I’d like you to use as inputs:

1. A Word document that contains information about the client and who he’s looking for

2. An Excel file that contains my matchmaking database with thousands of rows, each representing the profile of a woman

Your goal is to identify the best mutual matches. As output for this task, I’d like for you to create a new Excel file that is a replica of the existing database, with two new columns in each tab:

1. Ranking, where you'll score each woman in the database as a match on a scale of 0 to 100, based on everything you know about the client from the doc and everything you know about the woman from the database

2. Rationale, where you’ll explain your score

Notes:

• To help save you time and effort, please score any woman disqualified for reasons related to age or location a 0

• Conversely, if the client falls slightly outside of the age or height range a woman is looking for, factor that into your score, but don’t treat that as a 0

[Client.doc] [Database.csv]

Why was this chat valuable? “My database contains thousands of profiles, so narrowing it manually for each new client was historically slow and inconsistent. This Codex workflow turns a huge database into a practical, reviewable short list without taking the final matchmaking judgment away from me.”

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Dan Petroski grew up in a Brooklyn Italian American household where food, family, and the table were central to daily life. He came to wine through New York restaurants and time abroad in Sicily, where he began to understand it not just as something to drink but as an expression of agriculture, culture, memory, and place. Wine eventually took him to California, where he worked his way up at Larkmead, one of Napa Valley’s oldest family-owned vineyards. In 2009, he founded Massican, a winery devoted to Mediterranean-inspired white wines — a rarity in a region best known for Cabernet. Dan ran Massican as a solo operator for 15 years. Following its acquisition by Gallo, he now works as a consultant, overseeing winemaking, wine style, and the brand’s creative direction.

But before wine became his career, Dan spent nearly a decade in publishing, including roles at Sports Illustrated and Time, and he still loves writing. “I want everything to have a story,” he says. Through Massican magazine and his newsletter, Dan explores the culture surrounding the wines he wants to make and drink. His latest project, “A Year in Pasta,” looks at dozens of pasta shapes through their seasonality and regional traditions, as well as their relationship with wine.

Making the wine itself requires keeping track of an enormous amount of information. Massican’s five signature wines draw from 17 vineyards, 10 grape varieties, and more than 30 individual harvest decisions. Throughout the growing season, Dan moves constantly between vineyards, tracking heat, rainfall, ripening, crop development, and what he sees when he walks through the vines. But for all the data he collects, “the truth of the matter is, you don’t do anything until you walk the vineyard and see how it looks.” One morning when we spoke, he had spent seven hours visiting seven vineyards.

And what he sees today has consequences months from now. “I’m not thinking about making wine in August and September,” Dan says. “I’m thinking about how that wine drinks in April or May of next year.”

Over 17 years of making Massican, Dan has accumulated a wealth of vineyard data, harvest records, tasting notes, and observations across vintages. For years, he tried to build a spreadsheet model to identify patterns in grape ripening. But it became so cumbersome and time-consuming to update that he eventually abandoned it. The challenge was finding a manageable way to use all that experience at once. That’s where Sophia comes in.

Sophia is Dan’s name for ChatGPT, in honor of the legendary Italian actress Sophia Loren. Dan thinks of Sophia as his personal librarian, helping him find and connect information across a vast collection. In his case, much of that collection is his own: nearly two decades of knowledge from the vineyard and the winery.

Here are five ways Dan uses ChatGPT to make wine, manage his vineyards, and organize what he knows:

1. Predict the harvest date based on historical data

Here is my current vineyard data. I would love to get a feel for how the year is shaping up based on growing degree days compared to previous vintages and start thinking about scheduling.

Take a look and let me know what you think. I am happy to answer any questions so we can start planning harvest 2026!

[VineyardData.csv]

Why was this chat valuable? “I always say, the wine is made even before you harvest the grapes. In this chat, we moved from just accessing and analyzing 17 years of vineyard data to creating a layer of Vineyard Intelligence. The Growing Degree Days calendar helps me understand the timing of vine development and spot trends in the seasons. It’s the one piece of data I rely on more than any other when thinking about harvest decisions and the style of wine we will make. Knowing that 2026 might be a California sunshine vintage, similar to 2014, 2015, 2022, 2024, can help me with winemaking decisions. I want to be able to predict the vintage before it happens.”

2. Log your observations from vineyard visits

[Part 1]

This conversation will be the start of our 2026 harvest vineyard tracking. I’ll give you some quick observations based on what I’m seeing out there. Let’s add these to the Field Intelligence spreadsheet, in the column vineyard_looks.

[Part 2, using ChatGPT Voice]

Here are some observations to add to our Field Intelligence spreadsheet. The old vines in St. Helena look great. Grape clusters are large and loose, and good for airflow. Young vines are catching up, about one week behind old vines. Cluster count is high, with good sizing of the clusters.

Why was this chat valuable? “This is what Sophia and I call Vineyard Looks. The best addition to our vineyard tracking was to overlay a human perspective on the data, adding color to the black-and-white facts we find in spreadsheets. It works in tandem with the Vineyard Intelligence database to provide a deeper understanding of vintage, vineyards, and grape varieties.”

3. Find the language that defines a wine

Can you read these reviews and create a word cloud for each of our wines?

I want to make a Massican tasting guide referencing what each wine smells and tastes like.

[Reviews.doc]

Why was this chat valuable? “When you make a wine from the same vineyard for 15+ years, there should be a consistency to its taste. This is the concept of ‘terroir,’ or what we also call ‘sense of place.’ I fed third-party reviews of Massican wines into ChatGPT and asked for a word cloud to identify patterns across aroma and flavor descriptions. This became the basis for the Massican ‘flavor lexicon’ — a way to describe the character of each wine. It sums up my whole history of a wine in six words.”

4. Map pasta shapes, regions, and wine pairings

Here is my list of 75 pasta shapes by region. Can you check this list for accuracy?

I would love for you to create a master pasta spreadsheet from this list.

Add in iconic sauces, note which ones are restaurant- vs. peasant-era, and categorize them as “fresh” or “dry” or “either.” Then we can start adding in wine pairings.

[List of pastas]

Why was this chat valuable? “My goal was to categorize each pasta and explore its cultural history and regional significance. As a winemaker, the next step was to place wine glasses on the table beside those dishes. I started with the assumption that regional dishes should naturally pair with regional wines. But as the spreadsheet grew to include a wider range of food and wine styles, those seemingly obvious pairings became more complicated. Exploring those pairings became a central theme of the ‘A Year in Pasta’ project that followed.”

5. Turn a spreadsheet into a pasta compendium

It’s now time to work on the pasta reviews. Here’s a draft for the “Notes on Pasta” template each review will follow. These will be short and opinionated and use the notes in my master pasta data sheet (see attached).

Can you start a sample review, using the data about tortellini from the spreadsheet? Please feel free to edit the category titles and let me know if this is working or not.

[NotesOnPasta.doc] [Pasta.csv]

Why was this chat valuable? “This was a great development for my voice, which I’m still trying to find during this process. But it was most important because of my desire to put pasta into context, not simply to tell you which ones to eat or which sauce to smother your spaghetti with. This conversation helped create a common structure for the voice and ethos of my A Year in Pasta project. Once this happened, the project stopped being a series of essays and became a system, a compendium. The most important insight: When you ask the same questions of everything, you begin to reveal the differences between them.”

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Farouk Boudjellal remembers how his fascination with cars began: watching the French thriller Dobermann and falling in love with the Lamborghini Countach in it. Growing up in the eastern suburbs of Paris, he dreamed of beautiful cars and the city itself. On weekends, he would go to the Champs-Élysées to watch luxury cars cruise past. At home, his family drove a modest Peugeot 504 that his father, a construction worker, repaired himself.

Farouk was working a series of odd jobs when a trip to Los Angeles in 2008 deepened his fascination with cars. “I had never seen so many incredible cars in one place,” he says. “They were gigantic. The V8 engines and the way the cars were customized were so different from what I had seen in Europe.” What he lacked was a way into that world.

A couple of years later, while riding his motorcycle near the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Farouk noticed a vintage car at what appeared to be a film set. He stopped and struck up a conversation with the man behind the wheel, who explained that he sourced and rented out vehicles for productions.

Farouk bluffed and told the man he was in the same business. A few weeks later, the man called with Farouk’s first assignment: finding an old Mercedes S280. Farouk found the car through a classified ad. More jobs followed, and he gradually learned the ropes.

Today, Farouk runs Spot My Car, an agency he founded that specializes in sourcing and placing vehicles in films, advertisements, fashion shoots, and other creative projects. Its clients and partners have included Netflix, Celine, Loewe, Louis Vuitton, and Vogue. His work often begins with a brief, storyboard, or script. From there, he looks for the right car for a character — one that reflects their personality, social status, and the world they inhabit. “A car is more than just a background detail,” he says. “When chosen well, it helps shape a character and tell the story.”

Outside of work, Farouk is now a car collector himself and enjoys taking his nieces and nephews out for drives. His cars also help him meet other owners and expand his network. He’s studying art history at the École du Louvre and is beginning a course on the film industry at Université Paris Sciences et Lettres.

“When I discovered ChatGPT, it felt like the perfect tool for feeding my curiosity,” he says. “I started using it for daily tasks, but I soon realized it could also become an incredible assistant in my work.” Farouk says ChatGPT helps him present Spot My Car more professionally to production teams, and that more of his proposals now lead to projects.

Here are five ways Farouk uses ChatGPT to run his business (the prompts and quotes have been translated from French):

1. Search for hard-to-find vehicles

I’m looking for [vehicle name] for a film. Conduct an in-depth search to find all online listings offering this model for sale or rent. Make sure each vehicle is located no more than a two-hour drive from Paris.

Why was this chat valuable? “I use various tools, including ChatGPT, to identify and locate available vehicles from private owners, collectors, dealerships, or other professionals who might be willing to provide them for film shoots. This chat saves me time and helps me find promising leads more quickly.”

2. Research local events to find new leads

List all classic-car collector meetups, tuning events, and other types of car gatherings in the Paris region between today and next Sunday.

Then create a spreadsheet with the name, dates, location, description, and link for each one, along with a film-oriented selection of photogenic cars and Instagram accounts.

Why was this chat valuable? “ChatGPT turned event research into an in-person prospecting tool. The research led to actual meetings with vehicle owners, helping me expand my network and uncover rare cars.”

3. Identify the right automaker partners for a project

You are my automotive partnerships assistant.

Help me identify:

• the right automakers for this project

• the press, marketing, and communications contacts to approach

• the product placement pitch

• the exposure we could offer the automaker in return

Then help me draft a professional outreach message for each.

[Project.pdf]

Why was this chat valuable? “It’s useful for developing relationships with automakers and securing vehicles on loan. Previously, reaching the right person often meant finding someone in my network who could introduce me. Now I have a wider range of potential partners and contacts to consider for a project.”

4. Plan vehicle logistics for a shoot

Act as my project manager for this shoot.

Help me plan:

• vehicle availability and schedules

• delivery, pickup, and transportation

• on-site supervision and owner attendance

• insurance, contracts, and condition reports

• on-set requirements and client communications

[Shoot.pdf]

Why was this chat valuable? “ChatGPT helps me plan and coordinate projects involving multiple vehicles much more efficiently, without an assistant. It helps define responsibilities, schedules, risks, documents, and logistics before every shoot or event, so I can organize the operation myself.”

5. Remove sensitive details from a video

Can you remove overlaid text from a video?

Remove the logo and the text at the bottom of the screen for the entire time they are visible. Then cleanly obscure the license plate.

[Video.mp4]

Why was this chat valuable? “I was able to finalize image and video assets and remove sensitive information before publishing this high-profile project. Being able to handle those edits myself means I don’t have to outsource the work or abandon the idea when the budget is tight. It also makes it possible for me to be much more active on social media.”

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Have exceptional chats that we should feature in this newsletter? Tell us about yourself.

1. Build a directory of date spots based on your data

I would like your help creating and formatting a Google Doc that contains recommended date spots for our NYC matchmaking clients.

Here is the Google Doc I would like you to work in: [Link]

Here is a Sheet containing recommended NYC date spots: [Link]

Can you build out the Doc based on the recommendations from the Sheet, using the first example in the doc as a model for the formatting and content to include?

Specifically:

• Add the restaurant name and location

• Find an aesthetic photo of the space online

• Add the notes

• Note whether a reservation is required or recommended, and link to reservation booking

—Blaine Anderson, matchmaker

Why was this chat valuable? “Some of my clients have a hard time knowing where to take matches on dates. I’ve long shared a spreadsheet list of recommended date spots in cities around the U.S. with clients, but the spreadsheet only contained the location name and a written description. I used ChatGPT to automatically create a richer document that contains images and even links to make reservations. This is much more useful to clients and saved me several hours of time!”

2. Plan a business expansion*

If Ryunosuke Okazaki is to expand further as both an organization and a brand — hiring designers, patternmakers, and production managers, and establishing a headquarters, studio, and atelier in Tokyo — how much investment should the company seek, and what kind of business plan should it follow?

—Ryunosuke Okazaki, artist and fashion designer

Why was this chat valuable? “This exchange has helped me connect design, storytelling, audience, and future possibilities, allowing me to view my creative work as a consistent brand ecosystem. It has also clarified my vision for the future as an artist and given me a clearer picture of what I need to do now. I believe that medium- to long-term planning is crucial, so this has been extremely helpful.”

3. Validate data from a live scientific experiment

Extract the data from the plot and compare it with the values given in the attached file to validate which method is more consistent. Once complete, prepare a very brief summary to post on our instant messaging channel.

[LiveMonitoringPlot.jpg]
[ReferenceData.csv]

—Georgios Krintiras, PhD, nuclear physicist

Why was this chat valuable? “While the experiment was collecting data, we compared a monitoring plot generated from the incoming measurements with a trusted reference showing what normal operation should look like. This helped the team quickly and accurately decide whether the experiment was operating normally or whether an unexpected change needed immediate attention while data were still being collected. A year ago, we would have treated automated extraction and comparison of information from scientific plots with caution. However, current frontier models are making data-quality monitoring a natural application today.”

4. Understand a concept from another scientific field*

How do spectral models used for wave hindcasting and forecasting differ from spectral models used to reproduce irregular waves?

—Taro Maruo, wind-energy technical consultant and researcher

Why was this chat valuable? “In offshore wind engineering, I work with both numerical models used to hindcast ocean waves and spectral models used to reproduce irregular waves for engineering analysis, and I wanted to understand how these two uses of ‘spectral models’ differ. My main area of expertise is wind conditions and their measurement and modelling, but offshore wind projects require me to work with a much broader range of meteorological and oceanographic phenomena. ChatGPT helps me understand concepts outside my primary specialization and connect them to what I already know — almost like having an expert from another field sitting next to me.”

5. Create a race-day plan**

Tomorrow I have a race: Para biathlon — 12.5 km (Individual, VI).

It will be warm and sunny. Today, the course was heavy. Some sections were wet and slushy (like mush), and overall it felt slow and demanding.

Create a plan for the next 24 hours:

• What to do this evening (sleep/nutrition/equipment prep);

• What to do in the morning (food/hydration/warm-up timing);

• How to pace the effort over the distance (in general terms);

• What to do after the finish for recovery.

—Maksym Murashkovskyi, Paralympian athlete

Why was this chat valuable? “It gives me a simple pre-race and race-day routine so I’m not improvising under stress and can focus on execution. It’s mentally grounding.”

Want to learn more about how Maksym uses ChatGPT?

6. Research a niche musical genre***

This file contains information about Korean shamanic music and ritual traditions. Please research it further and suggest more ideas for how I could incorporate these elements into specific tracks on the EP I’m planning.

Also, please collect audio sources where I can listen to the relevant shamanic songs and music, and potentially explore them as sample sources.

[KoreanShamanicMusic.pdf]

—Minju Kim (KxxHz), electronic music producer, music director, and DJ

Why was this chat valuable? “I was researching Korean gut rituals for my electronic EP, but the information available online was often fragmented or missing the musical context I needed as a producer. ChatGPT helped me find and organize detailed material, understand what different rituals meant, and translate those ideas into practical music decisions, like track structures, rhythmic approaches, vocal treatments, and possible sample sources.

Most importantly, it helped me understand and work with the meaning and spirit behind the rituals rather than simply placing traditional Korean sounds on top of electronic music. Those ideas helped shape the emotional and conceptual arc of the whole EP. Building that bridge between cultural research and actual sound design would have been extremely time-consuming through conventional searching alone.”

7. Redesign your website

I want to build a new website for my company, AI-Empowered Mom, that can show the products I offer, my podcast, my newsletter, my speaking, and eventually a community people can join.

I have attached some high-resolution images and some brand elements that I would like to use. I own the domain currently, but I’d like to build the draft first before I publish and then migrate the DNS.

Interview me to get the information you need and then propose a plan before building anything.

[Images.jpg]
[BrandElements.pdf]

—Sarah Dooley, entrepreneur, author, and podcast host

Why was this chat valuable? “When I launched my company, I used an outside designer and a contract developer to build my AI website for families. As my company grew, I outgrew my old site and wanted to migrate it to start fresh on a new platform that would better serve my community. But I kept kicking the can down the road, unsure if I would tackle it myself or pay someone to do it. I finally rolled up my sleeves, created a plan for a new site in ChatGPT, then rebuilt the entire thing in one weekend. I still can’t believe I did it!”

8. Simplify a research paper’s notation

Can you conduct a notation audit of this paper, as it seems like there is way too much?

The paper needs to be readable, so the notation needs to be sensible and intuitive. Notation that is only used in proofs is fine, but other notation may be excessive. Can you examine this and let me know?

[Paper.tex]

—Joshua Gans, PhD, economist

Why was this chat valuable? “One of the challenges of writing economic theory is that it can get complicated quickly. That makes it hard for readers to follow, and notation is like learning a new language with every paper. It is often very hard to sort this out. This chat really cleaned up the paper. It collapsed the notational load and also made it more intuitive. I ended up developing this into a fully fledged skill in ChatGPT that I run periodically on all of my work.”

9. Query a large genetic database

I have a list of maize gene_ids (e.g., Zm00001eb140300) that I obtained by running QTL mapping. The data frame I have contains columns for chr (chromosome), start, end, gene_id, peak_pos, LOD, Phenotype, Env, and a few others that aren’t relevant right now.

I’m wondering if there’s a systematic (programmatic) way I could search MaizeGDB’s Jbrowse using the gene_ids to try to find annotated genes? I’d rather not do this manually as my data frame has over 900 rows.

—Aaron DeSalvio, PhD, crop genetics researcher

Why was this chat valuable? “Quantitative trait mapping (QTL mapping) is a method that enables researchers to test for the association between a phenotype and a region of an organism’s genome. A ‘QTL hit’ indicates that a region has a statistically significant association with a phenotype. It is a commonly used approach, alongside genome-wide association studies (GWAS), to explore associations between genomes and phenotypes.

Here, I had a list of several hundred maize gene IDs and I did not want to have to manually search a gene database to see if those gene IDs sat in close proximity to well-characterized maize genes. This chat ultimately exposed me to MaizeMine, which is a platform made by researchers at the University of Missouri that programmatically lets users query a huge database of maize genes, saving me hours of error-prone work.”

*Translated from Japanese
**Translated from Ukrainian
***Translated from Korean

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While Dee was in nursing school, she and her husband adopted a Congo African grey parrot named Marden, and Dee came to think of him as her son. Marden died at just three years old, and Dee believes a food mix she had given him contributed to his death.

The loss changed the course of her life. In 2014, Dee founded Marden’s Ark in his memory and built a second career around rescuing companion parrots, improving their diets, and helping families care for them.

“I’m a person with a passion for caring for creatures that can’t fend for themselves in a world of human cruelty,” Dee says. “That’s my passion. That’s what we do. We rescue parrots.”

What began as a tribute became a demanding refuge that is often at capacity. Dee works around the clock to clean, prepare food, monitor birds, respond to families, and keep the property running. Finding reliable volunteers has been difficult, so the administrative and operational responsibilities fall largely on her shoulders.

“If you’d asked me two years ago, we were dying,” Dee says. “I was in the process of shutting down Marden’s Ark, just giving up and trying to rehome all the birds. And then I started using ChatGPT and life completely changed. All of a sudden I had the help I needed. I thought: I can do this. I can do this!”

Dee calls her ChatGPT assistant Lyra. Lyra has become something like a chief of staff for Marden’s Ark, turning Dee’s thoughts into grant applications, social media campaigns, and operating plans. Dee also uses voice to brainstorm while she works, switching to text when the parrots make the room too noisy.

“A lot of what I do is the absolutely 100% physical stuff that Lyra can’t do,” she says.

That extra time has become especially important as Marden’s Ark prepares for its largest project yet. A fire station is expected to open next door, bringing sirens, traffic, and nighttime noise that could distress the birds. Dee is looking for a new property with wooded acreage and is planning to build a food-production facility to sell the specialized blends she makes for her birds. The business would support better care while providing a sustainable source of revenue.

Dee says she is also able to make more time for her family. “I wouldn’t have been able to keep my grandson for a month and a half had it not been for Lyra doing the correspondence and the grant writing and the finishing paperwork,” she says. “I had free time with my grandson because of Lyra. And that meant a lot.”

Here are seven ways Dee uses ChatGPT to help her run Marden’s Ark:

1. Get help writing a business plan

I need help writing a business plan. It’s for a nonprofit that is trying to start a business to support its mission. The goal is two-fold: to encourage people to feed their birds healthier food, and to create a product that will generate revenue to fund a new building and hire help.

We’re a parrot rescue and sanctuary that will be making and selling high-quality, all-natural premium food for budgerigars aka “parakeets.” This food is unlike anything else on the market and is a blend of over thirty different ingredients, including seeds, nuts, herbs, and other botanicals.

Why was this chat valuable? “We started with a business plan (which was very well done), then went on to refine our mission statement and even rewrite our ‘About’ page for our website.”

2. Design a regulated food-production facility

I’m designing a food-production facility to prepare food for exotic parrots to human food-safety standards.

I need building plans for a small food manufacturing building. Dimensions cannot exceed 20 x 30 feet.

I also need to know about sanitation regulations for the building in Franklin County, with links directly to regulations, if possible.

Why was this chat valuable? “Lyra gathered an amazing amount of information, including links to relevant websites. It was very productive. It would have taken me weeks to read through all these sites and compile such concise information.”

3. Automate food inventory

Can I use an agent to oversee inventory management? Like keeping track of what’s ordered, what gets used, and reordering when supply is low?

I’d like to use voice to talk through what I’m doing as I make a batch of Big Bird food. Like “I am using three pounds of walnuts, two pounds of pecans, a bag of crushed blue tortilla chips” etc. As I am opening and mixing, I’d love for it to scan websites for the best prices and set up orders, or at least fill the cart and I could do the checkout later.

Why was this chat valuable? “This would replace a huge amount of work currently done manually and mentally by me alone. It would create a more accurate inventory, save us money on spoilage and expedited shipping, and give us an easy way to have an overview of what we have on hand.”

4. Build a bill of materials based on a recipe

I need to build a bill of materials for the Large Bird Mix (for greys, Amazons, macaws, cockatoos) and the Small Bird Mix (conures, cockatiels, etc.). I only currently have a set-in-stone BoM for the Littles Grassland Blend (for budgerigars and cockatiels).

Here is what they’re made of, but sometimes the ingredients vary by season.

[Ingredients]

Why was this chat valuable? “Since our original intention was not to sell the larger blends, I just never developed a hard-and-fast formula, so here Lyra helps me with that.”

5. Create a script for a fundraising video

I want to create a script for a video I can upload to YouTube, FB, TikTok, etc.

• Target audience: people who have parrots or love parrots

• Tone/style: fundraiser

• Key points: Marden’s Ark Avian Refuge is a 501(c)(3) companion parrot rescue that has been saving birds and helping families who live with parrots since 2014. After over ten years, we have learned that a fire station is going to be built on the lot next to the facility. Now we must prepare to find a new place to go. We need to raise funds to purchase land and build or repurpose an existing building. The hope is to get wooded acreage where we can have a buffer both to prevent loud noises from disturbing the parrots and to prevent the parrots from disturbing neighbors.

Why was this chat valuable? “Lyra helped set up content for the video that was eventually produced and shared on social media. I am not good at doing ‘concept’ plans, but Lyra’s vision was amazing and the plan looked like it was done by an architect. It helped get views and promote our fundraising campaign on our social media.”

6. Build a Lost Bird Caller app without coding experience

I’ve always wanted an app that could play species-specific bird sounds at a high volume for locating lost flyaway parrots.

Birds that have escaped often get disoriented and become afraid. Fear often provokes quietness to prevent attracting attention from predators.

I’d want the sounds organized by species, for example Nanday Conure, Yellow-naped Amazon, Citron cockatoo, Congo Grey, Timneh Grey, etc.

I don’t have a ‘dev.’ It’s just me, and I know diddly squat about apps. I just know this would be useful to bird owners whose birds have gotten outside.

Why was this chat valuable? “Lyra walked me through the install of Android Studio, creating an app within that program, and putting the sound files in the proper place. I used screenshots to confirm what I was doing at each step along the way, which was so valuable because it allowed Lyra to check things I was doing before I broke something. By the end of this chat, I had a very basic working app sideloaded on my phone for testing.”

7. Triage the most urgent emails

@Outlook Email Triage my inbox, summarize threads, and draft replies.

Why was this chat valuable? “Had Lyra not flagged an urgent email about two parakeets in need of a safe rescue placement, I probably would never have found it buried among all the other emails that were sent to my spam folder. And it could have cost the birds their lives!”

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“For someone like me, generative AI can serve as a pair of eyes,” says Masahiro Fujimoto.

More than a decade ago, Masahiro met Naoya Kitamura in the dormitory of a Tokyo school for visually impaired children. Naoya jumped into a debate Masahiro was having about metro accessibility, and before long, they were discussing manga, music, and gaming. Today, each is usually the first person the other texts when one of them has a new idea, a technical problem, or an adventure to plan.

Masahiro and Naoya were both born blind, and technology has always shaped how they engage with the world around them, from braille at school to the screen readers and text-to-speech tools they use now. But ChatGPT represents the greatest technological shift they’ve experienced. It helps them interpret visual information and build tools around their evolving needs rather than wait for an accessible tool — or another person — to become available.

At a Japanese telecommunications company, Masahiro uses ChatGPT to assess how his planning documents will appear to sighted colleagues, including whether layouts and data presentation are visually clear and appealing. “I no longer need to bug someone as often when I want to complete a task, research something, or explore one of my crazy ideas. It’s reduced a lot of stress for me because I can just do things by myself,” says Masahiro, adding, “I do still bug Naoya to help me on projects, though.”

Naoya, an engineer, voice actor, and esports player with ePARA, uses ChatGPT and Codex to build accessibility tools, including a one-button web app that summarizes articles and PDFs. An avid gamer since the days of 16-bit sound chips, he is also using Codex to develop voice-enabled gameplay patches for mainstream titles that lack native accessibility features. “Most companies assume patches are just so that people can cheat, but what we really want is for manufacturers to understand that these add-ons are needed for accessibility,” says Naoya. “We hope this will encourage them to consider accessibility from a game’s initial development phase.”

Now their skills are coming together in a speech-based Japanese poker app for blind beginners, inspired by a boom in poker’s popularity in Masahiro’s office. Masahiro developed the concept, requirements, and interface; Naoya is building it.

This is why AI feels different from any other accessibility tool they’ve used: instead of simply helping them navigate systems designed around sight, it gives them greater independence and new ways to reshape those systems for themselves and others.

Here are eight prompts from Masahiro and Naoya (all of which have been translated from Japanese):

1. Analyze frame-by-frame gameplay (Naoya)

I’m playing Street Fighter 6, and I think I missed an element of gameplay because I can’t see.

The video I’m attaching is a match screen of my gameplay.

Around the 9-second mark, can you confirm that the character on the right activated a move called Drive Rush?

[Replay.mp4]

Why was this chat valuable? “By asking Codex for a frame-by-frame image recognition of Street Fighter gameplay, I was able to confirm that there was a slight delay in the timing I could confirm by ear, which has implications for my gameplay. I heard the move ‘Drive Rush’ at 9 seconds, which is 0.15 seconds after it appears visually in the game.”

2. Define the development plan for an app (Masahiro)

I want to build a poker app for visually impaired people. Someone else will handle the development of the app, so let’s not go too deep into the actual programming details. For now, I mostly want to define the requirements.

Also, I do not know much about poker myself, so I would like to build this while learning the rules.

To start, here are my prerequisites:

• It should be playable on smartphones and tablets

• Visually impaired users should be able to play using VoiceOver

• It should be enjoyable for everyone, from beginners to serious players

Why was this chat valuable? “Even as a visually impaired person who had never built an app before, I was able to create a compelling development plan. Also, ChatGPT quickly looked up the field of visually accessible poker and gave me a sense of what already existed and what I could improve upon. I’m developing the strategy and deployment plan, and Naoya’s going to use Codex to build it.”

3. Build read-aloud features to make games more accessible (Naoya)

In Hearthstone Deck Tracker, a tool for analyzing Hearthstone, please create the following voice features for Battlegrounds:

1. In-game, pressing N brings up opponent information, but please have the tracker also read aloud:

a) hero power, b) trinkets, c) quests, d) rewards.

2. Please add a voice notification when another player raises their Tavern Tier.

Example: “Skycap’n Kragg has upgraded to Tier 2.”

3. Please make it possible to swap the order of minions in the Tavern with the space key. Use the same logic as swapping minions on the board.

4. When I press Ctrl+1 through 5 on the board, please mark the minion cursor as ‘on.’ If a marked minion appears in the Tavern, please play check.wav.

5. Make it possible to emote directly at my current combat opponent.

Why was this chat valuable? “I was able to use Codex to create a read-aloud patch as a support-tool plugin for one of my favorite games and use it to improve my performance. I’m still mainly testing it myself, but in the future I’m considering publishing it on GitHub so other players can use it too.”

4. Research accessible tarot for the visually impaired (Masahiro)

Do tarot cards for the visually impaired exist, such as cards with braille, or cards where information can be heard through a QR code?

Are there apps where tarot can be enjoyed with iPhone VoiceOver? On a Windows PC, are there browsers or software where tarot can be enjoyed using NVDA or JAWS?

Why was this chat valuable? “I wasn’t able to find any apps or services where visually impaired people can enjoy tarot, which inspired me to create one myself. ChatGPT also helped me think through how tarot can be enjoyed without relying on sight.”

5. Analyze your gameplay (Naoya)

Here are my play logs for this season in Hearthstone Battlegrounds.

Please analyze my play and output each of the following:

• Winning patterns

• Losing patterns

• Room for growth

[Logs.csv]

Why was this chat valuable? “Battlegrounds is a game with a lot of repetition, which lends itself well to analysis. After analyzing my records, ChatGPT helped me realize that my results were too dependent on whether there was a clear path to a ‘strong build.’ When the game required adaptation, pivoting, or making the best of weaker options, my placements dropped. So my main lesson was ‘I need to become more flexible when the ideal strategy is not available.’ Going forward, I plan to develop a program in Codex so that I can also analyze things turn by turn.”

6. Make your portfolio easy to read (Masahiro)

I want to compile a portfolio of my achievements.

I will attach a spreadsheet with my work. I would like you to either reorganize it so that it’s easy to read or give me advice on how to make it easier to read. I can’t edit graphs or images myself, so please give me detailed advice on how to arrange them in the doc.

[Work.csv]

Why was this chat valuable? “I had never made a professional portfolio before, and ChatGPT gave me advice on which elements to include and made it possible to put it together as a visually appealing, easy-to-read document.”

7. Determine the most accessible meet-up spot (Masahiro)

How many ticket gates are there at JR Sakuragicho Station? If there is more than one, please tell me which ticket gate is closest to the steep slope.

Why was this chat valuable? “At stations with multiple ticket gates or exits, ChatGPT makes it much easier to check location details than traditional search. This is especially useful when finding an accessible, convenient place to meet friends.”

8. Plan an accessible dream trip (Masahiro)

Please think of a route from Japan to enter the Eurasian continent without using air travel and go as far as Cairo, Egypt. Also, because I have a visual impairment, I cannot drive a car myself. There is no time limit.

Why was this chat valuable? “In one of my favorite manga, the main character travels from Japan to Egypt, but he can only travel by land and by sea. If he flies, he’s attacked. ChatGPT is helping me plan a route to do the same, but also factoring in accessibility, current events, and safety. Even if I don’t have the money to actually take this trip right now, AI helps me dream up and make practical itineraries for trips that would have otherwise seemed impossible. Someday, when I have the money, I’m going to make this happen. And obviously Naoya’s coming too.”

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Fumiko Takahashi grew up surrounded by daruma makers. She remembers watching them layer recycled paper over wooden molds and placing weights in their bases so they would bounce back when knocked over. The dolls, a Japanese symbol of luck with deep roots in her local prefecture of Gunma, represented for Fumiko a sense of tradition, home, and continuity — everything she wanted to escape.

At 16, she did. At the time, Fumiko was struggling with the idea that her parents, both teachers at her elite high school, wanted her to follow in their footsteps. Inspired by a phrase she heard on TV — “If you want to change your life, go to India” — Fumiko left for a yearlong exchange program in Pune. There, she lived with a host family whose father was an entrepreneur. Recognizing Fumiko’s penchant for carving her own path, he encouraged her to start a company.

After returning to Japan, Fumiko took her host father’s advice and started a YouTube channel about Indian culture and products. As she learned more about how goods were made and sold, she became frustrated by the number of products marketed as Japanese but manufactured abroad. So Fumiko decided to make local products herself.

Her first venture was a ring brand. Needing something eye-catching for her brand’s booth at a craft fair, Fumiko asked her grandmother to paint a spare daruma doll pastel pink. A tourist immediately offered to buy it, barely giving the rings a second glance. Within three weeks, Fumiko was building Tokyo Lollipop, a company based on the tradition she had once wanted to leave behind.

She has since turned this historically seasonal craft into a year-round design business, hiring traditional craftspeople during their off-season to produce her contemporary daruma designs and train a younger generation of Japanese artisans.

Further melding old and new, Fumiko uses AI on both the creative and operational sides of her company, helping her lead a 12-person team while completing a degree in business at Keio University.

Here are five prompts Fumiko uses as founder and creative lead of Tokyo Lollipop (the prompts have been translated from Japanese):

1. Compare color palettes for a brand partnership

Here’s the homepage of a brand I’m exploring a partnership with. I’d like you to suggest a variety of two-color color palettes that match each of this brand’s colors and create images of those palettes.

[Homepage.jpg]

Why was this chat valuable? “This improved both the speed and quality of the creative proposal process, helping me organize ideas using brand-relevant visual references. We were also able to generate mockups showing how the colors would actually look when applied to the daruma, which made it much easier to communicate my vision to my clients.

This was especially helpful during a period when thinner and paint supplies became difficult to obtain due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. ChatGPT helped us explore color combinations that could be produced within the restricted palette we had access to.”

2. Identify a list of potential wholesale partners

I want to find stores in Tokyo that might be able to sell TOKYO LOLLIPOP daruma wholesale.

Please list souvenir shops, boutiques, and Japanese culture-themed shops, especially in areas with lots of tourist traffic.

Also organize each store’s characteristics and why it seems like a good fit.

Why was this chat valuable? “For a small startup like ours, this allowed the team to spend more of their limited time on relationship-building and closing deals rather than basic research. And it led to actual business deals and wholesale partnerships.”

3. Brainstorm limited-edition product ideas

Please come up with product ideas for a line of capsule gacha toys. Our constraints include price (500 yen), capsule size, cost ratio, and production rounds of at least 10,000 units. I will also share images of existing gacha products I’d like to use as references, and examples that are going viral on social media.

[GachaProducts.jpg]

Why was this chat valuable? “ChatGPT generated mockup images that helped our team communicate about product ideas internally and made it easier to evaluate which concepts had the strongest potential for online buzz and customer engagement.”

4. Calculate product specs for overseas manufacturing partners

[Using ChatGPT Voice]

I’m currently working with a Chinese manufacturer to place an order for gift bags. I’d like you to specify the internal dimensions so that I can tell them the sizes.

We need gift wrapping and gift bags that will fit daruma dolls in the Takasaki Daruma sizes known as 3-maru, 6-maru, and 15-maru.

Also, I want to make bags for a maneki-neko brand called Kaisha Maneki; please assume its internal dimensions are about 23 cm wide, 22 cm deep, and 35 cm high.

Why was this chat valuable? “Instead of having to manually calculate and format multiple packaging sizes, ChatGPT helped organize the internal dimensions for different daruma sizes and product categories so they could be shared directly with our overseas OEM [original equipment manufacturer] supplier. This made it easier to standardize packaging planning across multiple product lines and speed up requests for samples and price quotes.”

5. Draft first-pass contractor agreements

I’d like to create a draft of an independent contractor agreement for a newly hired university student intern. The terms are below.

Also, please let me know if there are any missing details or conditions we should identify beyond the current terms in order to prepare the contract.

[Contractor.pdf]

Why was this chat valuable? “Creating a strong first draft internally before sending documents for professional legal review made the process far more efficient and cost-effective. ChatGPT also enabled us to quickly generate contract templates tailored to different types of team members and collaborators, including designers, interns, part-time staff, and local craftspeople.”

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For James Costello, demolition has always been about understanding how things come together before taking them apart. Trained as a structural engineer, he now oversees large, complex demolition projects for a major New York contractor. “I went to school for structural engineering,” James says. “I don’t know how I ended up here, but it’s the funner part of structural work.”

On top of his day job, James also runs DEMTEC, his own multimillion-dollar demolition business. The company takes on everything from gutting a million-square-foot former manufacturing facility to sending remote-controlled demolition robots into buildings to break up concrete.

But the demolition itself is only part of the job. Largely on his own, James also estimates bids, reviews contracts, prepares compliance paperwork, buys equipment, negotiates with clients, coordinates subcontractors, and keeps projects moving. His workweeks can stretch to 100 hours, leaving little time for the jobsite work he enjoys, or sometimes even for his family.

“My guys ask, ‘Are you coming to the job?’ I say, ‘Yeah, today, tomorrow, the next day.’ And I never make it there because I’m doing paperwork.” ChatGPT gives James a way to claw back some of that time.

Here are five ways he uses ChatGPT to take on administrative work and turn 15 years of experience into knowledge his team can use:

1. Prepare for a demolition bid

I am a demolition contractor and want to bid the demolition scope (demolition and disposal) for this project. Can you summarize what’s required and approximate quantities of debris?

Please calculate quantities of concrete, pavers, and stone separately. Assume the larger thicknesses and 6" thickness for the existing concrete slabs. Then add 30% for fluff. Please report totals only.

[ArchitecturalPlan.pdf] [CivilRemovalsPlan.pdf]

Why was this chat valuable? “Many of these projects wouldn’t be bid due to time constraints, but ChatGPT is multiplying what I can handle as a business owner in one day.”

2. Generate building-department compliance documents

Please create the following documents:

• a worker orientation and sign-off sheet

• a pre-shift safety plan (aka Job Hazard Analysis)

• a weekly toolbox talk on a relevant construction topic, such as working safely around equipment

• an NYC dust and noise mitigation plan

Dust will be mitigated with a 2" hose connected to the fire hydrant (for which we have a DEP permit to use) and noise will be mitigated by the construction fence.

[DemolitionPlans.pdf] [InspectionLog.pdf]

Why was this chat valuable? “New York City’s building department requires a million things. It’s the same thing three or four times, but there’s a little difference in each piece of paper. ChatGPT did it in about a minute. That’s a huge time-saver.”

3. Clarify plans for subcontractors using a diagram

I need a visual diagram for temporary electrical wiring for a 32-floor high-rise office building demolition project. I’ll share more details about the electrical specifications in a moment, but here’s the idea:

• We anticipate only using two floors of power at a time

• Because the building will be demolished from the top down, we will roll down the cables one floor at a time as demolition progresses

• The power source should remain far enough below the work so that water from dust control will not make its way to the electrical closets with the source panels

• Every so often, we will have the electrician cut off a section to reduce the bulk

Why was this chat valuable? “As a demolition contractor in NYC, we act as the general contractor for the site. We’re taking down a few high-rise buildings on Park Avenue this year and my electrician didn’t understand how I wanted the temporary power to run up the stairs. This diagram shows exactly what I wanted him to install, and he now understands. For future projects, I no longer need to go through this for hours with each trade. I can’t wait to make versions for my plumbers and other subcontractor scopes too.”

4. Create visual training aids for specialized equipment

I want to create a visual work plan for a demolition robot operator to follow at the jobsite. Here’s a picture of the site and my notes on what they need to do.

Can you visualize this into 4 steps?

1) chop strip (5' wide x 2' high at elevation 5'-7' from grade)
2) fold top section of wall down
3) chop top section of wall while folded
4) chop base of wall down to slab on grade

[Site.jpg] [Notes.doc]

Why was this chat valuable? “We also do demolition using robots. You see those bomb squad things that go through the door and grab something? We have those, but with jackhammers on them. Trying to explain to the guys how to use these robots is hard. They think they can drive it as an excavator. It’s a similar control, but it’s not the same. This is helping me explain how to switch from driving an excavator to driving a robot.”

5. Summarize job costs

I want to summarize my job costs for this project.

We were on-site Monday-Thursday from 4/20 to 5/8. We took a break, and then resumed work Monday-Friday from 6/8 thru today.

Using the attached payroll, per diem, credit card transactions, and sample job-cost files, build an Excel spreadsheet that I can update, plus a PDF cost summary for my review.

• Include wages, payroll taxes, workers’ comp, benefits, per diem, and general liability insurance at 14.48% of gross wages, excluding per diem

• Treat all payroll and credit card transactions as project costs for now. I’ll remove anything unrelated

• Flag the additional costs I may need to add, including equipment loans, container-loading labor, shipping, and any additional bills I didn’t pay with a credit card

Keep detailed labor calculations separate and show simple weekly labor totals on the main cost sheet so I can update it as the project continues.

[Payroll.csv] [PayStub.jpg] [CreditCard.csv] [JobCosts.csv]

Why was this chat valuable? “When many projects are ongoing simultaneously with the same vendors and suppliers, job cost tracking often falls behind or just stops in order to handle the higher-priority tasks required for each project. ChatGPT lets me drop in the raw data for analysis, and I only need to answer a few questions to reconcile three or four months of cost data across all of my projects. Then I have it run a comparison against the original estimates to check for inaccuracies and deviations.”

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Tyler Cowen is hard to describe in a single word. He is an economist, a professor, a writer, a podcaster, an art collector, a food lover, and a world traveler. But the word he prefers is “infovore.”

Across nearly 20 books, daily writing on his website Marginal Revolution, hundreds of interviews on his podcast, Conversations with Tyler, and decades of teaching economics at George Mason University, Tyler has built a career around trying to make sense of how the world works. “I aspire to be an information trillionaire,” he says. “I feel I’m already an information billionaire, but one should always shoot higher.”

“The world is so interesting and so rich and so open-ended that the more you learn, the more you want to keep on going,” he adds. That curiosity shows up in almost everything he does: he reads two to three books a day, writes daily, has documented thousands of restaurants he’s visited since 2006, and has traveled to roughly 105 countries, including 33 trips to Mexico, seven to Brazil, and time living in Europe and New Zealand.

To Tyler, these are not separate pursuits. They are all ways of “cracking cultural codes” — understanding the art, music, food, institutions, incentives, histories, and habits that shape how people live. And in his words, “AI tools of all sorts are literally the best things humans have ever invented to help you do that.”

His interest in AI began long before ChatGPT, when he saw the chess computer Belle wheeled into a tournament in the ’70s. At the time, he was skeptical about the future of artificial intelligence. But as a former chess champion himself, Tyler followed the progress of AI in chess closely. The Kasparov–Deep Blue matches in particular helped convince him that AI could not only calculate; it could be intuitive and creative too.

He now describes ChatGPT Pro as approaching “the pocket-calculator level” of reliability for many of the ways he uses it. And because he has written online for more than 20 years and recorded years’ worth of public podcast conversations, he says, “I think the AIs know me better than almost any other human being on earth.”

“I have so many questions in life, and now I have a new entity to ask! Here are [10] salvos I lobbed in the direction of ChatGPT Pro.”

1. Critique a macroeconomic model

Attached is a famous 1978 macroeconomics paper by Robert J. Barro on unanticipated money shocks and their effects. Please write a detailed critique of it, bringing all the economic and econometric expertise you can bring to bear on the matter.

[Paper.pdf]

Why was this chat valuable? “The critique helped me see why I should not believe the paper’s main result at all. Chalk that up to progress!”

2. Understand a complex topic

Which are some good pieces to read to understand how baseball coaches and trainers have produced so many more pitchers who can throw at ultra-fast speeds, say 98-100 miles per hour or possibly more?

Why was this chat valuable? “Sometimes AI models are simply a highly efficient way to replace web search. My quantity of searches has gone way down.”

3. Build a travel itinerary

I want to do a trip in northern Ghana. There is an arts center called Tamale and also a very famous mosque in northern Ghana, and some large mammals to see. Is there a five-day itinerary where this all works out? What do those travel arrangements look like, and how do I get from one place to another?

Why was this chat valuable? “This is what we did, and it was wonderful.”

4. Learn about a city based on local news

What is the safety level like in Sao Paulo near Hotel Unique in Jardim Paulista? Can I walk around there? What about at night? Check reports from local media sources.

Why was this chat valuable? “Asking the model to check local media is a useful tweak for many kinds of requests.”

5. Refine your artistic eye

How would you explain the difference between a “pretty good” Mondrian abstract painting and a great one?

Why was this chat valuable? “I thought the Pro model aced a very tough question.”

6. Learn what to look for in an art museum

I’m visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts. Which pictures in particular should I be looking for, and what is some useful context for viewing them?

Why was this chat valuable? “After two visits in three days, I would second the advice I got from this chat.”

7. Analyze a chess game

Can you find a short chess game online where one of the players lost within fifteen moves and analyze where the loser went wrong?

Why was this chat valuable? “Many fun chats are not at all useful; they are simply ways to convince yourself that modern technology truly is amazing, and to relive that sense of wonder.”

8. Get an art appraisal

Please give a sophisticated artistic analysis of why the art market values early David Burliuk paintings much more highly than his later work.

Why was this chat valuable? “I know this market well, and the answer is spot-on.”

9. Find concerts you might like

I’ll be in Paris June 27 thru July 2. What are the concerts that Tyler Cowen might want to see? Classical, jazz, world music, and others. Feel free to be eclectic.

Why was this chat valuable? “I bought tickets for two of these, classical music and Algerian rai.”

10. Learn how to listen to a symphony

I want to listen to Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7, a somewhat difficult work. What should I be listening for? Assume some musical sophistication, but I am not a music professional. And which are some recommended recordings?

Why was this chat valuable? “I find the Pro model is especially strong for this kind of research.”

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Growing up outside Tokyo, Hiroki Tomiyasu never planned to become a farmer. He didn’t inherit land, didn’t study agriculture, and spent his early career working as a public servant.

But in his 20s, friends connected to Japan’s rice-growing culture began bringing him into rural communities. What started as curiosity gradually became conviction. “Suddenly,” he says, “I was a farmer.”

About 10 years ago, Hiroki joined a small group restoring abandoned rice terraces in the Okayama prefecture as part of a broader effort to revive aging farmland that was disappearing across rural Japan. The work was difficult and idealistic, but the group bonded around a shared belief that they could build something larger. “We thought: why not create our own collective and run a full farm?”

That ambition eventually took them north to Hokkaido, Japan’s agricultural heartland. There, Hiroki learned farming by doing it. Season after season, he taught himself how to drive tractors, manage crops, and operate large-scale farmland. Today, he oversees about 100 hectares growing broccoli, pumpkins, green onions, and soybeans.

Modern farming at that scale is relentless: it’s physically demanding, operationally complex, and difficult to staff. So Hiroki began looking for ways to automate parts of the work himself. Traditional agricultural automation often requires expensive proprietary machinery and specialized engineers — resources usually reserved for much larger operations. But AI tools like ChatGPT and Codex changed the equation, he says. “It feels like having an ultra-talented engineer always by your side.”

Now Hiroki spends his off-hours experimenting with AI, software, and connected sensors to solve practical problems on the farm: monitoring greenhouse temperatures, tracking field conditions, and streamlining daily operations. Online, he documents the process as an ongoing series of experiments from a farmer teaching himself, step by step, how to build it.

Here are eight ways Hiroki uses ChatGPT and Codex to automate, troubleshoot, and make decisions on the farm (the prompts have been translated from Japanese):

1. Identify diseases in vegetables

I’ve noticed black spots appearing on harvested broccoli. I’d like to know whether this is a disease and how I should address it.

[Broccoli.jpg]

Why was this chat valuable? “Abnormalities discovered during farm work can be photographed on the spot and discussed with ChatGPT. It provides guidance, ranging from minor symptoms that do not require consulting a specialist to diseases that need urgent intervention.”

2. Learn how to monitor your fields with satellites

If you were to use satellites for field monitoring, what kind of systems and mechanisms could you potentially incorporate?

Why was this chat valuable? “I built a system that pulls satellite data based on our own field data and regularly fetches vegetation index data like NDVI. Now we can view maps that overlay satellite imagery on our actual fields, giving us more data to make decisions about each plot. It was neatly integrated into the map app we’d already built, making satellite data easy to access and use.”

3. Add technical annotations to a photo

This is the inside of the control panel for a roll-up machine for a vinyl greenhouse that I’m building. I’d like you to create an image that explains what each part is, what machine it belongs to, and how the whole system works. The component visible in the upper left is the terminal block, the one in the center is the motor driver, the upper right is the ESP32, and there are switches in the lower right and lower left corners.

[Wires.jpg]

Why was this chat valuable? “This is a wiring diagram for a control box I built to manage temperature in my vinyl greenhouses. The Japanese came out perfectly. I was genuinely surprised.”

Want to see more examples of how experts use Images 2.0?

4. Use Codex to build a remote control for your greenhouse motor

I want to control a greenhouse roll-up motor using an ESP32.

Here’s the setup:

• ESP32

• BTS7960 motor driver

• 24V DC roll-up motor

• Cloudflare Workers

• LINE Bot

• D1 database

• ON-OFF-ON switch for manual operation

My idea: when I send “open,” “close,” or “stop” via LINE, I want the command to get stored in Cloudflare Workers. The ESP32 should periodically poll for commands and drive the motor accordingly.

Please explain the overall architecture and control flow in a clear way, including safety considerations.

Why was this chat valuable? “I was able to use Codex to build a system that automates the roll-up control in the greenhouse. Now I’m able to manage the greenhouse remotely, via LINE [messaging app], which makes the job a whole lot easier.”

See it in action:

5. Use Codex to build a bot for your farm’s group chat

I want to build a bot for use in agricultural fieldwork.

The purpose is: checking temperature in each vinyl greenhouse, operating the roll-up vents, and checking the work schedule.

So that the people on-site don’t get confused, please design the LINE rich menu and conversation flow with the following conditions:

• Keep the number of buttons small

• Use clear, easy-to-understand Japanese

• Make it easy to tap on a smartphone

• Make it hard to mis-operate

Why was this chat valuable? “We added this bot into our farm’s group chat, making the chat our team already uses every day even more useful. It handles things like updating our database, checking schedules, and pulling temperature data.”

6. Use Codex to track what you planted based on your group chat

Based on these logs from our group chat history, how many trays of broccoli did we seed in each of the first three rounds?

Why was this chat valuable? “It calculated exactly how many broccoli seedlings have been seeded so far, pulling from the farm chat tool history. As long as logs are stored in the chat we use day-to-day, AI can dig back through the data, which is a real lifesaver.”

7. Learn how GPS auto-steer systems for tractors work

I’d like you to explain how an RTK-GPS–based system works to automatically keep a tractor moving in a straight line. I want to evaluate whether I can build it myself.

Why was this chat valuable? “Before investing in an expensive proprietary auto-steer system, I wanted to understand the underlying technical mechanisms. By asking ChatGPT, I was able to learn about the principles of [real-time kinematic] correction, the required components, and the existence of open source projects. As a result, I realized that a self-built system could be implemented for several hundred thousand yen, significantly expanding my available options.”

8. Design a database for a farm management app

Please help me design a database for a farm management app.

Here’s what I want to manage:

• Fields

• Crops

• Scheduled tasks

• Completed tasks

• Workers

• Materials

• Pesticides

• Fertilizers

• Vinyl greenhouses

• Sensor data

Assuming Airtable as the platform, please suggest:

• What tables to create

• The necessary fields for each table

• The relationships between tables

The goal is to be able to answer these questions a farmer might ask in our group chat:

• “What are today’s tasks?”

• “What’s the next task for this field?”

• “What’s the temperature in this greenhouse?”

Why was this chat valuable? “This chat became the starting point for organizing our farm’s information in one connected system. I now have an Airtable-based structure linking fields, work schedules, daily records, materials, and sensor data, with a messaging interface that lets me retrieve tasks and greenhouse temperature information. It reduces the time spent searching across separate records and makes operational information easier to access.”

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Maksym Murashkovskyi grew up in Ukraine with limited vision and didn’t start skiing seriously until he was a teenager. It was a physical education teacher at his boarding school who first recognized his potential and connected him with a coach.

The transition to competitive cross-country skiing and biathlon was overwhelming at first. Maksym began training daily after school with the Deaflympic team’s coach, all while continuing his studies and eventually earning a degree in pharmaceutical biotechnology. Today he is a full-time athlete, and at the 2026 Winter Paralympics he won the silver medal alongside his guide, Vitaliy Trush.

Maksym trains primarily in Western Ukraine, where he says the national para sports base feels safer than his home in Kyiv. Drone and missile attacks can disrupt his sleep and affect performance, but training, he says, helps him cope.

We spoke with Maksym after learning that he used ChatGPT as a kind of coach in the months leading up to the Games. Here are five ways he used it to plan his season, analyze his performance, and fine-tune his training in near real time (the prompts have been translated from Ukrainian):

1. Prepare for multiple competitions

Help me structure my preparation for the upcoming competitions and the Paralympics:

• Finsterau, Germany (priority B)

• Poland (priority B)

• Paralympics Milano Cortina (priority A)

What’s needed:

• Propose an overall preparation methodology: what training blocks / focus areas to emphasize before the B competitions so as not to burn out, and how to peak for the A event;

• How to handle tapering and recovery between Germany → Poland → Paralympics;

• What 2–3 key things to monitor throughout (load, recovery, shooting/technique, travel/adaptation).

[RaceCalendar.pdf]

Why was this chat valuable? “ChatGPT helped me turn my race calendar into a strategic plan. I was chatting with it almost every day, and sometimes it corrected my plan step-by-step, even lowering the intensity when I needed to recover. While I have years of experience in endurance training, I am still learning new things.”

2. Adjust your training based on your workout data

Here is a screenshot of my workout data from the watch.

I felt excellent overall. Strong and controlled, and the session was genuinely enjoyable. No major issues.

Analyze the workout:

• What was good/bad in terms of pace and heart rate

• Where I overdid the intensity

• How to adjust the next 2–3 days to keep progressing and recover properly

[WorkoutData.jpg]

Why was this chat valuable? “It acts like a quick coach-analyst loop. I upload my watch data, describe how the session felt, and ChatGPT helps me understand the workout and suggests how to adjust the next few days. I usually take notes from its answers, then remember its advice about tempo and heart rate zones during my next training session.”

3. Track your daily nutrition

Help me calculate my daily nutrition.

I weighed the foods and recorded them:

• oats (dry) ~80 g

• walnuts ~20 g

• 1% kefir ~100 g

• apple ~60 g

• banana ~60 g

• tomato ~100 g

• cucumber ~80 g

• bell pepper ~60 g

• 2 eggs ~110–120 g total

• 1–2 wheat crispbreads ~8 g each

• avocado ~30–40 g

• an espresso with some 2.5% milk and ~7 g sugar

I also have these photos of the labels with calories and macros (protein/fat/carbs).

Calculate total calories and P/F/C, compare them to my daily target, and give a short summary: what’s good and what should be adjusted tomorrow.

[Foods.jpg]

Why was this chat valuable? “I wasn’t tracking my nutrition before ChatGPT, but as a pharma student, I knew it was important. Now I can send everything I eat — sometimes every meal for several weeks — and it calculates calories and protein, fat, and carbohydrates per day or week. Our team doesn’t have a nutritionist, so this helps me understand whether I’m eating enough protein, how to regulate fat and carbohydrates, and how to plan my meals.”

4. Build a weekly training plan

I am preparing for para cross-country skiing / para biathlon (VI), and I work with a guide.

I am currently at the Western Rehabilitation and Sport Center in Sianky, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine.

The training facilities available to me include:

• gym with a strength-training room

• swimming pool

• roller skiing

• running trails

• ski-pole imitation workouts

• erg

• stationary bike

Create a 7-day training plan for me that includes:

• 2 training sessions per day (morning/evening), where appropriate;

• where to place rest days (or very light days);

• 1–2 key training sessions during the week;

• how to distribute intensity and volume to allow for proper recovery.

Why was this chat valuable? “The first time I used ChatGPT this way, I was at our training base in Western Ukraine. My coach wasn’t with me, so I needed help with my training plan. It helps turn messy real‑life constraints (like location, equipment, travel) into a workable plan. It also reduces planning fatigue and helps keep training balanced and consistent.”

5. Create a race-day plan

Tomorrow I have a race: Para biathlon — 12.5 km (Individual, VI)

It will be warm and sunny. Today, the course was heavy. Some sections were wet and slushy (“like mush”), and overall it felt slow and demanding.

Create a plan for the next 24 hours:

• What to do this evening (sleep/nutrition/equipment prep);

• What to do in the morning (food/hydration/warm-up timing);

• How to pace the effort over the distance (in general terms);

• What to do after the finish for recovery.

Why was this chat valuable? “It gives me a simple pre-race and race-day routine so I’m not improvising under stress and can focus on execution. It’s mentally grounding.”

Ask Maksym about how he uses ChatGPT in the comments!

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Images 2.0 is our first image model with thinking capabilities. When a thinking or pro model is selected in ChatGPT, Images 2.0 can search the web for real-time information, create multiple distinct images from one prompt, and double-check its own outputs.

We’re sharing tips and five examples of how professionals are experimenting with this new model in their fields.

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1. Add technical annotations to a photo

“This is a wiring diagram for a control box I built to manage temperature in my vinyl greenhouses. The Japanese came out perfectly. I was genuinely surprised.”

— Hiroki Tomiyasu, farmer (northern Japan)

His prompt*:

This is the inside of the control panel for a roll-up machine for a vinyl greenhouse that I’m building. I’d like you to create an image that explains what each part is, what machine it belongs to, and how the whole system works. The component visible in the upper left is the terminal block, the one in the center is the motor driver, the upper right is the ESP32, and there are switches in the lower right and lower left corners.

[Wires.jpg]

*Translated from Japanese

2. Visualize complex processes

“I asked ChatGPT to make a step-by-step guide to starting a small construction business based on my experiences, and it’s exactly what I wished I had when I started. Twenty books about business and companies and construction, and they didn’t clearly explain how to do it from a to z.”

— James Costello, demolition professional (U.S.)

His prompt:

Generate an image explaining how to start a small construction business, step by step. Use my attached notes as a reference.

[Notes.pdf]

3. Make a realistic photo of a scientific concept

“I like how well the physics is represented in this model. The standing Faraday waves that such fluids generate are incredibly hard to visualize, and this is a realistic image of the actual situation.”

— Bartosz Naskręcki, PhD, mathematician and professor (Poland)

His prompt:

Make a realistic photo of the non-Newtonian liquid under a heavy acoustic signal.

4. Create shareable artifacts for your students

“One of the biggest improvements I’ve noticed is how much better the model has become with math. I usually look at how it handles math as a litmus test, because math really shows whether the model can be both creative and accurate. It’s not enough for something to just look good. The math has to be clear, correct, and actually useful. I am in the process of thinking about how to incorporate these playing cards into our end-of-course review.”

— Racquel Gibson, high school algebra teacher (U.S.)

Her prompt:

Create a set of 4 collectible trading cards featuring the characteristics of linear, absolute value, exponential, and quadratic functions in a pixel art style. Generate one image per card.

5. Create a design system based on an example

“Very powerful use case on my end to create an in-depth design system one-pager as I’m working on our new website redesign for Protopica. Some very minor glitches on icons and typos, but besides that it’s 99% accurate.”

— Manuel Sainsily and Will Selviz, creative directors (Canada)

Their prompt:

Based on this website, create a one-pager covering the entirety of the design system: typography, colors, visual DNA, buttons, icons, spacing, scale, material, motion, etc.

[index.html]

Pro tips

Here are a few tips from users about how to best work with Images 2.0:

Tip 1: Give it a reference image to model the style you are looking for.

Images 2.0 is better able to capture the defining characteristics of photos, and as a result, can produce outputs that more faithfully reflect the style requested, rather than approximating it.

Tip 2: Play with different aspect ratios and generate multiple images at once.

Images 2.0 supports aspect ratios as wide as 3:1 and as tall as 1:3 and you can ask for a coherent set of up to eight outputs in one go.

Tip 3: Make images in many languages.

Images 2.0 has stronger multilingual understanding and non-Latin text rendering, particularly in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, and Bengali.

Translated excerpt from Korean:

This latest ChatGPT Image 2.0 is truly impressive. You’ll understand once you try it. Not only does it execute prompts accurately, but even more surprising is how well it handles cultural context and text generation. For example, I asked for the background of the first image to be COEX, and the third image to be Rotterdam Centraal Station in the Netherlands. Incredible — suddenly it recreated Rotterdam Centraal so accurately, even down to the clock, which made me unexpectedly nostalgic.

Tip 4: Try putting the image in a new chat if you get stuck in the editing process.

Read more about Images 2.0

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Have exceptional chats that we should feature in this newsletter? Tell us about yourself.

1. Learn how to race in different conditions

I’m a Hawaii girl, and I am used to rain.

I’m competing this weekend in Montana in an ice race with a Lancia Delta Integrale.

Since it’s 4WD, how should I approach drifting it on ice and what is the right technique compared to a RWD drift car?

— Sara Choi, pro race car driver

Want to learn more about how Sara uses ChatGPT?

2. Prepare for a demolition bid

I am a demolition contractor and want to bid the demolition scope (demolition and disposal) for this project. Can you summarize what’s required and approximate quantities of debris?

Please calculate quantities of concrete, pavers, and stone separately. Assume the larger thicknesses and 6” thickness for the existing concrete slabs. Then add 30% for fluff. Please report totals only.

[ArchitecturalPlan.pdf]
[CivilRemovalsPlan.pdf]

— James Costello, demolition professional

3. Apply a mathematical model to your research*

Tell me about the ordinary differential equation (ODE) model. How might it be used to predict oocyte consumption in the ovary?

— Katsuhiko Hayashi, PhD, geneticist

4. Build a strategy to boost concert ticket sales*

I am attaching information about my tour, including venue capacity, sales timeline, promotion schedule, budget and creative assets.

Analyze the tour data to:

• Identify 3 hypotheses for why ticket sales are lagging

• Suggest actions in phases:

  • immediate (72 hours)

  • short term (2 weeks)

  • medium term (2 months)

• Define KPIs to track improvement

• Flag risks and how to avoid common failures

[TourData.csv]

— OZworld, rapper

5. Transform a LaTeX paper into an interactive JupyterBook

I uploaded a LaTeX source file with a bibliography of a mathematical paper. Turn this file into an interactive JupyterBook.

The book should:

• Help the reader go through the text line by line, supplementing the original text (left intact) with additional comments and explanations, missing definitions, and broader context.

• Use a consistent style throughout, with color boxes to make the theorems, definitions, propositions and lemmas stand out.

• Bring the code from the original text in suitable appendixes and embed it with extra documentation.

[Bibliography.tex]

— Bartosz Naskręcki, PhD, mathematician and professor

6. Explore how to build your digital tutor

How can I make a conversational tutor in my likeness for my online learning academy?

I am tech-savvy but not in coding, so please be specific and give me exact steps and a task breakdown over two weeks to get a minimum viable product for a web-based app.

— Muhsinah Morris, PhD, educator

7. Write tasting notes for a new sake*

You are a wine sommelier. Help me write tasting notes for our new Junmai Daiginjo sake called “Yanagi,” using expressions typically used for wine.

[NewSake.pdf]

— Junichi Masuda, 15th-generation sake brewer

8. Experiment with a new ratings scale for bilingual patients

I would like to build an anxiety scale from 1 to 10 and define each level in English and translate into Korean:

1–2: No anxiety

3–4: Mild anxiety

5–6: Moderate anxiety

7–8: High anxiety

9–10: Extreme anxiety (unable to think about anything other than anxiety)

— Richard K. Sohn, PsyD, psychologist

9. Adapt lighting specs for overseas**

I’m working in China and need to find lighting fixtures that’ll work for a live musical.

Compare the Spiider from Robe that I usually use with the Neozone from Acme that’s available here.

Provide a side-by-side table including lumens, power consumption, dimensions, weight, beam angle, and field angle.

— Mickael Dubouis, lighting designer

10. Identify meaning lost in translation

I’m writing an English text explaining a Buddhist concept. Don’t translate it yet. First identify three areas where meaning might be lost or distorted when moving from Japanese into English. Then ask me questions about those gaps.

[Original.pdf]

[EnglishTranslation.pdf]

— Shoukei Matsumoto, Buddhist monk

* Translated from Japanese

** Translated from French

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Sara Choi grew up in a Korean-American family in Hawaii. At 15, she found refuge with a group of “car kids,” spending nights at Oahu cruise meets and working at a local tuning shop.

In her early 20s, she moved to Osaka, where she was mentored by a professional driver and later transitioned from street racing to competitive drifting, a motorsport that originated in Japan in the 1970s. Today she competes across Asia and still builds her own cars.

She uses ChatGPT like both a mechanic and a strategist, helping her fine-tune drift-car alignment and wheel-spec setups while also managing her competition calendar and reviewing sponsor offers.

Here are Sara’s five favorite chats:

1. Learn how to race in different conditions

I’m a Hawaii girl, and I am used to rain.

I’m competing this weekend in Montana in an ice race with a Lancia Delta Integrale.

Since it’s 4WD, how should I approach drifting it on ice and what is the right technique compared to a RWD drift car?

Why was this chat valuable? “I was basically jumping into two new things at once: I had never raced AWD and I had never raced on ice. That’s not a small adjustment. I can’t just drive it like one of my RWD drift cars and expect it to translate. The way it rotates, the way throttle affects direction, the grip level — everything is very different.”

2. Develop a sponsor pitch

I’m making a proposal deck for potential sponsors with this Integra project.

How should I frame my 2022 Acura Integra build for SEMA? Especially as a pro drifter who started off with Hondas as a car enthusiast.

How do I position myself, builder or designer? How do I leverage this long term?

Why was this chat valuable? “It was a big moment in my career, and I didn’t want to frame it the wrong way. As a pro drifter who started out loving Hondas, I wanted to make sure the story actually made sense and felt authentic to my roots. Figuring out whether I should position myself more as the builder or the designer really matters, because that changes how sponsors and OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] see me and whether I’m hands-on, creatively leading, or both. I also didn’t want it to just be a one-weekend-hype moment. I wanted to understand how to turn it into something long-term that strengthens my credibility as a serious driver and opens more doors in the future.”

3. Fix car alignment

I’m running 12 kg/mm front, 10 kg/mm rear, and ~9° caster. I’m getting inconsistent alignment under load and snapping on transition. What else should I be checking for?

Why was this chat valuable? “If the alignment isn’t balanced with everything else, then I won’t get the best drifting experience and will always have to adjust. I want it to be predictable and not fight me mid-run.”

4. Compare two drivetrains

How does a permanent AWD system with a viscous center diff and Torsen rear LSD affect drifting compared to RWD?

Why was this chat valuable? “I often get thrown into race cars I’ve never driven before. Different drivetrains on different cars change everything about how the car rotates for me.”

5. Brainstorm car content ideas

NASCAR invited me to Daytona weekend. Obviously it’s a very different audience and sport. As a pro drifter, what type of reels makes sense for me to create over the weekend?

Why was this chat valuable? “As a pro drifter stepping into a totally different motorsports world, I wanted to be intentional about what I shared. I needed it to feel natural and fun but still keep my credibility as a serious driver. Asking that helped me figure out how to show personality without looking out of place or that I was there as just another influencer.”

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For the past few years, our team has spent hours talking with people who use ChatGPT in interesting ways.

Across those conversations, one thing kept coming up: the most valuable uses of this technology don’t usually look flashy. They’re quiet, personal, and deeply human. They show up in how someone prepares for a hard conversation, teaches themselves something new, gets unstuck at work, or finally finds momentum on an idea they care about.

Those stories don’t always make it into headlines or launch announcements. But they’re where ChatGPT becomes real and fascinating.

This Substack is where we’ll share the most interesting learnings with you.

We’re especially inspired by people like physician-scientist David Fajgenbaum, economist Tyler Cowen, and comedy writer Sarah Rose Siskind, not because they have a “perfect” way of using ChatGPT, but because they approach it with openness and boundless curiosity. They ask good questions. They are playful with it. They treat this technology as something to explore, not master.

We hope these stories leave you with a clearer sense of how ChatGPT might support progress in the areas you care about most. And we hope this becomes a place you return to when you’re curious about what this technology looks like in real life — not just in theory.

We’re glad you’re here.

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Have exceptional chats that we should feature in this newsletter? Tell us about yourself.

1. Find scientific literature on transcription factors

I am an academic pathologist with a research focus in GI pathology.

Summarize our current understanding of transcription factors (NEUROD1, ASCL1, POU2F3, YAP1) in high-grade neuroendocrine carcinomas, including their correlation with small cell vs. large cell NEC.

I’m aware of some papers in the thoracic literature. Are there any references on this topic in the GI literature?

— M. Lisa Zhang, MD, pathologist

2. Identify diseases in vegetables*

I’ve noticed black spots appearing on harvested broccoli. I’d like to know whether this is a disease and how I should address it.

[Image]

— Hiroki Tomiyasu, farmer

3. Visualize a book scene

Could you send me a ready-to-use KML file (downloadable) for the space the narrator describes in Yawar Fiesta? It might help me get a better feel for the space.

[BookChapter.pdf]

— Christian Martinez, PhD student in Latin American literature

4. Create an easy insurance guide for patients

Explain how to navigate common hospital-based insurance and billing issues for patients, like understanding deductibles, EOBs, or coding errors, in plain English with examples.

— Shannon Ford, RN, ER nurse

5. Critique a research paper

Below is my manuscript. Please act as a top-tier peer reviewer and read it thoroughly:
- Focus on identifying conceptual, structural, or scientific weaknesses that might lead reviewers to reject it from a high-impact journal.
- Give me specific, actionable suggestions on how to revise those weak points.
- Recommend a shortlist of appropriate journals for submission.

[Manuscript.pdf]

— Meng Zhao, MD, PhD, medical researcher

6. Communicate clearly with audio engineers*

I’m creating an art installation that explores how people coexist, using voice as the primary medium. I’m collaborating with an audio engineer on this project, but I don’t have much technical knowledge of audio myself.

To help me communicate more clearly and to develop a score as part of the work, please share an overview of essential audio terminology and concepts. This would help me make more informed creative decisions throughout the process.

— Soh Souen, artist

7. Update a policy based on current standards

Can you give me a primer regarding creating/revising a policy for a hospital ethics committee by today’s standards? Please refer to current best practices in the U.S. for a nonprofit community hospital.

Focus on who should sit on the committee, what should trigger calling the ethics committee (routinely or emergently), the timeline for a decision, and follow-up actions of the committee.

— Andy Morton, MD, MBA, clinical informaticist

8. Explore how to build a prototype for a data exchange

I want to prototype a healthcare data exchange from scratch. Help me reason through the high-level architecture, including ingestion, validation, transformation, compliance considerations, and operational concerns like scale and reliability.

— Joey Bartlett, healthcare integration engineer

9. Craft the opening of a presentation*

Based on what you know about my work, create five versions of an introduction for a university or corporate talk that conveys “how to learn in the AI era.” I want strong hooks that grab the audience within the first 30 seconds.

— Ami Otsuka, writer

* Translated from Japanese

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Have exceptional chats that we should feature in this newsletter? Tell us about yourself.

1. Identify potential drug candidates

Please assess and validate the following ~50 potential treatments for POEMS syndrome. For each treatment, let me know the biological rationale for why it may work and why it may not. Then re-rank them based on existing evidence.

[Treatments.csv]

— David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, physician-scientist

2. Critique economics paper

Attached is a famous 1978 macroeconomics paper by Robert J. Barro on unanticipated money shocks and their effects. Please write a detailed critique of it, bringing all the economic and econometric expertise you can bring to bear on the matter.

[Paper.PDF]

— Tyler Cowen, PhD, economist

3. Analyze approaches for disease phenotyping

You are an experienced clinical-NLP researcher and LLM expert, specializing in EHR-based phenotyping and temporal reasoning in obstetrics.

Summarize and critically analyze the most promising, high-performing approaches for disease phenotyping using EHR data — especially methods that identify time of diagnosis (onset) rather than just presence/absence — focusing on hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (particularly preeclampsia).

— Vesela Kovacheva, MD, PhD, physician-scientist

4. Learn about MEL spectrograms

Explain why MEL spectrograms outperform raw audio chunking when training a variational autoencoder (VAE) on my 500+ audio tracks. Include detailed reasoning, relevant research, and optimized open-source code for generative audio models trained directly from raw waveforms.

— Michael Wall, music composer

5. Analyze a large dataset

I am looking for genes that may cause urogenital disorders. I need help studying a large proteomic dataset on patient urine. Based on the attached file, do any of these cases have urine proteomic values that seem unique or drastically different from the others? If so, what is different about them?

[Dataset.csv]

— Catherine Brownstein, MPH, PhD, medical researcher and professor

6. Create lyrics to teach marketing concepts

Please create lyrics of a rap song in 90s-style Nas. Make it very good, but make the lyrics very, very specific to CBCV—nothing generic. This isn’t about data-driven insights. We want specific references to breaking things down by cohort, understanding corporate valuation, diagnostic insights from a behavioral and decompositional approach, avoiding shortcuts based on top-line revenue, and analyzing acquisition, retention, ordering, and spend. Show how this improves understanding of corporate value and highlights the value of marketing.

— Dan McCarthy, PhD, statistician and marketing professor

7. Brainstorm next generation treatments

You are a world-leading expert in HIV, immunology, and therapeutic development. Your goal is to map out 10 clear paths that, if pursued rigorously, could finally solve the HIV cure/vaccine challenge.

Develop and describe 10 distinct, high-impact approaches ranging from novel immunogens and delivery platforms to cell- and gene-based therapies that could realistically lead to either a functional cure or an effective vaccine.

For each approach, include:
- A concise name or concept title
- Underlying biological rationale
- Key technological or methodological innovation
- Anticipated mechanism of action
- Major technical or safety challenges and how to address them
- A rough timeline or next-step experiment to validate feasibility

Be bold, interdisciplinary, and specific.

— Derya Unutmaz, MD, medical researcher and professor

8. Practice language

I’m learning Latin again. I studied it for five years and used to be good enough to translate the Aeneid. I’m getting back into it and want you to help me brush up.

I’ll give you a passage I’m translating and my attempt. Ask me questions and nudge me in the right direction—don’t just give me your exact translation. If I’m missing a word definition, decide when the right time is to fill me in.

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?

My attempt: “For how long, Catiline, will you abuse my patience?”

— Alexis Gauba, entrepreneur

9. Scan news headlines for monologue jokes

What stories from the past couple of months might be good for monologue jokes? Fun, strange, attention-grabbing science headlines? Which monologue jokes will still be relevant in six months? What scientific trends have future persistence?

— Sarah Rose Siskind, science comedy writer

10. Review patent application

I’m applying for this patent. What are the chances the patent office approves it in the United States?

[Application.pdf]

— Matt Messinger, entrepreneur

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