James Camron, AI Adaptability, and Future Disruption
E15

James Camron, AI Adaptability, and Future Disruption

Intro:

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.

Chris Carolan:

Good morning. Happy Friday. October 25, 2024, we're here. It's time to wake up with AI here with Jordan and Nico. How you fellas doing today?

George B. Thomas:

I'm doing great, brother. I feel like all of a sudden I got an energy surge. Like, as soon as I logged on to this, it was like, transformed, like, ready to, like, talk about all the stuff today. Because there's only 57,000 videos in our Slack channel this morning. Thank you, Nico.

George B. Thomas:

I appreciate that.

Nico Lafakis:

Anytime, man. Anytime. Yeah. This morning has been, the the boys know this morning has been really, really eventful. There's been not necessarily a lot of news, but at least for me, a lot of content has dropped in the last 24 hours.

Nico Lafakis:

So it's always amazing when I go to sleep and I wake up and I see this plethora of videos and they're all, like, 8 hours ago, 9 hours ago, 10 hours ago, and it's, like, I'm sleeping. Can you wait until I'm wake up and then roll some stuff out? But, like, no.

George B. Thomas:

Facts.

Chris Carolan:

Nay. They cannot.

George B. Thomas:

They will not.

Chris Carolan:

We don't want them to either if we're being honest.

Nico Lafakis:

No. I mean, it's been well, you guys know. It's everything. It's everything from, like, education to film and TV to robots to predictions to, like, all sorts of technologies. And I'll just run the gambit so you guys have, like, an under like, a small snippet of what this morning looked like.

Nico Lafakis:

Started out with a story from or actually a video from James Cameron. It's about a 20 minute long video and he's talking about what I expected him to be talking about. If you if you know, like, James Cameron's work, it's very tech related. It's very, like, tech reliant. The main reason it took so long for him to do the second Avatar movie, I'm not saying it was worthwhile.

Nico Lafakis:

It probably would have been more worthwhile if he had completed the technology sooner. I think we would have been more blown away by it. But, nevertheless

George B. Thomas:

I know we're not ditching on the movie. Right?

Nico Lafakis:

I didn't say that.

George B. Thomas:

Okay. Okay.

Intro:

I'm just because this is supposed

George B. Thomas:

to be, like, a good morning wake up on this episode. Yeah. No. It's true. Okay.

George B. Thomas:

Okay.

Nico Lafakis:

It is. But that's all to say that thanks to AI, he's gonna have the third one out soon.

George B. Thomas:

Oh, now that excites me. There

Nico Lafakis:

you go. Yeah. And so he went on to talk about the fact that he's, you know, same same as myself. He's been into this stuff ever since he was a kid and, you know, just been fascinated by it, and that's part of, you know, what he does with movies and talks about how, you know, there is there's great possibility going forward, and it doesn't have to all be like Terminator. Right?

Nico Lafakis:

So it is kinda nice to get the message from the man himself that, like, I don't really see even the even my own depiction of stuff actually coming to fruition. So that was a good video to wake up to. And, then a really interesting video to come out of a company called Clone, and they are making robotics that literally do just that. They clone the same they they work in the same way that a human works. So the system has, like, these pneumatic pumps in the in the chest of it and then, basically, a skeletal structure.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. And then let's stop there for a second. Just pause there for a second because you mentioned the thing that I look over in my Slack, and I see the thumbnail to this video. And I'm like, man, that ish is creepy. So now go ahead and say what it is, but just I'm forewarning people that, like, some of the stuff, if we put it in the show notes or you go search it and you go look for it, like, there might be this thing where you get a little creeped out, but you gotta get past the creepiness.

George B. Thomas:

You gotta be adaptable to learn to set your mind at ease. Sorry, Nico. Go ahead. Continue on with this. Torso by Clone.

George B. Thomas:

Oh my god. It's in my nightmares thumbnail. Yeah. Oh, yes. Yep.

George B. Thomas:

Here we go.

Nico Lafakis:

Yeah. I mean, like, people should be able to see it. Right? So, you know, if you're if you're watching this, what you're looking at is, again, like, a skeletal structure that is wrapped with these tubes, these air tubes that mimic and act like human muscles and human ligaments do. So rather than the traditional machines that we've seen so far, the traditional robots we've seen thus far that need, you know, the same type of mechanical movement that a robot does.

Nico Lafakis:

We have to work around, like, whether it can do like a 360 joint, that kind of thing. Here, we're actually mimicking all the human muscles in the body and tendons and using that as the mechanism to move just like we do as opposed to using pumps and having to use, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I thought that was just extremely cool.

George B. Thomas:

If you're listening to this and you wanna see it, Spotify. We put the videos up on Spotify so you can see the, shenanigans that are happening on this podcast.

Nico Lafakis:

And then next out of that was a pretty shocking tweet from a, engineer at Google who said that self improving AI systems that can enhance themselves by way of technological evolution, we've already got what we need in order to do that. So it's definitely possible to already start building systems, which if you asked me, I would say that OpenAI was already there because the development there is is getting quite fast. I would probably I'd venture to say the same thing about NVIDIA only because of the fact that Jensen has openly admitted that they use AI to engineer new technology. So it's like even even chip engineers, I don't know where they're at in the chain, but they'll soon possibly be behind. You know?

Nico Lafakis:

So it's it like, you have to try to understand and encompass that a lot of this stuff started with chess. Started when Kasparov got beat. And when Kasparov got beat, it was so well that you had to start studying the machine and start studying what the machine's moves were. But chess is a pretty, like, strategic game, and it has only so many moves to it. So it's pretty limited.

Nico Lafakis:

It's at the end of the day, it's a very, very super duper complex version of tic tac toe. Go on the other hand, very different game, has infinite number of outcomes, infinite number of moves, infinite number of plays, the most infinite version of tic tac toe. That being the case, the best Go player retired from the game the moment he was beat by a computer. The rest of the field has been studying the computer ever since. It's an odd thing that we are racing towards creating a technology that we will end up having to learn from, I would think, as opposed to and I'm not sure when that point in time comes.

Nico Lafakis:

It leads right into the next video which is from Ray Kurzweil who is another I I don't know his title straight out the gate. I'm sure it's either computer science, mathematics, or physics. And he has been the one who has predicted AI technology to, like, 85% rate in terms of getting it right. Closer than anybody else, for sure. And he's been doing this since the eighties.

Nico Lafakis:

So it's not like, oh, he's been predicting it in the last 5 years or something like that. Like, no. From the eighties, he predicted, like, when, you know, sufficient AI was gonna come about, and he's been seriously close. So probably about 6 months ago, he was giving a talk and he said that he thought AGI, which again, you know, AGI is this subjective on off sort of mention of things whereas Meta and OpenAI and Anthropic have moved on to this sort of model of AMI, which would be advanced machine, intelligence. Difference between the 2, just it's not so much the acronym.

Nico Lafakis:

It's that AMI is representative of, like, a series of of, let's say, tests that you need to pass in order to say, yeah, you're at that level. Whereas AGI is very speculative. It's subjective. It's like, oh, okay. It is or it isn't.

Nico Lafakis:

Like, there is no finite definition. Nobody can agree on what artificial general intelligence actually means. Some people think that it's just the system, just the chatbot. Other people think it has to be in a robot. Other people further think it has to be in a robot that understands physics that can actually feel, hear, touch, and have all the same senses as a person.

Nico Lafakis:

So, like, nobody can really who knows? And then the level of intelligence too. Like, what level it has to have? Childlike? Does it have to be college level?

Nico Lafakis:

Does it have to be you know, what does it mean to have water cooler level intelligence? Water cooler talk level intelligence. What's that? That video, it basically just talks about the fact that all of this stuff is possible by maybe 2028.

George B. Thomas:

It's crazy because when you say that we have to learn from the computer, immediately people might get freaked out, but, like, Speak and Spell. It's a computer that taught kids. It's not that it's new. It's maybe a little bit more grandiose. Right?

George B. Thomas:

And it's funny because when I hear you, like, speak about all these different things in a row, I even go back to, like, a conversation we're having in the green room yesterday before we actually recorded the episode where we're like, well, Claude projects and now Perplexity Spaces, and we've had GPTs and OpenAI and, like, well, which one? And should I jump and should I change? And so and the thing that I hear out of all of this, especially today, is this idea of adaptability and being able to kinda move and pivot and transition with the times and the platforms and the and the changes. And guess what, folks? That's today's skill that pays the bill.

George B. Thomas:

It's about adaptability with AI. Listen. As AI tools and technologies evolve at lightning speed, as Niko just reminded us in our Slack channel this morning and on this episode, being open to learning and adjusting, well, it's become a must. The businesses and individuals that thrive are those who see AI not as a disruptor, but as an opportunity to grow and optimize their workflows, their processes, the everything. Imagine this scenario.

George B. Thomas:

You've been using a particular tool for years, and suddenly, a new AI powered platform comes out that could automate tasks you've been doing manually. Again, there was an update that Niko put in Slack about an IT software that looks amazing and scarily like HubSpot. But I digress. If you're adaptable, you're excited. You're not overwhelmed.

George B. Thomas:

You dive into the new tool and you figure it out how it works. And before you know it, you're saving time and increasing efficiency like never before. See, adaptability means not getting stuck in the we've always done it this way mindset. It's about seeing these advancements as a chance to level up your skills and your business. Now here's why this matters.

George B. Thomas:

AI is constantly changing. New tools, features, and updates are constantly rolled out. The key is to stay flexible. I love Bruce Lee and the whole become the glass and water and anyway, you can Google that or search it in your latest AI tool that you're using. But you have to learn how to assess these tools, test them out, and see how they can fit into your existing processes.

George B. Thomas:

It's not about mastering every new technology, but about having the right mindset to embrace change and integrate AI where it makes sense. Many AI tools and platforms constantly release updates and new capabilities. Being adaptable means not ignoring these changes. You explore them, get hands on, experience yourself and them together, and use them for your advantage. So let's hit the highlights before we land this plane on today's skill that pays the bills.

George B. Thomas:

Stay open to new tools. Embrace AI advancements. Test and learn. Take time to experiment with new AI features or platforms. And flexibility, ladies and gentlemen, is your human superpower.

George B. Thomas:

AI will continue to evolve. Being adaptable ensures you grow with it, staying relevant and effective. Well, that's today's skill that pays the bills.

Chris Carolan:

Be like water.

Nico Lafakis:

That's it. It's always difficult for me because you always touch on, like, 2 or 3 things where I'm just like,

Chris Carolan:

really?

Nico Lafakis:

Alright. Alright. It's interesting. It's gonna be interesting. And I say that because I was also listening to Paul Reiser's latest episode, and part of that was him talking about how AI is going to be one of the greatest disruptors to job markets we've ever seen.

Nico Lafakis:

Right? And it is. Like, look. Yeah. You're gonna we're gonna have adaptation.

Nico Lafakis:

It's just that we're gonna have to do it quickly, so it's gonna be rough. We've never ripped off the Band Aid of evolution, of having to evolve, like, what we do for a living every day in a very short amount of time. We've always done it over decades, but the the whole yeah. I don't know. The disruptor thing, I was just like, really?

Nico Lafakis:

Alright. I will I will I will try my best not to see it as a disruptor.

Chris Carolan:

Oh, I think you have to. I mean

George B. Thomas:

I I think it will be in ways, and especially if you don't pay attention to any of the words that just came out of my mouth. Like, if you're rigid and put your head in the sand, oh, you about to get disrupted. If you're flowing with it along the way, maybe not as much of a disruption, or maybe you're pivoting into where you need to be instead of being disrupted. So I'm not disagreeing with you in any of those words.

Nico Lafakis:

No. I think you're actually I think you're 100%. But I think that's where it comes from. You're right. Because, yeah, you definitely it it disrupts markets that are unaware that it is happening.

Nico Lafakis:

Markets that are fully aware are not going to have an issue with this. So companies that have been wrapping their heads around it, that have been onboarding, that have been paying attention to their employees that use it, that have been coming up with policy, you're good. If you're still I I don't care if you were a mechanic shop. If you are still, like, asleep on this thing, it's ridiculous. And it is gonna come back to bite you so hard.

Nico Lafakis:

So hard. If you are somebody who I don't know. You're near your you're near your sixties, 65, something like that. Hey.

George B. Thomas:

Easy there. Easy there.

Nico Lafakis:

I know. I know.

Chris Carolan:

And I'm not there yet,

George B. Thomas:

but I'm getting close.

Nico Lafakis:

I'm not targeting. Don't worry. It's more specific, more granular. If you're near that age and you had a really hard time coping with smartphones, or you're one of those people that, like, along the way, there was that movement. Right?

Nico Lafakis:

Where people ditched their smartphones and went back to flip phones. If you're one of those people, I don't know what to tell you. It's only going to get more and more complex. Sort of. It's not so much complex in the way of how the technology works.

Nico Lafakis:

That's what's so different this time around. When you were talking about George, you know, being in school and and being taught by the speak and spell and that, the thing is, it's the way you phrased it and that's what I've I've been sort of finding out with my conversation with Claude. The fact that I phrase my conversation with Claude as it's an intelligence, it's a form of intelligence that I'm speaking to, it's like a brain that I'm speaking to, it actually has a much more I don't know. It has more respect for the conversation. It has it seems like it has more respect for me as a user that I'm treating it that way.

Nico Lafakis:

And it seems to understand the difference between being treated like some sort of robotic librarian and another person that you're having a conversation with.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. As a marketer, it feels like it's personalization on steroids. Like and I and I was mentioning this again this morning in the green room. I was like, y'all, it it called me y'all. It's like y'all might wanna think about and I was like, what?

George B. Thomas:

It's like, I agree. It's like it knows you. I'm using air quotes for those of you that understands better what you're trying to do and how to communicate with you. It is a really and, again, we're talking about the new update to Claude and stuff, but it's just getting very interesting.

Nico Lafakis:

Understanding how this stuff works, understanding that it is a part of what it's gonna take to move forward, that is. That's that's part of that growth mindset. Right? It's understanding how this is going to shape your org going forward. How can you apply this to your services department?

Nico Lafakis:

How can you apply this to your digital marketing department? How does it apply to your sales team? It's gotta be a method where everyone is on board, everyone is kind of working from the same I don't wanna say trough, but something like that. Everybody's working at the same table, let's put it that way, and they're all with the same understanding because without that you just have everyone it's it's Wild West. Everybody's kind of using they're using whatever model they want, they're using whatever prompts they want, they're using whatever this they want.

Nico Lafakis:

Outside of the org, okay, that's fine. That makes sense. But how many orgs are are allowing their employees to use any of these tools without using an org based one, without using an agency based model, which has that solidified voice that the agency wants to have. So there's there's a difference between the 2, right? Like marketing should be leveraging, like, you know, we we talked about making custom GPTs.

Nico Lafakis:

Marketing is trying to maintain the voice of a brand while building content for that brand. It should be building a custom model that is based around that brand for you know, with whatever public data is available so that it has an understanding of what the voice of that brand is. So that when you're, you know, generating that content, it's consistent. But then, again, it's it's gotta be something that comes from on high. It has a startup top.

Nico Lafakis:

The top of the org needs to get as familiar with these tools as everyone else there was a day in graphic design world when seniors didn't really need to know how photoshop worked and they didn't really need to know how digital stuff worked and they didn't need to know anything about formats and all that which made our lives impossible because we'd have to come up with content that fit these ridiculous restrictions that didn't understand anything about the platform and its restrictions or its capabilities. If the top of the the org doesn't understand what's possible, how are they going to understand what's happening beneath them? This isn't a case where it's content that's, you know, going out the door that has been approved. This is content that may be getting generated that's going out there. Who's approving it?

Nico Lafakis:

Are we all with the same understanding?

George B. Thomas:

It's funny because there's a couple things that when I hear you talking like this, I'm like, alright. So one, you have to have ownership mentality, and you've gotta own this ish from the top down and, like, really be in it and going for it. And when I say owner's mentality, like, there's a that's a whole podcast episode in itself. The other thing that came to my mind is, like and it's and, again, I'm pulling things that the way that I've lived and the way that I've kinda come at life is, like, 1% better each and every day. Right?

George B. Thomas:

Because you're, like, you're at least focused on it. So, like, you're owning it and you're focused on it and you're trying to get 1, 5, 10 percent better each and every day. But then the thing that really is kinda, like, slapping me in the face when I'm listening to you, Niko, is this idea of standardization and governance. Like, you have to have a standardized, like, process platform for your people to do this AI thing. I don't know if organizations like, we can barely get them to do that around data hygiene, Jiminy Christmas in their in their CRM.

George B. Thomas:

Like, I don't know if they're thinking about this yet when it comes to the world of, like, AI and business and, like, what it all means.

Nico Lafakis:

And I mean, I think like, so think about this. Right? You're you got Sidekick Strategies here. You got Sidekick Strategies New York. You got Sidekick Chicago.

Nico Lafakis:

You got Sidekick Cali. You got Sidekick Florida. Sidekick Texas.

George B. Thomas:

Wow. We've really grown.

Nico Lafakis:

Oh, yeah, man. Give it just give it a year. At this point, all these different brands, you you can't. You're gonna approve all that content? How are you gonna approve all the messaging?

Nico Lafakis:

You don't have time for that. But if you took the time to build a centralized model that everybody logs into, that everybody accesses, and that centralized model has all the predetermined messaging it understands. You don't have to. When you're writing the voice, you're writing a singular voice for the model, and you understand that that is going to be the voice that's used for the content no matter where it's being created.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. And the back of what you're saying, Chris, my mind goes back to your let's build. And you said to me multiple times, man, your GPT makes it so easy for me to build this description because it just knows almost too much what I what I'm asking for. That's that's the output that you want. That's what you wanna get as an organization with what Niko's talking about.

Chris Carolan:

Yeah. And the problem, Nico, is that in order to build that model, you need to have a mindset of empowering your people.

Nico Lafakis:

Mhmm.

Chris Carolan:

And instead of coming at it like it's approval versus empowerment. Yep. If I need to approve everything because we focus from a place of risk constantly, then things just don't get done because you can't possibly approve everything that's going out the door at scale every day. And that is why the model is so important, but, like, you don't even think to make the model or to try and solve that problem if you can't move from approval to empowerment, which, again, we always come back to culture. Because this alignment, like, at the top truly needs to be like, does everybody know what the North Star is?

Chris Carolan:

Does everybody know what the path is? What the plan is for the business? Does everybody know our values? Are we all aligned there? If we all aligned there, then you get the policies like the one I've already heard.

Chris Carolan:

I've always heard about from HubSpot where it's like use good judgment. You got it. Like, we trust you. Like, you wouldn't be on the team if you weren't using good judgment, like, in how we've built these policies and, like, from a risk perspective. And I get why it's there.

Chris Carolan:

And that's why, like, bringing it back to earlier, you talk about we've created this thing in AI that we are now going to learn from. Like, for me, it's like, of course, when we try to teach each other like from this policy risk mindset with this some kind of agenda whether it's subconscious or or direct, like we're not great at teaching each other. There's also like an end to that. So if we're thirsting for knowledge and thirsting for understanding, yeah, let's build something that we can actually, like, learn better from and gain knowledge from and let's be okay with that. Let's embrace it, which we know, like, when we're still talking about growth mindset versus fixed mindset in 2024, that's a challenge.

Chris Carolan:

Right? Again, that's why we're here. I think at this point, like, the scale needed and the gaps in these knowledge bases, showing up every day is one of the only things. It is is almost more important than everything else in in my opinion. If you're trying to share knowledge and solve these issues, the feedback loops that we get by being out there every day and hearing how people are responding.

Chris Carolan:

You know, like, even my mom yesterday said she saw the show, and she's like it was like, alright. Qualitative evidence that she's now woken up on another level, after seeing that chat. And that's the kind of thing, like, if hopefully, if we have these conversations and show some stuff, you know, people are gonna, you know, they're gonna wake up with AI. Have a great weekend, everybody.

Intro:

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.

Intro:

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

Creators and Guests

Chris Carolan
Host
Chris Carolan
Chris Carolan is a seasoned expert in digital transformation and emerging technologies, with a passion for AI and its role in reshaping the future of business. His deep knowledge of AI tools and strategies helps businesses optimize their operations and embrace cutting-edge innovations. As a host of Wake Up With AI, Chris brings a practical, no-nonsense approach to understanding how AI can drive success in sales, marketing, and beyond, helping listeners navigate the AI revolution with confidence.
Nick Lafakis
Host
Nick Lafakis
Niko Lafakis is a forward-thinking AI enthusiast with a strong foundation in business transformation and strategy. With experience driving innovation at the intersection of technology and business, Niko brings a wealth of knowledge about leveraging AI to enhance decision-making and operational efficiency. His passion for AI as a force multiplier makes him an essential voice on Wake Up With AI, where he shares insights on how AI is reshaping industries and empowering individuals to work smarter, not harder.