A Whole New World, AI Operations, and Perplexity Lawsuit

Welcome to wake up with AI, the podcast where human powered meets AI assisted. Join your hosts, Chris Carillon, Niko Lofakas, and George b Thomas as we dive deep into the world of artificial intelligence. From the latest AI news to cutting edge tools and skill sets, we are here to help business owners, marketers, and everyday individuals unlock their full potential with the power of AI. Let's get started.

Happy Friday, October 18, 2024. It's time to wake up with AI, and we're here with Niko and George to help us do just that. How you fellas doing?

Doing wonderful this morning. There is a plethora of breakthroughs in the last 24 hours. Lot of lot of news, lot of updates. Looking forward to the weekend to try to absorb it all.

I don't know how I'm doing. I thought I was doing okay. And then this morning happened in Slack, and I started watching videos that Nico was sending over, and I was like, I don't even know what to do with myself for the rest of the day. I got stuff to do. I'm busy.

Clients want work done. Super admins want training, and there's these videos. And and I started watching some of them, and I was like, oh, god. So I don't know how I'm doing, Chris. I don't know how to answer that question right now.

So what was the oh god?

Yeah. I wanna I wanna hear that.

Dude, the the sphere the sphere thing.

Yeah.

Like, the digital ID. The oh my god. It's just revelations. Like, I I I was like, are we in biblical times? Like, wait.

I gotta prove I'm a human? But then I was like, that thing looks really cool. Would I wanna own one? I don't know. Will I need one?

I'm not sure. All of a sudden, there was like a 1000000000 questions in my brain, and I'm like, I just need a minute. So, Chris, no. I don't know how I'm doing this morning.

Okay. Yeah. I could understand that entirely.

How are you doing? Like, most days, George. So we appreciate that. So we're hitting on that, Niko, or are we talking about feds using AI to catch fraud? If maybe that's the same thing.

I I clearly, I didn't watch the videos. I'm not doing my homework.

So No. No. That's that's something entirely different.

Maybe you're better off. I don't know. I'm I'm still trying to figure it

out. This is what I'm trying to tell people. Like, no. You want me coming in unprepared. It's just better content that way.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. That's the thing. It's like, I I always look forward to the blown minds, to the the reactions from you guys every morning after after I purposefully just dump into that channel everything that's that I've looked at for the last, you know, few hours.

And, yeah, unfortunately, I did a self imposed challenge this morning to see how much I could catch up on in just 5 minutes. And it was it was a decent amount. It was a handful. But I think that is probably the best example I can give you guys, the crew that is, how I go across the spectrum like that. Right?

So, like, how I look at it from a government standpoint of view, from a robotic standpoint of view, from a banking standpoint of view, from an actual application point of view, to an AI advancement point of view, to a whole new world point of view.

Yeah. And not like the Disney song A Whole New World. Not that kind of Whole New World. I mean,

a A whole new world.

Like, oh my god.

Yeah. So I'm gonna touch on that real quick, but then I wanna get to the story I teased yesterday. So what we're murmuring about here is a new device that OpenAI has been behind. I'm sure I'm not sure if it's OpenAI. I'm sure it's Y Combinator funded.

It one way or another, Sam Altman is very, very involved. This is not something new. The device being completed is new. The idea is actually a little over a year old. Look.

When gbt 3 hit the web, the first thing I said was the truth is dead. It's over. The last of the truth is finished now. You will never be able to know whether somebody has done something from generated or not. And even when people try to challenge me about different content types, it's like, nope.

Can't do it. I even saw a video of a guy who hooked up a g p t to a pen on a c n c machine so that it could write the output on paper so that he could turn that in. It was over on every scale. Right? So he came out and said, look.

Given that we can't tell the difference in text, we can't tell the difference in voice, we have to come up with something new. And facial as well. Right? Because you can mimic facial now. A really scary part of that video was the fact that people are using facial deepfake and using Zoom deepfake in order to deepfake as your CEO, as your CFO, to then get a hold of accounting and have them cut a check.

How scary is that? So this technology is based, and it's gonna eventually get to your phone too, but it's on device as well for physical locations. And what it does is it it's a retinal scan. So let's all just put our minds into

It's minority report.

Yeah.

It's minority report. I'm like I'm like, oh my god. What's it?

We're there.

We're there. So it's minority report. If you've seen that movie, you'll see a very famous scene of Tom Cruise running through an alleyway and a scanner picks up scans his eye from probably a good 50 meters away or 50 yards rather and instantly changes the advertising that he's seeing on a billboard and it's personalized to him. K. The the reason we're going this route is because it will take us much much longer, and I'm not entirely sure.

I'm very actually, I'm very sure. We will never develop the equivalent of human eyes for robotics because it's unnecessary. They need cameras. They don't need the same corneas. It's not designed the same way, in other words.

So because of the fact that they can just use a camera and the the rest of it's normal, easily and, you know, within nanoseconds, that's a robot eye, that's a human eye. So this is the new method of being able to detect, are you human? It's a big, big story. Definitely dive into it more next week, but just wanna touch up what that is that we're all geeked out about. The real story that I I teased yesterday is about perplexity.

If you don't know about perplexity, it is a web search engine that is LLM or generative AI based. So the big difference is where you see the Google answers that pop up nowadays, that's the only type of answer that perplexity provides you. But it does it in sort of like a RLHF format where it's giving you this additional context to the the search that it did. And the search is entirely based on sources, which it also provides for you above and then gives you the link within every aspect of the answer where that information came from in in the source that it looked at. So not only do you know that it's a 100% accurate answer, you can actually see where it got that answer from as well.

So that being the case, really no more advertising because there's like, no Google Ads. I just type it, I get the answer, I don't have to surf through a ton of links to find the right page that has the answer on it. I just get it. What if I was using that for news or for a book? So the New York Times, I believe yeah.

I'm pretty sure because they're the they're the biggies that are suing everybody left and right. The New York Times has superplexity and filed a lawsuit rather and are saying, hey. You're violating our capabilities because your model is going through certain aspects of our site that it should not be able to in order to garner information that you're then giving to users.' People are able to learn the context of a story without actually having to go and pay to read about it online. Never mind the fact that you shouldn't have to pay for for information or intelligence anyway. So it brings to to mind and this morning, I put something in the channel for the guys that I I didn't even know until I found it this morning.

I I find that these companies are doing a wonderful job of supplanting anyone that would otherwise get in their way that are considered to be just, you know, just the old school, the big boys. You couldn't possibly get past them if if you wanted to. And yet, here are all these startups that are quite literally destroying the foundations of these older companies. Google added in what Perplexity has, and it hasn't really moved the needle for them in terms of ad revenue. It can't.

Who cares? What does it do, though? It does the one thing that we were talking about the most at inbound, which was ads meaning. If the content that you're creating doesn't have any meaning for what I'm looking for, then I don't care about your website. I don't care about your service.

I don't care about your product. But if it does have meaning, the language model will pick it up, especially if it is completely relative to what it is that I'm looking for. The closer that is, the better it is. Now what does that mean? Well, it means that everybody shouldn't be selling the same thing anymore.

They shouldn't be wording it the same way. You shouldn't be looking at your competitor and saying, they word it this way. We should try wording it this way because they have larger returns than we do. You should stay in your lane. You should be even more finite, even more niche.

Because if the person is looking for that thing, you need to have that thing. You can no longer just have all the things with that being a part of the little bit. But the bigger story overall, I don't wanna get too deep into that, is just the fact of, does this seem like a legal violation? Does it seem like a huge violation to say, we're just trying to give information to the users, and we're only giving a snippet plus a link back to the original source. It goes back to your site where they would have to pay to read the entire information.

You know? Or is it just a desperate attempt from newspaper outlets that are dying left, right, and center right now to try to hold on to whatever they can of subscription based service.

So there's there's a couple of things I wanna unpack. But, Chris, do you wanna go first?

I mean, I'll just say I'm very interested to see how any business that was based on ad revenue, like, as the number one source, Are they going to survive? Not even, like, what might they do. It's like, will they survive? I think that's a real question, especially when you think about the percentage of revenue that Google Ads was for Google. Like and it's just going to evaporate.

It already is evaporating, and there's no easy way to replace it, which is it just goes down a whole another rabbit hole about this this shit probably never worked to begin with like we all thought it did. And now, like, the jig is up.

So, 1, it feels like a desperate attempt on a historical mindset of owning knowledge, news, information that no longer exists in the world that we're moving to. 2, search for me over the last 6 months has felt cumbersome compared to the way that I ingest the information education and news or knowledge that I need now with AI tools. 3, when Niko said that you need to be more niche, more nuanced, more you, less your competitors, I wanna double down on that and say, actually, yes, and you need to be so inside of your prospect lead customer's brain that you know what they're typing, what they're researching, what they're wanting to learn, what their problems are. If you meet them where their brain is at in the AI system that they're using because they're stepping away from Google and Bing and the historical places that they got their information, and you're creating it in that way, you align with the humans who are looking for the products and services that you serve.

My bad.

I don't know what else to say except, yes, 100%. Like, it's just a a factor of ad space is really going to shift. It's not a a fair comparison, but it really does. It kinda makes me think of Fallout, if you've ever played the game. You run around and there is just physical advertising everywhere.

There's paper pamphlets all over. There's stuff plastered on buildings, huge billboards. It's meant to represent an older time that's kind of like a hybrid between, you know, the the forties, fifties, and today. But that's what I think is going to happen. When you look at minority report, that's one of the things of new of, like, you know, sci fi movies that I hate, but I try to that's where I fantasize is, like, okay.

But what happens on their daily personal life? What are the devices like? What's the monetary system? How do people act socially? Right?

I'm doing everything but paying attention to the story. I'll just throw this out out there. Steven Spielberg, love you for what you did with Ready Player 1. I think that's actually one of the greatest movies to show what could possibly be the transition that's going to happen post 2030. That just screams to what I'm saying.

Right? Is that you look at that world. You look at Ready Player 1. I don't consider these to be, like, dystopian, postapocalyptic. It's funny because, like, to me, climate change is just doing that naturally for us.

It's causing us to start to migrate. If you look around the world, if you look at the news, there are climate migrations happening. So we are moving into this sort of society where we're gonna have to be, like, closer and closer together. Advertising is gonna get too annoying on a digital level the way in which we are being pounded by it currently. And I think it's gonna make a major shift back to being in the physical space, back to being in the physical world, kinda where it belongs.

Around where I'm at, it's it's boring. I'm not gonna lie. It's boring advertising wise until I get closer to the city and then there's some billboards and stuff like that. I go to Cincinnati. I go to Chicago.

I go to New York. Totally different. Even the tag style advertising, that's my favorite. The human

Yes.

Advertising Preach. That is sprayed, that's tagged onto the building. Right? That it it blows my mind when I see that because I understand and I know the skill that it takes in order to pull that off.

It's so interesting to hear you talk about that because it's like in a world that is becoming increasingly digital, in a world that is becoming increasingly AI, the thing that we will need most and seek out most is the human elements.

We're going to live in a world.

I born at the right time, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just gonna throw that out there.

Yeah. I think it's just it's a matter of we're going to crave it. Like, yes, machines and I I see this thing whenever I watch news about progress, especially with robotics, where they are striving because we are programming them for perfection. And that brings me back to Tron Legacy where towards the end, probably the most the most worthwhile two minutes of the entire film is where Flynn is having a conversation with what is a a duplicate of his himself digitally he calls Clue. And they're fighting because Flynn is trying to get his son back out of the system.

And Clue comes towards him and he's he's screaming at him and he says, I did everything that you told me to do. I took this system to its maximum potential. And Flynn says, yeah. I know. He says, I I took it.

I got it as perfect as it could be. He's like, yeah. But the thing is perfection is also imperfection. You didn't know that because I didn't know that when I programmed you. So there is something to be said about, like, programming these things for perfection being a negative thing as opposed to a positive.

Well, perfection is not reality. Right? Let's be honest.

It's not human reality.

Yeah. I think Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think not even negative.

It's not really good or bad. Just understand where it is. Because I'm already noticing when I can't get the auto correct, like, it'll pay attention to everything else, but when it won't start auto correcting my sentences because it's just poor grammar that I'm using in the sentences. So it's like that part of being you, like, especially for those that like to play with language. Like, keep playing with language, and AI will never replace you.

Right? Because it's not built to it's not built to be imperfect.

It it's so funny because I've noticed, Chris, with what you're talking about that I use Grammarly because listen. I'm a high school dropout. Right? So the grammar, the spelling, sometimes not so great. Like, I've had times where the computer goes out of all the words in the world, this looks like none of them.

So it, like, doesn't even know what to tell me. But I've noticed that sometimes I'll look at Grammarly and be like, no. I don't wanna change that. I know that you want me to use this other word, but that's not the word that I wanna use because this is exactly how I would say it. And so, like, realizing that there's a level of using these tools but not losing yourself, that's where people are gonna because it's so streamlined.

It's so easy. It's so optimized. It's so easy button, but are you just wiping you out of it? And that's that's why I come back to this. It's human powered AI assisted.

Always be measuring what level of that you need in what you're doing when you're doing things. Anyway

Let's get into it, George. What's the skill? Man, I'm, like, sitting here going, do

I even wanna do a skill of the day today? I could hear it.

I could hear it.

This is such a good conversation. Like okay. Alright. Well, let's we'll throw it in there real quick. Skill that pays the bills, we're gonna go operation style.

Alright? So today, we're diving into something that can seriously free up your time and save you from countless headaches, process automation. We all have those, like, tedious, repetitive tasks that no one wants to deal with, whether it's entering data, tackling inventory, or sending out those monthly invoices. These are the tasks that keep things running but can drain your time and energy faster than anything else. But here's the good news.

AI powered tools like robotic process automation, Zapier, Microsoft Power Automate, if this, then that, which is like old school before its time almost, but, like, come on, can take over those mind numbing tests. Yep. You heard that right. AI can handle those repetitive jobs while you focus on big picture strategy and growth. So picture this.

You're running a business. Might not be too hard to picture or imagine because you're probably running a business or managing a department, and every week, you're drowning in data entry. You're manually plugging information into your CRM, keeping track of stock levels, sending out invoices 1 by 1. Sure. It's important work, but it's definitely not what gets your creative juices flowing.

Now imagine AI powered automation stepping in. Again, with those tools and those triggers and those actions, that data entry, that inventory tracking, it's all real time. It's all being automatically sent out. You don't have to worry about the invoices except for maybe getting paid by the humans. But sending them out becomes easy and, honestly, so much more.

I'm just scratching the surface here. These assistants don't get tired. They don't make typos, and they definitely don't need coffee breaks. They just get the job done, freeing you up to focus on what really matters, growing your business, creating new strategies, and spending time on the parts of your work that actually energize you. Alright.

So say you're managing inventory for ecommerce store instead of manually updating stock levels after each sale, your assistant can automatically adjust inventory. Or if you're handling client invoices, the whole process, sending, reminding, generating reports, which, by the way, was a whole invoice HubSpot update. Anyway, not why we're here. The beauty of it, you're still in charge, but you got people. Well, assistants that are helping you in the background with all of this.

So let's boil it down for today. Automate the boring stuff. AI powered tools will help you do that over time. Boost your real time efficiency, whether it's inventory tracking or anything else that we've talked. Keep your operations running smoothly with these assistants and free your time, ladies and gentlemen.

Free your time for big picture thinking. Automate the routine and you'll have more time to think strategically, innovate, and dive into the parts of your business that you love and that needs you more than those repetitive tasks. The bottom line, process automation isn't just a fancy term. It's a secret weapon for working smarter, not harder. Ladies and gentlemen, that's today's AI skill that pays the bills.

Amen. Yeah. We're not going one episode without one of those, brother. So

I mean, if I can keep coming up with them. I'm I'm I'm wondering, like, day 30 or episode 50. Like, what skill will I have? But we'll see.

As long as you keep it as, skill to pay the bills Yeah. You can you can branch out. Doesn't have to necessarily stick to marketing.

That's gonna be the the

fun part is that these this news every day, it's like,

skill to pay

the bills. Figure out how this stuff scans your eyes. Yeah. The skill to pay the bill for the day is how not to lose your

shit when you when you when you see the new news report. That's the skill of the day.

I don't know if it's on I'm pretty sure it's only on mobile because I don't know if there's a desktop downloadable version yet. But one of the things I thought was amazing was that, you know, Google is obviously sort of upset by what perplexity is able to do. You notice that Microsoft doesn't even care. Like, people were saying, oh, it's it's Microsoft's gonna be so upset because gbt is using Bing for gbt search. And why do they care?

They only less than 5% of the market or something. It's a such a small number. What happens is I have perplexity on my phone. I have an Android, so I'm not sure if this is doable on on Apple. Probably not.

We we have perplexity on Apple, if that's what you're saying.

Well, I I use the web version.

Oh, okay.

So I know this so this is an odd, like, funny thing. I know that there are app versions of all of this stuff. The app versions to me are watered down, very watered down. The the capabilities are not quite as robust. You know, a lot of stuff's not quite there.

It's great for voice, not so much for, like, if I'm doing work. So what I do is I just have them open in web tabs, and I just use them straight out of the the web. The console is equally as as nice to use, so it's not like it's you're trying to use a desktop tiny version or something. So when I'm using chat, I start typing something and I realize I need to edit, so I go to select the text and where it would normally say search in Google, it says ask perplexity. Yeah.

When I did the right click, if you could classify it as that, there was the web search option, but you just click on the 3 dots and all of a sudden there's an ask perplexity option. And it's like, if that were in place of or if that were what happens when I click web search, man, that would be the cat's meow right there. Like, I could just skip past all the BS and and all the I don't even know if that link's relevant and all of that kind of stuff. And especially when you click search Google 9 out of 10 times, it goes straight to link version and not to the generative answer version.

Let's be honest. Right? Another thing that you sent over, this is, like, a couple days ago. It was a Sam Altman interview, and one of the students asked the question of, like, well, what about all the information that isn't in the model? And Sam's quick response was, well, we wanna make sure we get all the information into the model.

And so start to think about that. Like, in a world where all the information, all the information is in the model, I don't have a need for Google. I don't have a need for Bing. And when I say Google, I mean Google search. Right?

And I said when there was this, like, kind of it was announced maybe before its time, but there was this whole thing around GPT search. As soon as I heard those terms and I allowed my brain to dream, I was like, oh, Google's dead. I'm not gonna go there. And I know I'm not unlike many other humans. They're not gonna go there.

No. They're definitely not. They're, you know, they were scrambling to figure out how to change the model, how to make it work now, but it's almost completely broken. And, yeah, I'm I'm not sure that there is much that you can do at this point that, you know again, this is the greatest disruptor to everything we have ever done in regard to technology. So there's things like DeepMind and its infinite excellence discovered something like over a 1000000 different types of materials.

Materials, k, like compounds that could be made, manufactured. Of those million, the most possible that we could actually put today, or with today's technology, it was 700. Those 700, we would not have discovered for 80 years, at least, according to the model. So that still hasn't trickled down into everyday life, that technology. Think back on microwaves that came about as a result of space program.

Now think about how long it took, right, to go from tech invention to kitchen. Took a while. Right? It takes a while for this stuff to trickle down. So we're only 2 years in.

If you watch that, you gotta put the link. Gotta put the link in the in the post. If you watch this interview actually, it's, did I post the the one from Michigan University in there? It just happened a couple of days ago.

I think it was Michigan. I'll have to look Okay. Back in our Slack.

That's the one you wanna watch because that's where Sam talks about the fact that life is never going to be the same. Every year is going to be more mind blowing than the year before. So the only thing that you can possibly do in order to keep up with all of it is to wake up with AI.

That's a wrap for this episode of wake up with AI. We hope that you feel a little more inspired, a little more informed, and a whole lot more excited about how AI can augment your life and business. Always remember that this journey is just the beginning and that we are right here with you every step of the way. If you love today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. You can also connect with us on social media to stay updated with all things AI.

Until next time. Stay curious, stay empowered, and wake up with AI.