Making Headspace: Why the Hardest Job in AI Is Learning to Sit Still

Friends,

your weekly AI briefing is here - designed to help you respond to AI, not react to the noise. No curveballs. No chaos. Just clarity.

📰 This was the week that was...

This was the week the AI world went quiet - and that's fine. It's Easter. The inbox is lighter. The calendar is thinner. The news cycle slowed to a murmur. If you're reading this with a cup of tea and nowhere urgent to be, good. That's exactly where you should be.

Let's get into it.

🔥 Urgent Priorities

✅ No fires to fight this week

✅ The AI landscape hasn't changed since last Friday - it will still be there on Tuesday

✅ Time to think, not time to react

This isn't a week for panic. It's a week for a long walk and a clear head.

🎯 Strategic Insight

Tension: We talk a lot about the three hardest jobs in AI adoption: creating headroom in the diary to understand AI, making room in the P&L to fund it, and finding the courage to reinvent the business around it. But there's a job that comes before all three - and it's the one most leaders skip.

Optimistic insight: Making headspace. Not headroom. Not budget. Headspace. The quiet, unscheduled thinking time where strategy actually forms. Most leaders are so busy reacting to AI news, trialling tools, and fielding vendor pitches that they never sit still long enough to ask the only question that matters: what do we actually want AI to do for this business?

What's shifting: The leaders pulling ahead aren't the ones consuming the most AI content. They're the ones who've carved out space to think clearly about what they've already learned. The shift is from "keeping up" to "making sense".

Why this matters now: Easter gives you something the calendar rarely offers: four unscheduled days. That's not a gap. That's a gift. The leaders who use this weekend to think - not scroll, not trial, just think - will come back sharper than the ones who spent it catching up on demos.

👉 Takeaway: Before Tuesday, ask yourself three questions:

• What have I already learned about AI that I haven't yet acted on?

• Where is AI already saving us time or money that I could redirect?

• If I could only make one AI bet this year, what would it be?

Write the answers down. On paper. No chatbot required.

🤓 Geek-Out Stories

1️⃣ Google's "Pied Piper moment": AI memory compression just got serious

Google Research unveiled TurboQuant, a compression algorithm that could shrink AI's working memory by at least 6x without losing accuracy. The internet immediately nicknamed it "Pied Piper" after the fictional startup in HBO's Silicon Valley. It's still a lab breakthrough - not deployed anywhere yet - but Cloudflare's CEO called it Google's DeepSeek moment: proof that efficiency gains are becoming just as important as raw power.

Why it matters: For UK business leaders, this is another signal that the cost of running AI is heading down, fast. You don't need to understand vector quantisation. You need to understand that the models you're paying for today will cost a fraction to run tomorrow. Plan accordingly.

👉 TechCrunch has the full story

2️⃣ Anthropic accidentally revealed its most powerful model - twice

A misconfigured data store left nearly 3,000 unpublished Anthropic documents publicly accessible, including a draft blog post describing a new model called Claude Mythos (also codenamed Capybara). Anthropic confirmed the model exists, calling it a "step change" in capability - larger and more powerful than anything in its current lineup. Days later, the full source code for Claude Code was accidentally published to npm. Cybersecurity stocks dipped. Anthropic is now testing Mythos with a small group of enterprise customers focused on security applications.

Why it matters: Two things for business leaders. First, the next generation of AI models is coming and it will be meaningfully more capable, particularly in coding and cybersecurity. Second, even the companies building frontier AI make basic security errors. If Anthropic can misconfigure a data store, so can your team. Check your own house.

👉 Fortune broke the original story

3️⃣ "The blank page is not deep work" - a Chief AI Officer builds his own AI memory

Eric Porres, Chief AI Officer at Logitech, published a sharp response to recent essays by Ezra Klein and Cal Newport arguing that AI degrades our ability to think. Porres' counter: the bottleneck in knowledge work isn't generating new ideas - it's finding the ideas you already had. He built a semantic memory layer across 4,485 AI conversations on 12 platforms, searchable by meaning in under a second, for less than £20 a month. His argument is simple: the blank page isn't sacred. It's just all we had before.

Why it matters: This is what "own your AI" looks like in practice. Porres isn't waiting for a platform to solve cross-tool memory. He built it himself, on his own infrastructure, under his own control. Even if you never build a vector database, the principle matters: your AI conversations are an asset. Treat them like one.

👉 Read the full piece on Substack

🎨 Weekend Playground

This Easter, try NotebookLM - Google's free AI research tool that turns your documents into genuinely useful learning formats.

Upload something you've been meaning to properly get your head around - a strategy document, a white paper, an industry report gathering dust in your downloads folder. Then ask NotebookLM to explain it back to you in different ways: an Audio Overview (a surprisingly good AI podcast), a set of flashcards, a mind map, a quiz, or even a short video explainer. The newest formats include Debate and Critique modes, where two AI hosts argue the merits of your source material from opposing sides.

Why this matters: We all learn differently, but most of us default to reading because that's how information arrives. NotebookLM lets you discover which format actually makes things stick for you. That's useful self-knowledge - and the long weekend is the perfect time to find it.

👉 Easter mission:

• Upload one document you've been meaning to digest

• Generate an Audio Overview and listen on a walk

• Try the Debate format and see if argument sharpens your understanding

• Create flashcards on the key points and test yourself on Easter Monday

• Ask yourself: which format helped me learn fastest?

📢 Share the Optimism

If The AI Optimist helps you think more clearly, forward it to someone else navigating the shift. If it's not quite landing, hit reply and let me know - I read every message.

Stay strategic, stay generous.

Hugo & Ben