Jeff Standridge (Intro):
Are you ready to change the trajectory of your business and see massive improvements? Each week we’ll share strategies and practices to generate sustained results and long lasting success in your organization. Welcome to the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey, guys, welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, and this is Jeff Amerine. Great to be back.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. Thank you guys for joining. We’ve been talking about innovation and what we’re going to talk about today is artificial intelligence, machine learning and kind of the impact of that. How about you take us away there on that, Jeff?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, so it’s interesting times, and AI and machine learning and AutoML and all that stuff, it’s not really a brand new topic, but within the past six months there’s been tremendous coverage through mass media of things like Chat GPT, Open A.I., DALL-E, and there’s a whole host of these things that are coming out there. And Open AI started out as an open source AI project with a lot of well-to-do people funding it. And Chat GPT has kind of become Microsoft’s implementation of that and they’re going to implement it in Bing. But the thing that’s really interesting about where we are now is this whole AI and machine learning, and AutoML was kind of the domain of data scientist and data analysts. For the longest time you had to be well-schooled in data, you had to be really steeped in it. Now it’s essentially B2C available to the whole world, right? So much so that the Chat GPT site will go down because there’s so much interest after it ran on 60 Minutes and CBS Sunday Morning. And so I thought it would be interesting to have a conversation about what is that going to do in the way innovators innovate, in the way certain what you call professional, white collar jobs change. What’s the impact going to be? Is it a negative? Is it a positive? Is it going to increase productivity? How is it going to drive innovation? So that’s kind of the opening for what are you seeing and what are your thoughts?
Jeff Standridge:
You know, we teach a lot of our entrepreneurs who are struggling and even innovators within larger enterprises who are struggling to get everything done to step back and do some time tracking and figuring out where they’re spending their time. And what we find over and over and over again is that the masses are spending upwards of 50% of their time doing things that are way below. They’re not operating at the top of their license. They’re doing tasks that can be handled much more effectively and much more efficiently by other means. And, you know, while some people have jumped on the Chat GPT in the Open AI bandwagon and said, Oh my gosh, it’s going to, you know, eliminate so many jobs. Well, see, I think it’s going to make them more effective. It’s going to make them more efficient. If you’re a writer, if you’re a researcher, if you’re a social media person, why would you not leverage that application, that toolset, to be able to make your job more effective and more efficient? I mean, and just the examples that we’ve used with Chat GPT or with Open AI was using, I mean, the cut off date was December 31st, 2021. So it’s not even using live data. So what happens to it when you actually plug it in to an open sourced live database of search queries and search strings and Wikipedias of the world and web pages and what have you that’s being updated literally on a second by second basis, what happens to the knowledge base upon which an AI tool like that operates and what kind of efficiencies can’t we even imagine yet.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, I mean, it’s a really good point. And I agree with you. I see this as a force multiplier that will make people more productive and, to give you a perfect case in point, and I would consider myself at this point, being a boomer, the least technically astute, probably on the whole team. But I got interested in this. And so I said, Well, all right, I wonder what you could use Chat GPT for. And so I said, All right, Chat GPT, write a blog, 500 word blog that talks about the ten best uses for Chat GPT. And about 30 seconds later in perfect grammar, nice, nice English prose, out came this blog. Now I had to edit it a little bit, but we kind of had some fun when we posted that out actually on the Startup Junkies website to have the reader go all the way through the blog, and not until the end did we disclose that, Hey, this whole thing was written by Chat GPT. And it was really good information. We did one other thing where I said, All right, Chat GPT give me a compare and contrast of the business model canvas versus the lean canvas, the pros and cons of each, 500 word block, and it blasts these things out pretty well written. I had to edit a few things here and there, but you know, 90% accurate and it saved me a ton of time that those two exercises were probably 5 minutes each and we had worthwhile educational content to push out to our audience. So I see it as a multiplier, not as a detractor or something that’s going to eliminate jobs.
Jeff Standridge:
I think we have not even scratched the surface of the. But you know, I’ve said for a long time that just the technology that exists in the marketing world, the data, the precision targeting and the technology that exist in the marketing world has far surpassed the ability of most marketing experts to actually leverage it, to actually use it. And that’s just in one industry. Well, imagine what happens when you democratize access to information, irrespective of industry, irrespective of technicality, so to speak. And you make it available to anyone for any use at any time. You know, assuming that it’s used for good. I think that’s another issue we could probably start to think about is, okay, you know, there are some dangers out there. But in, you know, my belief is that the potential benefits far outweigh the potential dangers.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with that. Another good example and this is an Open AI spin out is and this is one that could be a significant disruptor for organizations like 99 Designs or Fiverr is there’s another tool called DALL-E and it’s a play on Salvador Dali. Right. But it’s spelled with an E, you know electronic, it’s kind of like Wall-E, I guess, that merger of those two things.
But I was I wanted to do something for a proposal cover. And so I got out there and said, You know, all right, I want to have something that represents outdoor ventures that shows a sort of winding path that’s translucent, that’s in the style of X artist. And pretty soon it blasts this stuff out that’s in the style of that artist it kind of amalgamates all those possibilities and gives you four or five options that you could choose from. Now, I think that is going to make it really tough for people in, you know, 99 Designs or Fiverr or some of these sort of online $5 design sites to compete when somebody, a knucklehead like me, can get on there and do something like that and have the output be pretty cool and also freely available, I mean, it’s fair use right now. There’s not any intractable copyright or IP issues, particularly if you’re sourcing artist styles that are long since gone, right. All those issues are way past. So I think all of these things are going to be force multipliers. And I’ll throw one other thing that’s pretty interesting. Overall in the developed world, the industrialized world, the birth rate is declining. And so we’ve got fewer and fewer people, in general, that are in these professional positions. We’re going to need these sorts of tools in order to maintain productivity, because as you see now, even in a time when it looks like we might be going into recession, we still only have three and a half percent or so unemployment in the US because people are leaving the workforce. So we’ve got to have the automation, the tools that make those of us that are still working more productive. And I think this AI era is going to be a huge boon to productivity.
Jeff Standridge:
Now I agree. So in that DALL-E that you were producing, that proposal cover, did it produce it for you in a JPEG or PNG or what was the format?
Jeff Amerine:
You can download it in multiple different formats, JPEG format, you know, PNG, whatever, what kind of whatever you need. And it’s pretty slick. Now some of that is the art’s in the eyes of the beholder. So I might fool around with some of that and it could be a garbled mess, like a really bad Jackson Pollock that nobody would consider art. But some of the rest of it was really pretty slick. I mean, there’s stuff where I’d say, I would hang that on my wall. That’s cool. I’d print that out if I could. So yeah, I think it’s going to be great.
Jeff Standridge:
Why don’t we do this? Why don’t we put a link to the in the show notes to the blog post from the Startup Junkies website that you had actually written through chat and just as an example.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, that’d be great. And we can provide links to Open AI, Chat GPT, Jasper’s another real popular one that’s kind of subscription oriented. There’s a variety of good resources out there and it’s very fragmented. There are some that are becoming sort of leaders, but all of these things are pretty easy to access now. It’s not something where I’d better go get the PhD data scientist to help me with it. I think it’s really good.
Jeff Standridge:
Good stuff. All right. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Thank you for joining.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
See you next time. Feedback from listeners like you helps us create outstanding content. So if you like this episode, be sure to rate us or leave a review. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to get the latest growth and innovation strategies. Thanks for tuning in to the Innovation Junkies Podcast.