HOAI: Introducing Hands-On AI - Everyone Says You Should Use AI. Nobody Says How. Video
Hands-On AI (Video)Show Notes
How many times this week has someone told you that you should be using AI — without ever telling you how? Mikah Sargent introduces Hands-On AI, a new podcast from TWiT.tv with short, focused episodes that explain what these tools actually do, then show you step by step how to put them to work. No buzzwords, no doom. Just practical help from one human to another.
Hands-On AI launches Thursday, October 1.
Host: Mikah Sargent
Download or subscribe to Hands-On AI at https://twit.tv/shows/hands-on-ai
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More from Hands-On AI (Video)
The big AI apps now have research modes that make you wait for a report full of sources. Is the wait worth it? Mikah Sargent gives ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity the same complicated question, plus ChatGPT with regular web search as a control, and compares how long they take, where they look, what they miss, and how much cleanup each report needs. Then he checks every answer against a rebate and tax-credit answer key built from official sources.
What happens when AI stops talking and starts doing? Mikah Sargent puts Meta's Muse agent to work on simple jobs, hard ones, and a couple of weird ones: a weekly news brief, a day trip, a shopping cart that stops for his approval, a web page it builds itself, and a podcast about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Along the way, he explains what makes an agent different from a chatbot, what Muse can and can't touch, and the settings to check before you hand any AI the keys.
What's actually inside an AI model? Mikah Sargent opens up the file from last week's episode and finds tokens, billions of numbers, and one surprisingly simple job: guess the next piece of text. Along the way, he shows why the same question can get a different answer every time, where all those numbers came from, and why a chatbot can sound completely sure of itself and still be wrong.
Your next chatbot doesn't need the cloud. Mikah Sargent installs a free app, downloads an AI model, turns off the Wi-Fi, and keeps right on chatting, all on an ordinary computer. Along the way, he explains how to read a model listing, including what the size and "Q4" labels mean, so you can pick a model that runs well on your own machine. Then the local model goes head-to-head with a cloud assistant to see where it holds up and where it falls short.
Hands-On AI is the show that turns AI confusion into AI confidence. In this introductory episode, Mikah Sargent lays out what the show is and isn't: short, focused episodes — most 10 to 15 minutes — that take one question, one tool, or one technique at a time. Some weeks go under the hood on what a large language model is actually doing. Some weeks get practical: the AI already in your pocket, or a model running entirely on your own computer. And some weeks are honest verdicts on the tools everyone's talking about.