The AI-First Business Podcast

Becoming AI-Native: Ben Parr's Vision for Personal Branding, Problem Solving Across Industries, and Global Innovation

• Tina Yazdi

Share episode

Ben Parr is a tech industry veteran with a career spanning from award-winning author to influential editor at CNET and Mashable. He's also the co-founder of Octane AI and the driving force behind the AI Analyst, a decade-long voice at the intersection of tech, business, media, and society. 💼🚀📱

🎙️ Looking for daily strategies on how to integrate AI into your life and work? Then this episode is for you. Ben shares his take on where we are in the story (these tools are the worst they will ever be right now), the mindset for success (using AI vs being AI-first), and why the changes in this past year are comparable (or outpacing) the mobile revolution.

Key takeaways from our conversation with Ben:
📦 AI's Impact on E-commerce: AI plays an increasingly important role in e-commerce. For example, companies like Octane AI are already being used to enhance customer experiences through product recommendations and personalized interactions.
🧠 Embracing an AI-Native Mindset: The concept of being "AI-native" or having an "AI-first" mindset is crucial for individuals and organizations. You need to integrate AI into everyday workflows and tasks to stay competitive and adapt to the evolving technological landscape.
🌍 Global AI Competition: You cannot ignore the geopolitical aspects of AI development, such as the competition among countries and companies to maintain leadership in AI. This includes potential risks and challenges associated with global AI competition.
🚀 AI Across Industries: AI's influence extends across various industries, including social impact, governance, ethics, sustainability, finance, healthcare, education, and government.
💥 The importance of personal brand in the age of AI: Personal branding is key in this evolving AI landscape, and it can set you apart for long-term success.
📚 Stay Curious, Stay Ahead: It’s essential to invest in continuous learning and stay informed about AI trends and tools. Ben recommends daily experimentation with AI technologies to adapt to the changing AI landscape effectively.

Connect with Ben here:

Episode References:

Useful? Let us know with a ⭐️ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating

📺 Watch on Youtube

🔥 Subscribe

📲 Socials

🎙️ The AI-First Business Podcast 🤖 We take you behind the scenes with the leaders and teams writing the playbook on transitioning to an AI-First world

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this episode are personal and do not reflect the official stance of any organization. Content is for informational purposes only.

[00:00:00] Hi, Ben. Hello, Timmy. Welcome to the dark room. We are currently filming from the tech stars, LA studios. Um, so I'm really excited to introduce Ben. Um, Ben is a 360 degree tech industry veteran. He was editor at large at CNET and Mashable. He's also an award winning author and president and co founder at Octane AI.


Ben, welcome to the AI First business podcast. Hello. I'm glad to be in the dark room here. It's good to see you in person after, I think the last time I saw you was the gold rush of 1842 in San Francisco. Um, the Botox is working, as you can see quick intro on Octane AI, where you are the president and co founder, and you'd actually just launched it in 2016, which was almost a hundred years after I originally met you.[00:01:00] 


Um, can you tell us a little bit more about what is Octane AI? I have a lot of questions after it's introduced, so I think it's good to set a foundation. So as you alluded, I have been on the media side for a long time, but. My, interestingly, I've been in AI for nearly a decade now. So my co founder, Matt Schlicht, and I started OctaneAI and it was first in 2016, nearly a decade ago, chatbots, but chatbots for celebrities.


And so we worked with Lindsay Lohan and Rick Ross and Jason Derulo and Kiss and Aerosmith. And I have lots of stories about all of them. It's great for press, but horrible for making money. But we were early to chatbots, early to AI, early to these conversational interfaces. Um, but what we learned was that they don't make, celebrities don't pay.

So we use the same technology, but we moved it over to the world of e commerce. And that worked out really well. Now OctaneAI is one of the top software companies in the Shopify ecosystem in particular, over [00:02:00] 3000 e commerce brands use OctaneAI for things like building quizzes, automatically recommending products using AI.


Getting insights into things like the reviews using AI. We are one of Shopify's top partners as a result. And we've been working with all the new AI tools with like we're in the first private beta for open AI. Most importantly, Ogden AI is a profitable AI company. And I don't know how many of those you've ever heard of.


Uh, it is a very short list as I have learned didn't come here to play around and, but, you know, profit profitability is a really, really great thing in 2023. I will say on that note, I have a fun fact, maybe I don't know if it's out of date, but over 450 million dollars have been made on octane AI to date.


It's actually past half a billion officially. Now, if I recall correctly, looking at the last numbers, it's a lot of money. Can you tell us more about that? Like how, what is. What are the many ways that people are making money using Austin AI via Shopify? So the main way is an e commerce brand, someone like a [00:03:00] Kizzix or Jones Road Beauty, or it's a long, like Magic Spoon, they'll use it.


Like customers come in, they're like, I don't know which of the skincare products I should buy or which cereal I should buy, or I'm trying to figure out which supplements to get. And so our software will help them using AI for themselves manually. build an entire quiz, ask questions like kind of skin conditions that you have, what kind of, you know, treatment are you looking for?


You know, are you going to do it a day or night? And use that to recommend like the right products to their customers. And we have a set of AI tools that will actually do those recommendations automatically. You can set the manually too, if you're an e commerce brand. And then for a lot of our brands, it's the number one converting page on their website.

They'll send all of their ad traffic to it. They'll send their, like a lot of the website traffic through that page. Cause people sign up, people want to know like which skincare routine should I get? And what are the products they need for that? Or what are the like fashion styles? Fashion's resizer, if I [00:04:00] need like small, medium, large, if I need in this color, in this style.


So I mean, basically what you would have is a, an assistant in the shop to like help you out. It is, that is actually one of the ways we marketed it. We took like that in personal, in office, in store associate, and we turned them into a representative on the site. And now what we're doing is adding more interesting AI to.


Make that even, uh, more interactive and more helpful. And we have a bunch of cool things that will come out in the next year. And so we have a bunch of that. And, uh, it's been a fun year, as you can imagine this year being... I feel like you're in your life as a... Long time AI, yes. Yeah. Uh, one of the kind of things I was just personally curious about is, so you were a veteran author, um, and editor.


Sina Mashable, you published Captivology in 2017, 18? 2015. 2015. Oh, before, before we met you? Yes. Already. Okay. So, and um, you had the social analyst running for 10 years [00:05:00] and then that kind of, from my understanding, transitioned to about three years ago into the AI analyst. Is that so some context for everyone?


When I was the editor of Mashable, which is 2008 to 2012. I wrote a weekly column called The Social Analyst, which was my column where I just went deep into topics like what was happening at Facebook, or what was happening at Yahoo, or my opinion of the future media, or future privacy, or I had a very popular one.


I remember, this is how those will date me, but where I was like telling everyone that Internet Explorer 6 had to die. And of course, actually that comment helped me kill it. Thank goodness. Cause it was destroying the internet, but recently I revived it. I did it at CNET. I revived it as a newsletter and that did really well, but there's so much of my focus now in terms of writing about AI that I don't know, it just rolls off the tongue, the AI analyst, it won't ever maybe like change.


I was like the AI analyst made a lot of sense. Cause for me in the past, I think everything was around like social, like it was about [00:06:00] social media and like commentary, but I think that AI. Is a fundamental layer for everything that we are going to do in the future. And the same way we're like, you wouldn't say, uh, hi, I'm having an internet company or hi, my business, you know, uses the internet to make money, but every business does same way.

They use mobile. Every business uses mobile is that. We'll call it the third generation. Every business uses, we'll use AI in some way. It'll be in the front end. It'll be in the back end. It's already even now, like, even just like your TikTok feed is almost all AI. Your Facebook feed is almost all AI. If you have a self driving car, even just a car that has like, you know, auto braking, it's using AI to figure out what distance and things like that.


This is, AI is just like a permeating layer of everything we're doing. So I wanted to write more about it. And that's where the AI analysts came from www. benparr. com. Par with two Rs. Three years ago, when you kind of made this transition to the AI focus, um, [00:07:00] was that already what you were seeing back then?


Or is that kind of something that is very evident to you today? I mean, the AI, I mean, look, uh, there was a revolution when, uh, tragedy came out. And like, we've been using OpenAI since the first private beta in early 2020. We had already built a AI assistant called Octi off of the early APIs to help write content.


The revolution with ChatGPT was not that the technology was better because the technology had already existed. It was the user interface. It was a chat interface that everyone could go and use, that students could understand and be like, I'm going to just chat with this thing and it's going to like solve my problems.


And it basically does. It's a. It is a friend who is awake 24 seven, will never judge you. ChachyPT. I'm sorry. Machy was great, but Machy did not have a chat interface. And that's probably the thing that everyone missed. Like if you have a chat interface, it's the thing that everyone really understands. And so ChachyPT made it so that everyone had a friend that they could talk to 24 [00:08:00] seven and had access.


To the entirety of human knowledge and would never judge you and never spill your secrets. Who does not want to have that when you, like, put it that way? It doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to be better than a human, which is not that high of a bar in lots of places. Most humans don't know most things.


ChatGPT does a pretty good job. And yeah, if it gets it wrong once in a while, that's what double checking is. Same way when you would double check a friend who told you something. Or you should double check just for yourself. Going back to the concept of this permeating background noise in our daily lives, uh, the same as like the internet and the mobile, it's like you don't need to mention these platforms anymore.


They're just like woven into everyday life. Have you noticed that the conversations in relation to AI have the same texture as when there was like a mobile transition, like 10, 15 years ago? Or do you think there's something about the way that we talk about AI today? This distinctly different and isn't acknowledging that in many ways, [00:09:00] maybe it's like a parallel, like not workflow, but like cycle that we're going through that we've already been through several times with these other technologies.


Yes. No, uh, compare and contrasting time. Oh, three things. The same three things in five and 15 paragraph form. You've got 30 seconds. It'll change your intro body. I'm going to just ask you for the answer. I mean, when I talk to VCs about this, like, Uh, they, it is a lot of comparison to the early mobile days or the early internet days.

Do you make those comparisons or do they make comparisons? I make comparisons too, for sure, because... Are you framing things for them? Uh, there's a lot of belief in, among Silicon Valley. In terms of the power of AI. It's, so it's fundamentally different than say... And I'm gonna pick on crypto for a couple minutes here.


No, but that's also been a comparison point. Like is it similar to a mobile revolution or like, kind of like another blockchain mobile, crypto mobile. Not crypto mobile, not crypto. So like with crypto, oh, I hear with crypto it's all good. Yeah. [00:10:00] With crypto, the problem was one of the many problems was user interface.


Mm-Hmm. . And so having the user interface, like it's impossible for the average person or a grandma for that, uh, for that matter. Use this technology for anything useful to like figure out, tell grandma how to figure out how to like set up on a Bitcoin wallet or an Ethereum wallet or whatever kind of wallet exists today.


But to that, but like any grandmother can understand how to chat with a chat of the chat GPT, it's like super straightforward and super simple. And so the end result is like, they're just fundamentally different. Like groups are also just attract people who are into money because it is about money, which attracts the kind of person you don't necessarily, it's not always about building AI attracts developers.


And I always find like, you know, mobile attracted developers who wanted to build on top of the iPhone platform. So we're seeing a plethora of interesting, useful applications and all these applications are useful. Because they're so easy to use and for people to understand. Now you're seeing like, how do I use this [00:11:00] for legal?


How do I use this for real estate? How do I use this for my industry? There's almost no industry where it can't be helpful. If there's a place, there's an industry where there's something repetitive, or something that has a lot of data, then AI can be supremely useful. Not just generative AI, the stuff that we're talking about with chat GPT, but AI as a whole.

And guess what? Every industry has lots of data and has... Lots of repetition can be solved with AI. You say that there is a lot of belief in Silicon Valley and you're out there, even though you live in LA twice a week, at least it sounds like you're an SF. We discussed how your natural habitat is 5, 000 feet in the air.


But also kind of like that you live in LA and you have access to other communities, how widespread do you think that belief is? Do you think it's just what we're seeing is the early adopters are seeing the bigger picture and everyone else will inevitably get there as well? Um, or do you think there's a chance that there'll be kind of like two camps that are very polarized about their opinion and how they talk about AI?


Also, I mean, like I, you know, I live and work in Amsterdam and the conversation and the [00:12:00] texture of the conversation in the EU is very different than what I've observed here in America as well. Like, what, what do you think about that? 'cause I think I, I honestly think most of the US is more uniform around the discussion.


There's definitely people who are real critics. How would you describe like the texture's? How I, the vibe, here's how I'd describe the texture vibe. So when you, for you want to understand what, uh, uh, if something is a real trend, you go to students and you see what they're doing. That's how you do it. Uh, you could tell tech talk was students, like university, university and high school and high school, even middle school, and you go and see what their behavior is like.


You could have early been able to tell that tech talk was going to be a long term user behavior. You are going to be able to easily tell that mobile was to be a long term behavior. And that crypto was not because they're not adopting crypto in high numbers. But I went and I just did, I did a speech to at my alma mater Northwestern.


And I asked the students like, raise your hand if you use chat to BT on a daily basis and [00:13:00] all but one, raise their hands all but one, which means that, and I've heard this from multiple, like. countless students. They're using it every day because it's supremely useful. And not just to like write an essay, but to get opinions, to figure out how to solve a math problem, to analyze a large block of texts, do these different things.


The end result being you are there forming a habit. That will be brought into, that's already being brought into the workplace. And as they come into the workplace, they'll be using it and they're going to have an advantage over their older colleagues and peers who may not be using AI. So I don't very, even among teachers and others, I don't meet many people are like, AI is going to be a complete fad.


There's a few. But it's a very small minority. There's a large group that's like AI could be very dangerous, which I think could be true, which is where the regulation discussion happens in the EU, is already working on an AI EU Act, which was written before transcripting came out. And so it has many potential flaws.


But the US in general, and I think this is across, is like, how do we leverage this for greater [00:14:00] productivity, to make our lives better, uh, to, and then like, yeah, there's a secondary of like, how do we make sure that like, Uh, it's used for positive means and you know, uh, there's a university like Stanford who are at the forefront of this and I've had dinners with them to talk about this.


There was one column in the AI analyst on Bedpart. com where I have like overview kind of what an AI code of ethics would look like. But there's not the same consternation. A lot of it is just like, this stuff is moving. Most of the major AI companies are based here in the U. S. They're based especially in SF.


I think there's a reason for that. What do you think is the reason for that? It's the same reason why the U. S. has most of the major fast growing companies. It's just part of the culture. Like, it's like, go and take a risk. Go and build a thing. And look, there's lots of downsides to the U. S. culture, to be very clear.


Like overburden, lack of like balance, all those things are also very true. You know, actually one like pure one is just if you start with something in the U. S. and you, you're starting with English as the language, [00:15:00] you can spread this to 300 million people in the U. S. plus everyone in the U. K. plus Australia, plus India, Canada.

I have a bit of an intellectual question kind of alluding to what you, you, you mentioned a few minutes ago about the potential. Um, of monetization and the potential of, um, efficiency and driving like more revenue using AI technologies, I guess, intellectual purposes of me starting this podcast originally was to create some kind of working starting point of a definition of what is AI first look like in terms of like what kind of mentality, what kind of first principles you operate on, what MVP leadership do you need to qualify for some minimum floor?


of being AI first, can I throw that question at you? Like if when I say AI first, this is an AI first leader, AI first team or AI first business, do some minimum criteria pop up for you? I like to use the phrase AI native. AI native, ooh, I like that. I prefer [00:16:00] AI native. AI first versus. What is, yeah, okay. They both mean the same thing, which is you try to figure out a way to use AI to help solve a problem.


So, one thing like my co founder and I teach, uh, It's a popular course where we teach mostly beginners and like executives, like how to leverage these tools to maximum effect. And we teach them like all the different AI tools. We teach them in depth on chat, GBT, and some pieces like that. But a lot of the big stuff is just, you've got to use it every day for something.


You've got to consult it to, in like, instead of taking the Google search, like use chat GPT, when you're like trying to like, like when you're stuck on something, there's a 95 percent chance that chat GPT can help you get unstuck. You're like having trouble writing email, just have chat GPT help you with the first version or have review what you've done so far, but you have to have that mindset of like AI first, AI native.


I've got to go in like, how can I leverage AI for this? You know, there's lots of amazing AI tools that'll help do advanced [00:17:00] podcasting or whatever job that you might have is very likely if it's any kind of white collar knowledge kind of work, it'd be able to use AI and even like engineering is easy as like use GitHub co pilot and use these softwares that help you write code a lot faster.


And the people who do that are just much more efficient than those who don't. That's it for like AI native, AI first is, do you like get into the habit of using it? Cause if you get into that habit, you're going to be really, really effective. A follow up question to that. It sounds like the AI native is a kind of starting from the individual and like personal.


If you were to scale. AI native to a team or a leadership or like an organization wide, um, what do you think that could look like? Is it just a group of individuals that all have that mindset, I mean, working together, or do you think there's something more that is necessary? I did a speech in Baltimore to one of the like largest groups, uh, counselors for [00:18:00] students who are trying to get into college in the U S and they're trying to become like the entire team, AI native, just like part of it is.


Getting everyone to leverage like a chat GBD for their daily stuff. They're all writing emails and they're all like having these communications and that there's, and like, they're making lots of content and you can make a lot of content really quickly, really cheaply with the inside of an org. If you know how to use these AI tools, you can create entire tick tock channels.

You can, you can waterfall content really quickly. But you just have to have that AI native mindset throughout the organization. Like, how can I leverage AI first? But people on the team are figuring out like the tools that you need to use. You're building tools internally. A lot of it is again, just habit formation because the tools exist now.


And just as a note, they're not perfect. But they are already incredible and save a lot of time and not just that they are the work today is the Worst these AI tools will ever be in human history and they're already incredible rule You could literally do an entire podcast using the voices like [00:19:00] record your voice and you could have a version of your voice on the lemon Labs in under four minutes.


We can why are we here? But I mean And then did you run you just kind of cars? Yeah, actually I actually think actually the AI revolution means that Uh, personal brand will mean more in the coming like weeks, months, years, weeks, stuff is moving so fast. It's weeks. It really is your personal brand. Like, oh, this person has like future thoughts, like, which is hard for AI to do, like, you know, Uh, talk about what the future is going to be, an investigation, things like that.


If you have like a personal brand, you built up an audience. That's really hard for, like, you don't get that taken away. I think that's even more malleable, even more important like you, that, or you're a pro athlete, or you, if you build a personal brand and you build up some audience, you say, start a podcast about AI, you build long term competitive advantage because.


Uh, people connect still with people, not with A. I. s, at least. Maybe that'll change 20 [00:20:00] years from now. I think that'll be a while. Yeah. But even then, like, as an example, there was a study, and they showed art, and I'll find a camera, I'm at Roche University. They showed, like, the same piece of art to different groups of people.


And they tell one group it was made by AI and one group it was made by humans. Same art. They would attribute significantly more value to that art if it was made by a human. Like, you can also see with chess. AI has beaten us for two decades now at chess. And yet we still really care about what the world's best humans do when they play chess and when they play chess against each other.


We really like, actually, there's probably more interest in chess now than there was two decades ago when like, there was no AI that was better than the world's top chess players. So my point being like, there will always be humans and large like places for humans. And especially for those who build brand or become experts in a specific domain, when you become that kind of expert, people come to you.


AIs, they are really good at figuring out what's happening, synthesizing stuff from the past. Humans are really good at figuring [00:21:00] out what's happening in the future, and that's something we have not decoded, and we cannot build into a machine yet. That's fair. Going back to the idea of AI native. Your team at Octane AI is spread across 14 countries.


There's a lot of people. Yeah, there's a lot of people. How do you maintain an AI first kind of culture and mentality at Octane AI? Like, is that something that you look for when you're recruiting? Is that something that you like try to establish in the team habits and rituals that you guys have in the way that you work together?


I think we're an AI company. So naturally people, so naturally, I mean, not hard to recruit that for us. It's just like people who. Our self curious autonomous in a remote setting, you have to be self driven, work and do things. Our team, we, we do things like we taught, we had a class where we taught everyone how to use chat GPT and like more depth and we had them do certain assignments just so they get in the habit.


We checked in with them on like, you know, the kind of things they were doing and just encourage it. And then like, honestly, the team [00:22:00] would post like, here's the thing I figured out using this AI tool. I, one like created all sorts of help videos using 11 labs and it was super cool. And. Yeah. Sorry. What is 11 labs?


11 labs is probably one of the top is maybe the top voice AI software out there. So usually upload maybe a minute worth of clips of your voice, not even, and then it'll have a perfect version of your voice. So you can just type in whatever text you want. It'll speak in your voice. You'd have AI Tina just talking through the future.


Beanie Babies, if I wanted to. Beanie Babies. I mean, look, I picked something very nice and cuddly. I actually picked something much cuter. Can it make me, like, popular at karaoke? Because... They're working on the voice stuff. The voice stuff is really good. I would love to know what I would be able to sound like if I had a nice singing voice, which I don't have.

Well, oh... If I could bring that to life for me, I'd be curious to hear it. We'd have to first record you singing. You can't, like, make it good. On my behalf, I need to. We need to have you right now. We need to hear you singing. It needs to have data points. It has no data points on your singing voice right now.[00:23:00] 


Okay. The next episode we can do 11. What was it? 11. A. I. 11 labs. 11 times does voice does not do music. There are other ones that do music, though. So we'll do like an A. I. Times karaoke episode. I mean, hopefully It'll be the most beautiful thing anyone's heard of. You do not need to have earplugs for that episode, everyone.


And just kind of like leading on the question of establishing AI native habits or practices or behavior at Oxygen AI, do you have any advice or thoughts for maybe leaders at other companies, whether they're building an AI solution to help, like they have an AI solution that they're selling to other companies, or they want to establish AI technologies.


into their existing infrastructure. Do you have any advice on maybe mentalities, training, leadership iterations they should be thinking about? I mean, I think we've covered the number one biggest one, which I will repeat to constantly, which is just. Use it every day and tell other, like, the team [00:24:00] to use it every day.


You know, you can like teach an internal course, you can do things like that. It's just, but it's the habit. Like, you gotta get people into the habit of like, I can use AI to solve this problem. Right. I can use AI to solve this email. And even I, like, forget sometimes. But if you remind people, they'll start doing it.

Even Ben Parr. Would whole U. S. mortals have? Only once in a while. No, it's, you build it as a habit, then it becomes automatic. I, I don't ever open a Google app. I always open ChatGPT to get like the first crack at an answer. Yeah, yeah. And then I might, I might Google to verify something, but. Yeah, yeah.


Generally, it's coming from the internet. It's probably about the exact same correct percentage as the internet in general with. What it does. So for those orgs, like I also recommend not just trying out and using the tools, but I would recommend a little bit of self education on what, how do these AIs actually work?


Like this part of the like class I teach with my co founder, Matt, on like, what is a transformer model? What is a large language model? Right. Who invented the [00:25:00] transformer model? These are like, you know, for those, the end, if you want your answer, you can like, I'll give you three seconds. Google invented the transformer model in 2017 and AI, these AI systems, you know, there's all sorts of terms like embeddings and hallucinations and all sorts of words and phrases, but if you learn the basics, I actually have a cheat sheet with most of these terms.


Can we get it from you? It's on benpard. com. You can just go there. She's at the top. I'll add it. I'll link it in. One of the feedback points I've heard from my friends in the VC world are there's this kind of sense that there isn't really a playbook or a set of ground rules for evaluating business ROI from AI founders today.


And I wanted to run that by you and kind of get a sense of, do you agree with that? Do you think? No. That's not, what are your thoughts on that? I'm doing a lot more AI investing now to, is to be candid. I will be doing more. I'll be doing more. Leave that for now. Are you doing it because you have a competitive advantage?


Because no one else knows what's going on. We built... Yeah, we built... Matt and I built a profitable AI company over the course of a decade. So you guys are, like, [00:26:00] of course know, you know, what you're doing, but... The answer to the first question, second question is that it's the same as any other kind of business, like fundamental business models matter.


It's easy, like AI businesses, uh, ones that are leveraging AI will tend to be better solutions than non AI ones, just purely from the fact that you can remove some basic repetitiveness and save money for people. But everything else is the same. You're still selling to some target audience. What do they look like?


What are their problems? You know, why has no one solved this before? Why is it difficult to solve that problem? Same questions that any VC would, uh, should be asking or thinking about. The business models in AI are exactly the same. People pay for product photography. Now you can use AI to do product photography, but there's a lot of competition.


Same. And so like, it's harder to pick out a winner. It's the same kind of issue with if you were investing in any other vertical industry, what's the competent competitive landscape look like? Uh, do these founders have a specific competitive [00:27:00] advantage? You know, how long have they been working in this industry or problem?

Who are the buyers? What is their sales cycle? So I almost remove the AI portion when I'm like making these decisions. And just look at it. It's like, right. The AI question for me is only like, is the technology. Unique and defensible in some way. Like you could build on top and build a great business on top of open AI, but you, a lot of the smartest founders I meet are building something on top of that or have an additional data set or

are building additional advanced like functionality that you wouldn't find anywhere else. I think it would be really hard for someone to replicate that. What Rewind or ChatGPT or a lot of these other AI companies, even the ones that are built on like EvenUp. There's this legal company. They do AI for personal injury attorneys.


Do you remember their name? EvenUp is what they're called. EvenUp. They went from a million and 10 million in revenue. They got a big ride, I believe Bessemer led that. They were, it was reporting the information. They, they're leveraged in the existing models, but now they've built enough technology and data set because they've been working with just this group, [00:28:00] this like one group, this like these personal injury attorneys that they have a real competitive advantage.


And it's both from the technology side and the traction side, and then they can go and expand it. So there's real businesses. That's real money. I look for business or like, oh, it's clear how they're going to make money and how they'll make real money and what the real pain point is same as any other business.


Very common sense. Guys, listen to Ben. Have you noticed though ex um, instances where that basic hygiene is neglected in the excitement or FOMO of participating in something that has a tag AI on it? By VCs in particular , there's definitely not to call anyone out. There's definitely a lot of that. And in the industry, I mean, look, we were in a downturn.


We're still sort of are. It's weird. Yeah. AI brings a level of excitement, something that we haven't seen traction like this for anything in a long time. Well, what'd you say the last time? Come to mind that we, mobile, mobile, even more than this is even more than mobile though. Mobile. So to be clear, this is more than that's a hot take.


No, it's not. [00:29:00] Mobile did make a paradigm. We'll call it paradigm shift. I hate using the word, but I will use it in terms like we all have a device in our pockets where we like track and do different apps. Yeah. Like it started out with a bunch of. Fart apps. I don't know if anyone ever downloaded a fart app.


They were popular. People made money. There was, there was like, God, I didn't miss the opportunity. The floppy bird. That was fun. But, also, Snapchat, TikTok, Airbnb. Don't forget Vine. There was a, but yeah, Vine. Is Vine not relevant? I hope maybe Elon will eventually restart Vine. Do you really want Elon to run Vine?


This is off the topic of the podcast, so I can't comment on it. Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, see, uh, I, for me, I don't. So, but there's all these businesses, these mobile businesses built on top of, like, as a result, like, you didn't think of Airbnb as a mobile business, but they would not exist without. Yeah. Now there's a set of business that won't exist.


Well, yeah, of course you got to get the foreign apps of AI out of the way. These apps that don't have large long term business models or just kind [00:30:00] of like flash in the pan, but there are no businesses being built for lots of verticals and industries. Every industry is going to be leveraging AI in some way, both front end in terms of like the way you interact with them and in the back end process data.


So I, the reason I got my phone is that on that note, um, two weeks ago I was at world summit AI, which was out of Amsterdam where I live. And, um, Going back to like, you know, being the lazy employee, I took the entire agenda, all the talks, all the, all the companies that are represented and ran them through chat GDP in an attempt to get some definitive analysis on the top trending topics and have a list of them here.


Um, can I read them to you and get your thoughts on what you think, what you're most excited about? Fire 10, let's do it. Okay. So here, here are the, here are the top themes in terms of. AI X something else at World Summit AI 2023. AI social impact. Good eye, by the way. Um, AI governance and ethics and the intersection of governance and ethics.


What [00:31:00] I mean by that is, um, it's a key enterprise selling point for things like Watson X. Salesforce is Einstein, things like that. I'm in it as more as a productized thing for AI to be successful. AI and sustainability slash climate tech, and then AI finance, AI healthcare, AI education, and AI government.


Trust and safety comes up at everything, even in the U S but the general, the general consensus across all this is like the regulations cannot keep up with the pace of innovation and the other reality is that. If you try to slow it down, other countries will catch up, which certain countries you don't want them to catch up in the same way, which is like one of the biggest war like battles right now, or is over chips, you know, the NVIDIA chips that power a lot of the AI models.


And most of them are in the U S and made by, uh, like the processor made by TSMC. In fact, one topic in Ted AI where it was last [00:32:00] week was. That there was a lot of consternation around, it's a single point of failure for AI, where if most of the semiconductors are made in one place, in one building, in one country, and that country, you know, it's a very politically sensitive place, and so if it stopped, if any, if it stopped, then we would have like basically a whole pause on the eye for three years in terms of, Acceleration.


This is giving the burning down of Alexandria library. You know what? Potential. Yeah, but the flip side is like. There's lots of countries and lots of places where they're building a new trying to like build up new generations of chips and things like that. So like there's new semiconductors and the ability to make more chips.


That's like increasing an exponential rate. That's why NVIDIA has done so well this year. So the biggest risk I'm hearing from you is that we don't progress or we fall behind. There's this potential on the table. We fall behind is one. Yeah. You go too fast and you hit something you [00:33:00] don't understand is something that people fear.


I fear that less personally. And I, my, I'm not, I don't fear this idea of AGI, which is a artificial general intelligence that has the same intelligence as a human, but has the power of AI, which means it could do more and could be superhuman or could decide that it doesn't need humans. That's the, that's like the far off, far end Terminator style fear.


I don't have the same fear in part because we don't even understand how the human... Mind works. How are we going to engineer, uh, computers to have consciousness in the same way humans do? Because we don't even have a clue how consciousness works. And so, we're far off, in my opinion, from having an AI system that is like thinking and feeling.


And this is also where, like, if you understand, like, how beddings work and how, like, the large sandwich models are just very... Smart, predictive, or just predictive smart, they just predict the next most likely word, uh, in a sea of words and phrases, and they're great at that, and it makes it feel and sound human, but they're not thinking, so we're far from that, where, exactly when, I [00:34:00] don't know.


You know, someone maybe we'll figure out there's like a cool thing to figure out consciousness in the brain, in which case we'll have a whole different podcast. Talk about breaking news. We have figured out consciousness and it lives in a little cloud and it's all right. Left center of your brain or anyway, my whole point being the risk I think right now is probably more falling behind.


The U S is clearly in the lead and a half. Most of these key companies are U S based. And most of the chips are there. Other countries are like, it'll be erased. They're trying to accumulate chips and trying to build their own models. You know, because OpenAI, the big leader, is a U. S. company. You want to try to disentangle geopolitics from technology, but you can't anymore. 


I mean, when you say you want, can anyone, the personal is political, right? The personal is political. I'm not gonna go down. No, no. I, I, I'll leave it at this. We'll leave it at, I, I, I like, I'll, I'll leave it at this, which is, I firmly believe that technological progress does over the long [00:35:00] run help humanity and like, we are not, you know, we, we now have the ability to.

Uh, stay comfortable indoors at any temperature. We have the ability to create energy from the sun. We have the ability to go to any other part of the world really quickly. We have the lowest mortality rates, uh, worldwide that we've ever seen. We still have work to do. Tons of work. Yeah, but this is what technology, and including AI, being able to solve, you know, cure cancer. 


We, I saw one like in TED AI, like... Really individually to understand like what individual cells are doing, find cells that are going to be cancerous before they become cancerous, find new drugs. This is all the stuff, the promise of AI. And so this is where like, I don't want to slow down on those things because this will literally save lives.


But flip side, like we have seen negative consequences from technology in terms of misinformation and other things. And so this is polarization, right? This is where caution or analysis is warranted. This is why we need the EU, right? [00:36:00] The e the it is actually EU perspective. It is actually interesting 'cause like, you know, for the US now, uh, this sounds silly, but now iPhones use USPC, uh, uh, and they didn't, before they had their own proprietary, which was, didn't make sense now, like you could use any US pc and that's because of the eu.

So the EU here is here. Thank you. E making things make sense for everyone else. Please. Who, and not even your family who knew that compromise and if, and going back and forth. Could lead to good outcomes. It's never my way or the highway ai or the eye way. I'm making up songs that a or the eye way AI or the eye way.


do you have any final thoughts? Um, a couple of kind of highlights I wanna bubble back up is, uh, some of the thoughts that you had, which is the importance of personal brand in a world where AI does a lot of heavy lifting on things that otherwise. You were relying on to, I guess, build your career on the back of the importance of kind of at a personal and individual level, having the [00:37:00] automated behaviors to use AI to support the work that you do and help you be more of you.


Like those are kind of like two, two pieces of advice I think that could be very actionable for a lot of people. Do you have any other parting thoughts before we end for today? I mean, I think I, I keep on repeating, it's just use it every day, stay curious, keep on top of what new trends are happening. And is there a newsletter that you could recommend to help people see on top?


Yeah, there is. There's one called the AI Analyst at benparr. com. E E N P A R R dot com. And look, my, my cheat sheet that you can download also has recommendations for even other newsletters and podcasts that I think are really good and really useful. Just, you don't have to pay attention to every single thing, but like, if you just keep up with what's generally happening, and you just try new stuff, you know, it's gonna be great.


Like, try uploading a photo into the new version of the chat, GPT and ask your questions about that photo, and they will give you answers. I don't tell you stuff, but I can... Upload a photo of this thing that explains to me how to use the microphone system here. And it will literally tell me step by step what to do.


That's [00:38:00] how amazing AI has become. What have you used it to fix in your life? I'm in the very beginning of figuring out. Very beginning of figuring out. You know, like, I, I, I had to, I, I had to, you have to get into a habit. I'm not in the habit of sending photos to CharityPT yet. That's my next thing. Next thing.


And the more people are sending photos, the better. I mean. The outcomes will be, we assume. It's, it's, it's cool. It's crazy that. That is cool, that is cool. It's nuts. We had to not have this a year ago. You have the ability to just. Get answers to any question by just sending a photo, but now you do. Ben, thank you so much for joining and taking the time.

Interesting. And bearing with me while I figure this out partially successfully. We'll find out. We'll find out. It'll be fantastic.









SOCIAL MEDIA CLIPS: 


CLIP 1  


TRANSCRIPT:  


Over 450 million dollars have been made on Octane AI to date. It's actually past half a billion officially now, if I recall correctly, looking at the last numbers. It's a lot of money that we've made. Can you tell us more about that? Like how, what is What are the many ways that people are making money using Octane AI via Shopify?


So the main way is an e commerce brand, someone like a Kizzix or Jones Road Beauty, or it's a long, like magic spoon. They'll use it, like customers come in, they're like, I don't know which of the skincare products I should buy, or which cereal I should buy, or I'm trying to figure out which supplements to get. 


And so our software will help them using AI for themselves manually. Build an entire quiz, ask questions like what kind of skin conditions do you have, what kind of, you know, treatments are you looking for, you know, are you going to do it a day or night? And use that to recommend like the right products to their customers.


And we have a set of AI tools that will actually do those recommendations automatically. You can set them manually too if you're an e commerce brand. And then for a lot of our brands, it's the number one converting page on their website. They'll send all of their ad traffic to it. They'll send their, like a lot of the website traffic through that page because people sign up.


People want to know like, which skincare routine should I get and what are the products they need for that? 



People on this episode

Head Shot

Tina Yazdi

Host