Acceleration Rates, New Job Hirings, and the Power of Questions

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.

Good morning. Welcome to the week of giving thanks. November 25th 2024. Happy Monday. It is time to wake up with AI.

Nico George, how you fellas doing today?

Well, it's a short week, so that is both good and not good. But doing great. Doing great.

Doing well. Let's see. I'm I'm I think I'm about 2 to 3 weeks out from, like, a really major software drop or software release for the first time ever. Thank you, Replit. Not sponsored, but would love to.

And I'm I'm very much I'm I'm excited about that. Made some some decent progress this weekend, so I'm looking forward to showing that off. How about yourself, Chris?

Doing good, man. I I feel like there's an AI breakthrough personally every week. I I think major drops coming from all of us, thanks to AI, very soon. But we're not here to talk about us today. What can we help people wake up to today?

Today. Well, we can definitely help people wake up to some of the news that surrounds not only what is coming out, like, what the the models are that are coming out and all the technology and stuff that we do, but also the training. So, like, there's a little bit behind the training that goes on, and how that gets done for a lot of these models. And the training in particular is like the post training, the RLHF. There's also a lot, you know, a lot of pre training that goes on, and then there's also just teaching models in general.

Right? Like updating their sort of ethical frameworks, let's say. And that tends to be done by people who like people. Right? But it tends to be done by, like, normal people.

And unfortunately, these people are typically, like, hired through these 3rd party services and stuff. But what I'm really driving at is that this business and this industry, it does rely on more than just the technology. It does rely on more than just what's under the hood. Right? Like outside of, you know, even Jensen Wong was talking about the fact that Blackwell might have some setbacks, but at the same time, you're talking about 1,000 of engineers attempting to create something new.

So it's, you know, the the amount of people behind this revolution that is going on is really actually only increasing. Like the body count behind this stuff is already starting to increase. So one of the first things that I wanted to talk about this morning was just the fact that even in the face of this agent revolution, in the face of AI revolution, these tools that are helping people excel and and gain greater capabilities over what they do every day already, it's already starting to to reverberate into greater revenues. Not always, but there is that trickling effect. Greater revenues from most businesses equals greater expansion.

Greater expansion equals greater jobs. So we're definitely in this a little bit. We have been in a little bit of a low. If you paid attention, you know, jobs it's been a it's been a hairy market and it's it's gonna continue to be for probably another 2 to 3 months, I think. But I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel already.

I'm starting to see people getting picked up for more jobs already. Good friend of mine was just picked up for a job that was related to programming because he knew how to use generative AI to program. So that is what's happening. The old guard has fallen away and this new guard of like, oh, hey, You know, if you think back, when we all graduated high school or we all graduated college, part of what you put on your resume was what? I know how to use Microsoft Office.

I know how to use Word and Excel. Those are those are crazy basic programs. But you had to put it down anyway just so that you could prove, hey. When I turn on a computer, I know exact I know what I'm doing writing and and doing formulas and stuff. And now that's what generative is.

Right? That that is a requirement now.

Yeah. It's a tool. And it goes back to what we were saying, like, back at inbound of, like and, of course, this was to a room of marketers. I would say this to a room of anybody at this point in time. It's like AI isn't gonna take your job, but the human who knows how to use AI sure will.

Again, just another reason why you need to wake up and at least implement enough of it of understanding and productivity and, like

Yeah. And you talk about all this invest I mean, we've been talking about the investment both from the the company's building tools and software and solutions, but also all the data that's showing all the businesses planning to spend more and more and more because the ROI is is pretty ridiculous. And if that spending is going there, that means there is expansion. There's jobs. And even if, like I I have to imagine that there's lots of places where even if an engineer or I could see 2 things, like roles where it's like engineering is needed, and you don't even have to like, maybe you've been one of those, like, trying to hold it off, but there's roles available where we just need, like, hands and heads that know how to engineer stuff.

Like, get in here. And that is probably the quickest way for you to kinda get on board and and start riding the wave. But then also, like, no engineering skills, just some sweet generative AI creation of things, I bet, could really go a long way in in putting that on your resume, putting a link to something that you've done. A lot of lot of opportunity here.

To me, it's the opportunity that I think people have been waiting for for a long time. You know, again, we were talking about last week, and we just kinda touched on it this morning. But talking about the fact that even us as rev ops people, as HubSpot people, you know, I we were talking about the fact that there's been those studies that show that people who are necessarily creative that then get this tool of, a generative program builder, they have this this acceleration rate that's ridiculous, like what they build and and how much they get into it and how much they start developing grows at this, like, 85, 90% rate. Okay. Whereas the people who have been doing it for a long time, developers who've been in the business for a long time and been in that position for a while, not so much.

They're seeing like a 5, 10% increase, not really nearly as much, which you would think that it would go it would skyrocket through the roof because these people know exactly how to spot check what it is that they're doing. But, and I am not trying to be mean. I am not trying to belittle what it is that programming is at its core. And I am not trying to belittle programmers or computer scientists. But at the end of the day, what you've done is you've created the underlying language, right, to these platforms.

But unfortunately that underlying language is fairly simple. It is expansive, but it can do so much with what's already there that by teaching something to be able to mimic that and be able to manipulate it and reproduce whatever a user wants based on command. Yeah. Like really at this point what what has happened is we now have digital sand. And so we have a bunch of kids, essentially.

People who've never used this type of software before. Running out to the sand and attacking it and building all these crazy sand castles nobody's ever seen before. I know people personally that have built 2, 3 applications just to do personal things that they do on a daily basis that is monotonous to them, but they are able to go on either, like, Replit or Plum or Cursor and just be able to type in, like, hey, I need an application that, you know, takes YouTube video links and pulls summaries and then writes, you know, social posts based on it or something. Right? And then all away you go.

Okay? And yeah. They don't know they may not know how to be how to, like, troubleshoot from a developer standpoint, but again, if you know how to ask for things, you know how to get there. So even though I'm not a developer, I've created a developer GPT. So now I have this GPT that can spot check what's happening in my program creator, right?

Or if, you know, you're using Visual Studio or whatever, if you're using Cursor, you automatically have this guide with you. If you're using Visual Studio, you have AWS guide with you. There are so many of these assistants now to help you build these programs that it's almost infallible. You can absolutely build this stuff and it shouldn't be shouldn't be a big deal. What I'm really looking forward to is once I'm done, does it break ever?

Or will are we finally living in this age where once a program is done from generation, we won't experience that like, wow it works a 1000 times. How come it screwed up for the last hour? But I think the level of creativity that comes out of this, I think content becomes a little bit of a different thing too. You know, I think that there's going to be something to be said about, you know, even currently there are already generative a r AI artists. There are going to be generative AI programmers.

There's going to be generative AI software designers. I was I was talking to my wife over the weekend about it, and even talking to my manager last week. Eventually, we'll get to the point. I don't know when. I know that Sam Altman has been talking about it.

I know that Demas Hassabis has talked about it. That eventually, we'll move to some type of society that is based on contribution as opposed to some like a monetary system. But my my biggest question about it really is like, okay, are we going to finally get paid for our ideas? Because at the end of the day, to me, it's the idea that is worth the money. The execution of it is going away now.

We're moving into a zero cost production, zero cost development environment. It's going to be effortless to have, like, machines building stuff or to be able to just generatively build out software, you know, whatever it is that we need. Even hardware. We're gonna have, you know, obscene 3 d printing soon. If it you know, already.

I mean, we're 3 d printing houses for crying out loud. So, you know, once we move into that environment, to me, I think it's the idea that's worth the money. I think that's what pushes us to become more creative as a species, as a people. This this these 2 to 3 to maybe even 4 decades of being standardly taught in school, of having philosophy stripped away from school, having art stripped away from school, having poetry and and free thinking stripped away from school, public schooling for the most part, it's created this huge gap where if you think about it the last 2 decades of your life even Hollywood has been extremely repetitive year over year over year and it got it got the biggest lunch ticket it possibly could with all the the superhero movies. Because that was, like, oh, okay.

Well, we can just take a break now and just pump these out 1 by 1 by 1, and we don't even have to care about story. The story's already been written. It's just that millions of people don't know it because they didn't read comic books when they were kids. There's no creativity there. You're taking somebody's story that was already written, and you're you're just Ah.

I no. No. I know. I know. Directing and yes.

I get it. Acting and all that. What I mean is it's not it's not necessarily fully original story. It's story that existed that, okay, maybe gets manipulated to have greater drama and that kind of thing. I get it.

But it's not as if you go see an M. Night movie, that's that's somebody's real creative thought origination. They took time to put it together, make this beautiful movie. Right? It's even even if you're basing something off of a book per se.

Right? There's based on a a true story and then there's, you know, kinda lifted from it or, you know, inspired by a true story type stuff. You know, I I think that this is the step that pushes us back into being, you know, individually creative to really rip that back out of our brains, that fantasy that we won't let go of. You know, some of the art that I've seen in the last 6 months, you never would have seen it. You never would have seen it.

It was trapped in someone's brain. All of these countless ideas that we have, million billions of ideas, billions of people on the planet. There are billions of ideas trapped in people's brains. And pretty soon, they're gonna come flooding out and that that's what excites me every morning I'm I look forward to that's why there's you know people you wonder why there's innovation every day you wonder why there's breakthroughs every day this is why This technology is enabling. It's super enabling, and it's allowing people to come up with ideas that they didn't have before, or to execute on ideas that they've only been dreaming of, but never had the ability to actually follow through on.

Startups. I mean, just left, right, and center. You you can't you throw a rock and you're gonna hit a start up before the rock hits the ground.

I wanna know what's happening in in George's thinking man stroking Jim brand.

He's gonna sit back.

I'm just I'm sitting here, and I'm I'm agreeing with a lot of what Niko is saying. But I'm also realizing that there's probably a set of humans on the planet. When they hear Niko say the word enabling, they actually think the pill debilitating because not everybody is built like Nico. Not everybody is built like Chris. Not everybody's built like George.

Not everybody understands the fundamentals. Not everybody has had a growth mindset. Not everybody understands the power of questions. Not everybody can connect the connective tissues of the pieces that we've been playing around with for years. In other words, not everybody out there is nerds.

So, like, I wonder how much of this, like, great clippable, you know, monologue of Niko is for a very subset of humans on the planet. And so then I was literally thinking, like, well, what what about the others? Right? And and what happens to the others, or what are the others think, or how do the others get from here to there in a rate that would even matter at this point. And so I wanna agree, and I wanna be like, yeah.

Heck, yeah. But just there's this part of me that is like, And then and then I'm listening to you know? And I'm like, I wanna also shout from the mountain tops. Like, there's nothing new under the sun, FYI. Like and then I wanna yell out some shit should be trapped in their brain.

It's an ugly place in there. Like, I don't know I don't know if I want everything to come out of people's brains. Like, that that becomes scary to me. Because, again, if I go back to your monologue, the thing that was running in my brain, and I was, like, sitting there stroking my chin was, like, yeah, if they're if they're good actors. But if they're not, what are we releasing to the world?

What are we unleashing? So, like, there's just so much because then you're like you know, can you imagine? And again, I'm I'm pseudo being stupid in this next statement, but can you imagine, like, you need to ground humans from being able to leverage AI? Like, oh, I'm sorry. You've you've used it in the wrong way.

You're actually on house arrest. You're no longer allowed to use AI at in this society. But that could be a real thing. Like, you could be just a genuine a hole doing wrong stuff with a very powerful technology, and there could be systems and guards put into place where you just can't leverage it anymore.

I gotta tell you, I mean, like, it's very legit and what's more is it's very instantaneous. This is, you know, this is definitely it's not probably. If you misuse your computer, somebody else has to come and figure it out. Somebody else has to be watching your IP. They gotta be watching your activity, they gotta be watching what you're doing.

Most of these models, yes, you can look, we're gonna get to the point, thankfully it's not yet, but unfortunately, people, we're gonna get to a point next year where you won't hear about me building agents, you'll be hearing about me building custom models, because that's how far along we're we're gonna be. 2 years ago I was using the thing. A year ago I was using an advanced version of the thing, programming it, working on it, figuring out all the tips and tricks. Now I'm building custom models everywhere. I the if I use a standard one, it's like me using Google for something.

And next year, it now, you know, I'm building software now. Pretty soon gonna be working with that with agents. And then next year, just going to be building models altogether. So in terms in terms of just, like, the evolution of using these tools to George's point of, like, jumping in too late, being too late into the game. There's there's the level where you know what's going on.

You understand what's happening around you. And then there's the level where you're actually involved. And I love the, you know, nerds taking over thing because my immediate reaction was, like, well, the jocks have had it for for, you know, 1000 of years now. So it's about it's about time. I mean, we put up all we put up all the buildings.

Right? You can't get the Star Trek without it. But unfortunately, I look at I look at things like Blade Runner. I look at things like Dread. I look at things like Ready Player 1, and I see the dichotomy.

I see the split between people who live digitally and people who live, quote, in the real world, let's say. People who choose to do away with the technology, Luddites, if you will. But there is still a coexistence that goes on there.

What if the alternative isn't a bad thing? What if all of a sudden I just wanted to, like, unplug and have 40 acres of land and not wanna be online all day and not have to deal with AI? Like, what if that's not a bad thing? Like, get some cows, get some chickens, you know, grow some corn. That's the other very interesting thing to me is, like, will there be sections of the planet that are just straight up, like, back to Amish or back to, like, you you know what I mean?

And it's like, people are just like, cut it, cut it. We're done. And so now there's these communities of, like, high-tech, high populace, or, like, low tech. It gets very interesting to think about that type of split or world that you could potentially live in because of just when do we as humans say enough is enough? I can't keep up anymore.

I don't wanna keep up anymore. Like, I'm tired of this thing that we have built that is maybe this massive AI powered hamster wheel.

Oh, man. I don't have like, what would it take to get tired of it? The whole thing is, like, it's not gonna be a hamster wheel. And, like, for the average user, it's never gonna be too late. The second you get through your barrier to entry, it's ready for you, and it's gonna make you ready in no time flat.

And I can just I wanna share my screen, and I wasn't planning on doing this, but what happened over the weekend for me? 22 breakthroughs, but second one yesterday. Just to show, like, I I think it's representative who because, you know, when you're using AI, you ask you can ask it to play roles and, like, it starts to focus on certain aspects as if it were, in this case, a warehouse manager. So we're working on upgrading, you know, operations. So I'm asking for help, you know, to get that started with inventory management.

So that's where we start. Right? We start with okay. It starts to create some documents. This is off the first off the first prompt, right, which is up here.

And so we don't have, you know, SKUs. Right? We we need to create a lot of stuff. Right? So, again, I am not a developer and a warehouse manager, likely not a developer.

Maybe not even tech enabled, right, depending on which parts of the industrial space we're in. So we have this conversation. I'm giving it, you know, some spreadsheets about what has happened. We have an inventory acceptance checklist. Alright.

That's I would expect, you know, warehouse manager to be able to just pull one of those out for me. Then I'm like, okay. Let's we we need to come up with some some SKUs. Right? It starts to break down like a SKU analysis.

And in this in this part, there was an interesting conversation where I asked it about its thoughts on dumb part numbering versus smart part numbering. And all of the pros or all of the cons related to smart part numbering were things that AI solves for. So do we even need dumb part numbering anymore? Like the complexity of the code and having to keep up with how things are coded. Then this was a suggestion from Claude.

I was not planning on doing this. So when we talk about the ability to ask questions and the ability to be creative, it's helping do that. So please create an interactive React component that allows me to explore sample SKUs and see how they would be formatted under the new system.

It built, like and for anybody that's wondering, it essentially built out a React based interactive menu system form.

Yes. Like a true builder that would have cost me 1,000 of dollars in months of time. And, of course, it has incomplete information, so it's not perfect out of the get go. But now I'm like, oh, wow. This is where we can go?

But, like, if you hit those buttons here, it gives you, like, new skews down there that you could then just put in a system. So it it literally is like a skew generator in a chat AI based, which is pretty dope. And what I wanna go back to before you move too far forward from this is you said it's a suggestion that it gave you. If you're using AI and you're not taking time to read the output because you're just too busy yelling at it for what you want it to do, you are missing a mark. You've gotta read the output and the suggestions, and you've gotta ask the questions.

This is what, Chris, we should be leaning into. It's like the power of questions and asking, is there anything else that I should be thinking about or doing around the conversation we're having right now? And then read it or listen to it, whichever.

Yeah. And at this point, like so my experience with these tools, I just said, okay. Let's break it up. Let's do one group at a time. And then we get to this place where I'm changing the color.

And, you know, I was having trouble with the color. It changed from blue to green, but then I couldn't see the green. So I'm just like, alright. Here's a picture of the logo. Please match the green.

Right? And then what I realized is that I was building this tool for somebody to use. I can also make it so that AI can now use it, and I give it an example invoice. And the invoice doesn't have any SKUs on it at all. These are our SKUs that never existed before.

And it's like, what SKUs were purchased in this invoice? It gives me the list. After a couple hours, I've created one for 3 different categories of products. And this is with no development experience. You know, now my next step is to ask it, okay, how do I put this, you know, on a HubSpot website page?

But also internally because this isn't a team instance of Claude setting up these chats to go be the place where you do your job because anybody can come in here and use this tool now. I don't even need an external website.

Careful. Careful. I don't need a website. I'll just do my marketing on social media.

For internal.

No. But but but that's the thing. Why? Because if all of a sudden anthropic or GPT or perplexity go away, and now you've made that the hub of the thing that you're do. Like, yes to create and move.

Be careful just living there forever.

Like any good software platform, yes. Be careful how much you're invested and understand what happens if that software is no longer available. I know even with AI now, soon as I hit that limit, I'm like, sign up. Beat. I

mean, I hate to sound like the old guy, like, get off my lawn guy right then, but just be careful. That's the thing. I think that just because you can go faster doesn't mean you shouldn't stop and think about when you should pivot or slow down to where it should be and what you should be doing with the thing that you like. Yeah. I mean, it's okay if, like, you're, like, working really fast, doing a lot of stuff, creating new things, getting all excited, and then decide, you know what?

I need to slow down. Maybe I'll just go to bed, and then tomorrow I can 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.