Transcription
Not like that. Hello, friends. This is Max, your tech optimist. And today we will talk about knowledge bases. After watching this video, you will create your first knowledge base in Obsidian and even learn to use artificial intelligence to speed up the note-taking process. So, let's go, friends. Meet my knowledge graph. These are my notes in Obsidian, which are interconnected. And I assembled this graph in just a few months. I started this base in March 2025, and today it already has hundreds of notes and hundreds of connections. And if it seems to you that this is not for you, because you are not a content creator, not a researcher, not a scientist, and you generally don't need this knowledge base, then I want to please you, a knowledge base will be useful to everyone who learns something new every day, and you are definitely one of those who learn new information every day. Therefore, today I will teach you how to create a similar knowledge base, how to do it quickly, how to do it with the help of LLM, but so that this knowledge is still yours. So, let's go. Let's start from scratch. So, here is our Obsidian. We just downloaded it. There is another video about this. Installed it. It has default settings. And now we will create a knowledge base. But before we create even one note, we will install something. This is important. We go to settings, go to community plugins, search for the chat GPT MD plugin. Surely there are other plugins that solve the same task, but I am well acquainted with this particular plugin. So, we install it and enable it. But that's not all. This plugin will allow us to use chat GPT and other LLMs directly within our Obsidian. directly within our notes. This is very convenient. For this to work, we need to connect it to our Charge GPT account. You may have a paid account or a free one. It doesn't matter to us now, because the sequence of actions is the same in any case. We open the settings. And look, here we need an API key from Open AI. How to get it? Very simple. We go to the browser and go to the platform.com website. Here we need to log in, and we log in through the email we are registered with on Open AI. Just go to the platform, and they immediately offer to create an API key. Let's call it My Obsidian. My Obsidian key. And we get this sequence of characters, which starts with SK and ends with something. We take it all, copy it, return to Obsidian, and paste it here. And before we finish setting up Obsidian for our current needs, we will set up a couple of hotkeys. We do this in the Hot keys section. We find chat GPT MD here. And look, we have two functions that we will need today. The first function is chat. We add a hotkey. I add Alt Command C, Alt Command C and Chat GPTMD select model. We add Alt Command M. Easy to remember. Chat C model M. Close. Everything, our Obsidian is ready to work. Now let's remember what knowledge you have at all. Surely you have some notes that you made in Apple Notes or Google Notes or something like that. Surely you have notebooks with notes. In general, you have definitely accumulated some number of records in your life, but we won't look for them now. We will do what each of us can definitely do. We will remember the books we read. So, we go into our Obsidian and create the first folder for notes. It will be called Books. Well, since we are talking about books, then we will probably also have a folder for movies. And we will definitely need some folder for knowledge. This will be our initial structure, then it will change, and of course, all this will grow into something bigger. But right now, this is enough for us. And we will start with books. We right-click on Books and say New Note. And, well, I recently finished reading the book 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur Clarke. Let's make a note about it. I finished this book literally a couple of days ago. By the way, the book is great, I recommend it. And before I start writing my thoughts about this book, I just want to get some information. What could we do? We could open a browser, go to LLM, ask it to help us create a note, then copy the text from there and paste it here. But we specifically set up Obsidian so that this can be done right here. Therefore, we say: "Please help create a note about the book 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur Clarke." And now we press our hotkeys. Remember, we set Alt Command C to get a chat with chat GPT. That's what we'll do. Alt Command C. And look, we have a note that we will slightly edit and turn into our note about the book. Great. We have general information, publication year, genre, themes. This, by the way, is one of the first books where a fairly good interaction between humans and artificial intelligence is described. And everyone who is in the know, be sure to read it. Well, and yes. main characters. I remember all this. I just read it. But now, thanks to the fact that I have a note about this book, it will allow me to make this knowledge even more my own. So, great. We have the first note. We can edit it a bit if we want, but overall it's already a complete note about the book we read. And now look how your knowledge base grows. Specifically, this book reminded me of another book, another book called The Expanse. This is a series by American writer James S.A. Corey. In fact, it's two writers. James S.A. Corey is a pseudonym, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that it seems this book can be linked to another one. In this note, I add a subheading "Related Books" and write "The Expanse James S.A. Corey" there. Look, I've actually written a link here. Again, if you don't remember how to create links in Obsidian, it's not a problem. Watch the previous entry about Obsidian. There I explain in detail how Markdown and links work in this program. And now we click on this link, which leads to a non-existent page, and see what appears on the left. We have a new note called The Expanse by James S.A. Corey. Now we will need the help of chat GPT again. Hello. Please help me create a note in Obsidian about the book series called The Expanse by author James S.A. Corey. And again, we press Alt Command C. Great. As you can see, it gave us our Markdown. And here we have a note about the book again. You can, of course, add more here, because there are nine books in the series, but that's not important to us now. We have enough that there are three books. And we know that we will add the rest later. Why, by the way, didn't it write all nine? Possibly because we are limited by the free version of chat GPT. We won't delve into this now, because our task is not to create perfect notes, but to demonstrate how it works. And we again create the heading "Related Books" and indicate here. This series is clearly inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, in addition to the thoughts from chat GPT, we have a thought that is entirely ours. And now we will take these words and create a link to the previous page. Now look, for the link to be displayed beautifully, as we need it, we add a vertical bar to this construction and insert after it the text that we want to be displayed on the link. This is a small Obsidian perk. Now you know too. But here's the problem. Look, "A Space Odyssey" is in the "Books" folder, and "The Expanse" is in the folder, well, in the root directory. And in the normal world, if we were to move "The Expanse" to "Books" now, the link might break, but not in Obsidian, because Obsidian accounts for this mechanic. We can move notes as much as we want. If we move, for example, this note to "Movies," the link will work. Look, from here the link still points to the note we need. If we move it again to "Knowledge," the link will work. We can move the note between different places in our knowledge base as much as we want, and all links to it will be automatically updated. This is great. Okay, we moved it to Books. Now we have two books. They are connected. By the way, we can already look at our knowledge graph. It's small for now. Here we have two links, two pages. They are connected. Ah, and that's great. So, what's next? Now let's try to add a movie. We go to Movies and ask to create a new note. New Note. And as if, since we have the book "2001: A Space Odyssey," we need to add a note about Stanley Kubrick's film. I haven't watched it, by the way. It's only planned after the book. They say the book and the film are very different. And that means I will have to give this note a special status, that the film has not been watched. But first, everything is by the book. 2001: A Space Odyssey. And so that we don't confuse these notes, we will indicate in parentheses that it is a film. Great. And now, as usual, we will ask for help from chat. Hello. Please help me create a structured note in Obsidian about Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. So, let's see what GPT gives us. Alt Command C. And let's go. We are forming a note again, and we can again use this data to set up this note as we like. Note that we get a rather short answer. Why is this happening? Because we have the free version of chat GPT. And if we want a better answer, we will have to invest a little money in Open AI. We won't do that today, because my goal is to show you how it works, not to inspire you to pay someone. So. But I think you understand the mechanics. Now let's look at our knowledge graph. There are now three dots. And look, one of them is hanging in the void. It's not connected to anything. It's logical to connect it to the book. Therefore, we go to the book and say "New Subheading." Related Films. And add a link to "2001: A Space Odyssey" film here. Great. Now we have a connected knowledge graph. Okay. Now you know how to create notes with the help of chat GPT. And you know how to link these notes together. And you even have an initial structure. Of course, you will have your own books and your own movies and your own TV shows, but nevertheless, it's already clear what's what. We also have a knowledge catalog so that we can enter random notes about what we have learned. Let's see how this can work. But let's not just talk about some knowledge from memory, but I will show you a life hack that you can use. A long time ago, I kept notes with a pen on paper, and since then I have many notebooks like this, which contain some decent notes. And I would really like to digitize some of these notes. Well, let's try to do it. To do this, I took photos of several pages of this notebook. Let's see how chat GPT will process them. We will use the paid version, because I don't know how the free version works here. Therefore, we take the photographed pages, add them to chat GPT, and write a prompt. Hello. These are photos of my notebook with notes that I made several years ago. Please try to figure them out and convert them into text. Select everything that seems important to you and structure it as you see fit. Thank you. Let's see what happens. As you can see, it took some time, but now we have structured text about what is written in the notebook. This notebook is dedicated to mentoring, so, for example, there is something that can be a good note. For example, how to start mentoring a startup, what questions to ask, and so on. I can copy it, go to Obsidian. create a note "Mentoring" and add the data from chat GPT there. I can format it as it suggests, or as I think is right. We won't copy everything it says completely now, because there are four pages, quite a lot of things. But I hope you understood the idea again. Friends, that's all from me. Thank you for watching until the end. Write in the comments what you liked, what you didn't like, what worked, and what didn't work. I hope that if you haven't started building your knowledge bases yet, you will start after watching this video. Be sure to write your questions in the comments, and based on your comments, I will create the next materials on working with Obsidian using chat GPT.