Outsmart the AI Tsunami with the ‘T’ Thinking Tool

Last year, we experienced AI FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) as we were overwhelmed by the rapid development of AI from numerous small VC-led players.

This year:

The big firms — Microsoft, Google, Meta, and the newly well-funded entrants, OpenAI and Anthropic — are releasing innovations every week.
Chinese players like Deepseek and Manus are pushing the envelope in terms of cost and scale.
And most critically, geopolitical turmoil (by Trump & co.) is pushing all leaders to adjust their plans and allocate even more energy to AI (I will need to write more about that 😂).
Bottom line: AI Tsunami.

Here, I propose a simple method, the ‘T’ thinking pattern, which I have used for years to ride the AI wave without getting swept up in it.

The ‘T’ talks about:

The top of the ‘T’ (Horizontally) — Stay aware of the growing AI ecosystem of tools, players, people, and trends.
The leg of the ‘T’ (Vertically) — Select one tool or project to master thoroughly. Introduce a focused effort each month.

Specifically, here are some suggested concrete actions for horizontal awareness:

Follow our free MindLi AI LinkedIn Group. 5-10 items a week on the latest. We also give 1-2 lines on why each item is interesting. You can read this at the end of the day/week/month and stay aware of the news.
Follow cool people who cover the field. Let me recommend three mavens that I follow: Ethan Mollick, a Wharton academics who cover deep trends in the field. Allie K. Miller, an advocate of AI in the workplace and a fan of AI-fun. For more technical work, follow Reuven Cohen
Let LinkedIn recommend new things for you to discover — if you “like” or “share,” you teach LinkedIn what you like — they can forecast good new information for you. I have good experience with their model. From time to time, give the model more direction (in the action menu “…” select “not interesting”)

And some suggestions for vertical mastery (again, these are mine; you will need to choose yours):

My primary tool for December last year was OpenAI ChatGPT, especially Canvas — it reduced 6-hour writing tasks to just 2 hours and has continued to evolve as my go-to writing space. I continue to embrace it. (See what the canvas feature in ChatGPT is and how I use it)
Other good, focused tools I tried include Anthoric artifacts with code where I attempted to build a Game of Life, and Google Notebook, which I used to summarize a 10-page report – excellent! Next, I plan to look at Manus (playing with AI agents) and some Google Gems (building your own GPT).
Another method is to find relevant topics to focus on. Here is a good list of such AI-AGI topics.

Happy surviving the wave…