Building Your "Second Brain" with AI

The Vision: AI as a Neural Extension

Imagine if we could plug AI directly into our brain - where AI knows everything you know (and think), and vice versa! While we can't literally connect AI to our neurons yet, we can create the next best thing: a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system that serves as your "second brain" and seamlessly integrates with AI.

What is PKM?

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) can mean different things to different people, but here's our take: it's your external brain for capturing, organizing, and connecting all your thoughts, insights, and information. Popular PKM tools include:

• Obsidian: A powerful, locally-stored knowledge base with graph views and extensive plugin ecosystem
• Notion: An all-in-one workspace combining notes, databases, and collaboration features
• Other tools: Roam Research, Logseq, RemNote, and more

Why PKM matters in AI Era?

1. More Personal Context -> Better Output from AI
   • AI can provide richer ideas in writing workflow
2. Cost of ingesting & organizing information is lower
   • AI can transcribe voice note at human-level now

> Community Note: We have an #AI4PKM group in Changbal for those who pursue similar interests in AI-powered knowledge management.

Project: Building a AI-powered PKM

What's the best we can do in 2025?

What it enables for me

1. Ingestion
   • Pull contents from my reading / memo / lifelog
   • Contents formatted / enriched / summarized
2. Organization
   • Build daily/weekly index of all new contents
   • Build topical index of all ingested contents
3. Creation
   • Provide draft for social media / essays / msgs
   • Provide ad-hoc research over knowledge base

Ingestion

1. Various Contents (Readwise)
   • Webpages
   • Books / Papers
   • Youtube
2. Lifelog (Limitless.AI)
   • Conversations
   • Monologues
3. Deep Research Reports
   • Ad-hoc research
   • Proactive research (WIP)

Readwise

Store all content I read and watch and sync to PKM

Youtube Transcript Enrichment Example

%%🖋 Edit in Excalidraw%% YouTube transcripts are automatically summarized and stored in PKM

Limitless.AI

Stores and summarizes everything I hear and say 24/7 and saves it to PKM

Key Points Extraction

%%🖋 Edit in Excalidraw%% Key points are extracted and summarized from original Lifelog and accumulated in PKM

Organization

• Time-based Organization
  • e.g. What did I learn during day/week n?
• Topic-based Organization
  • e.g. What do I know about topic, say, PKM?

This organization is essential for users,\ AI의 생산성(비용+품질)에도 도움\ (similar to search engine/database indexing)

Time-based Organization

%%🖋 Edit in Excalidraw%% Knowledge and experiences are summarized and accumulated daily/weekly/monthly/yearly

Topic-based Organization

Knowledge and experiences are accumulated by topics of interest and visualized in graph format

The Dual Purpose of Organization

Why is this organization so crucial? It serves a double purpose:

1. For Users: Better information access through logical categorization and connections
2. For AI Agents: Better context understanding, enabling more accurate and relevant assistance

This dual benefit creates a virtuous cycle: the better organized your knowledge, the more effectively AI can help you work with it, and the more AI helps, the more comprehensive your knowledge system becomes.