As you may or may not know I’ve been participating in the #100DaysOfAI since January 1st, 2024. I wanted to do a recap of the challenge, for those thinking about doing it, and also as a way for me to entrench what I’ve learned a little deeper by sharing with others. So I’m kicking off with Phase One.
Let’s start with an overview of what the 100 days of AI is. I discovered this challenge on “X” (@100daysai) and it was set to commence in just a few days, on January 1st, 2024 so I decided to jump on board. If you read the post on microlearning, you might want to skip ahead to the beginning of the review after the overview.
As mentioned in the image above, each day, you’ll receive an email in your inbox with a different task that takes around 30 minutes to complete, helping you learn something new about AI, or an AI tool, app, or workflow. Committing to 100 consecutive days of “exercises” may seem daunting, but don’t worry – the challenge includes designated rest and reflection days, prep days, and inspirational days that share success stories of community members for both 100 Days Of AI and 100 Days Of No-Code
This challenge is delivered in 3 phases:
- Phase 1: Al Foundations
- Phase 2: Learn the most versatile AI use cases
- Phase 3: Apply your AI skills to real world problems
Now that we all know what the #100DaysOfAI is, let’s jump into my thoughts on the shortest phase, Phase 1: AI Foundations.
When you signup for the 100 Days of AI you get 2 emails before the 100 days start with tips and resources for your first steps of the upcoming challenge. These emails let you know what’s coming your way. The first email gives you the lay of the land, while the 2nd gives you some helpful resources to start you on your AI learning journey including an AI Primer “Intro to AI”. These early recourses included some helpful nuggets like the “AI Jargon Buster” section which linked to the great TIME article “The A to Z of Artificial Intelligence” bookmark worth for sure! 🔖
The Day 1 email serves to set you up for success with what’s coming in the following 99 days. One of the key parts of this platform is to commit to it publicly, for me; this means posting each day about the challenge on “X” (old Twitter). The challenge does not care which public platform you share on, as long as you are publicly sharing. The email does have an embedded link that makes sharing on “X” super simple, and of course, the #100DaysOfAI gets publicity and recognition from all this sharing. But personal accountability is the real benefit you gain from this in my eyes. 👀
Days 2 – 13 are where the “real” challenge begins. I’m not going to review each email, but I will give some overall stats from the phase, along with some of my personal highlights. A quick note: while many of the tools used do have paid versions, I used the free or trial versions when doing my tasks.
The Stats:
- “Exercise” Days = 10
- “Non-Exercise” Days = 3
- Non-Exercise Days = rest & reflection, prep, and inspirational days
The AI Tools Introduced:
- ChatGPT from OpenAI – Get instant answers, find creative inspiration, learn something new. The biggest thing to remember about ChatGPT or any AI is that “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information.”
- Zapier – You dream up what to automate—Zapier will handle the rest.
- Otter – Never take meeting notes again. Get transcripts, automated summaries, action items, and chat with Otter to get answers from your meetings
- AskCSV – Ask the CSV file anything.
- Glide – Glide makes it easy to build custom business software powered by your data and loved by your team—without code.
- Guidde – guidde is the generative AI platform for business that helps your team create video documentation 11x faster.
- ChatPDF – Join millions of students, researchers and professionals to instantly answer questions and understand research with AI.
The AI Frameworks Introduced:
- Basic ChatGPT Prompting – How to ask ChatGPT (and similar platforms) questions.
- PREP framework – A four-step process to help you create effective prompts for ChatGPT that generate outputs based on your specific requirements. It stands for:
- Prompt
- Role
- Explicit Instruction
- Parameters
- Mega Prompt – A technique for controlling the behavior of an AI model by writing a longer prompt that includes explicit instructions, context setting, or examples of desired outputs.
To wrap up this post, here are my 3 top takeaways from Phase 1 of the 100 Days of AI:
- Gaining a deeper insight into optimizing ChatGPT for better results. Engaging with and honing the three different frameworks and prompt strategies during this initial phase has significantly enhanced the quality of information derived from ChatGPT.
- Bonus Tip: Looking to streamline your prompts, maybe make a template for those prompts you are using lots? Head over to the free resource LLM Prompting to build a prompt or set up a prompt template.
- The ease with which you can get information from CSV files, and do so visually with the “AskCSV” tool I learned about on Day 6.
- Bonus Tip: If you are looking for random CSV data for testing that is not real, check out Mockaroo. Mockaroo lets you generate up to 1,000 rows of realistic test data in CSV, JSON, SQL, and Excel formats.
- The ChatPDF tool on Day 11 is also cool and similar to AskSCV, but for asking questions of your PDFs, just without visual output.
That’s it; we have made it to the end of my recap of Phase 1 for the 100 Days of AI. I enjoyed the first 13 days, and if you come back for the next post, see what I thought of the following 27 days of Phase 2.
Until next time, enjoy the AI journey.
All the Links: bio.link/thebimsider
Note: The images in this post, unless noted otherwise, were created using AI (Copilot & DALL-E 3)
The BIMsider 
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