Job Numbers, Asking AI for Help, and Historical Moments

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 wake up with AI, George b Thomas, Nico Fakus. How you fellas doing today?

Whee. Equally. Equally doing, doing very well.

One thing I love about AI is I already know that it is helping me do what we were just talking about as far as, like, preparing this foundation around me and documenting things and make it making it so I can just show up. And George was just talking about how much easier it is to do things that we wanna do, like create content when it's just ready for you and you can just show up, bring your whole self, be present. So glad we could come together for this daily show because that's really the only way a daily show can work. Can't have a lot of work to do outside of this time or else it's not gonna work. Super thankful that we got Nico just funneling in news every morning so that we have stuff to talk about.

What do we got today, Nico?

I don't know if I'd used the word funneling. Maybe flooding. Flooding is a better f word than funneling for what's happening in our Slack channel. But

go ahead, Nico. Fault.

It's not my fault that that works.

Fault, whoever they are.

Yeah. I mean, like, that much advance is happening. Right? It's it's not my fault that it's so much so quickly. So a lot, obviously.

Lots going on. I'm not gonna avoid it. I think it's the topic that is going to be highest of mind, at least for most people. As a topic, I see it like the movie ratings on IMDB. There's the tomato meter and then there's the popcorn bucket.

Right? You know, to me, the the tomato meter is like, oh, innovation and crazy amounts of efficiencies and, you know, productivity through the roof and everything is just swimmingly well. Now in the back of my mind is the, you know, ever understanding that we live in a capitalist nation. So the idea of go along to get along from a business perspective doesn't really exist except if you're in the nonprofit world. And even then, it's still kinda cutthroat.

That being said, the popcorn aspect of it, there's been plenty of stories. Again, if you pay attention, earlier this year, Google let go of their entire Python department and just said, basically, like, we don't need you. Story just broke yesterday. Don't know how I missed it, but it happens. Sundar Pichai announces that announces that 25% of the code that Google writes is written by AI.

So that may I bet I bet they're lowballing that, by the way.

Just gonna throw that out there, but yeah. Very much going to assume that, especially since

Anthropic announced that it also uses internal agents to write code. Agents, not GPT platforms. Difference being go do this for me. Go create this for me. Then OpenAI, of course.

Nobody wants to be left out, So OpenAI, of course, now didn't announce it, but mentioned that they might have something like that internally. And so there was a there was, you know, another avid follower who happened to go perusing OpenAI's site and pulled some some code from the site and noticed that there were 7 7 different agents that were coded into the page. So the long and short of it being the first of all, I would say, the first of all jobs where we're gonna see it's gonna be cuts in a way that you hadn't expected. Try to think of this like what was happening with automation, okay, on a on a industrial scale was that it was displacing, but within the court. So Amazon was displacing workers in warehouses, but those workers then moved to a different type of distribution system.

So they helped to expand elsewhere. Walmart and other companies use self checkout, automation checkout, but now those employees help with delivery driving. They help with order picking. So it it changes a bit. Right?

There's some evolution there. Now that evolution took time from self checkout to the to the point of Walmart doing delivery and and order picking, it took years. I remember when it first started, at least for me, I was down in Florida at the time and it took probably from then until the time that I saw them initiate, delivery had to have been at least 4 years. And that I mean, I know that I say years like it sounds like a decade, but come on. At this point, a week sounds is like a month to me.

So It's a lifetime. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it it is. It's like so much time passes. So many things now happen within a week's period of time. It's warped it for me.

So all that just to say that the same thing is about to happen to coding where coders are the the job of coding, being a coder, it's going to be the the same as being a prompt engineer. Let's put it that way. There was a great use for it in the beginning, but then it just went away. The whole but the thing is is people learned how to prompt better, so you didn't need orgs didn't need it as much because their their individuals learned how to prompt better. Training helped them with that.

So, yeah, things go away, but even Claude, I gotta say, I have like philosophical conversations with Claude on a daily basis, and even with Claude, we've had the discussion about cosmic balance. If you if you think all the way back to, you know, early days of history, cosmic balance has always been there. Sunrise, sunset. There was Anubis, right, and set. Two different gods of 2 different types.

Right? And then you go forward into, ancient Asian cultures, yin and yang. Almost the perfect, I mean the perfect representation. Even when it comes to, you know, purported time travel theories. What's the shape that represents it?

Einstein's Rosen bridge. It's an infinite symbol, continual balance. Talking about with Quad, I asked, look throughout history, see what happens. And even it came back and said, yeah, you're right. No matter what, when there's great calamity, there's great triumph.

Whenever there's something horrific that happens, there's something amazing that happens on the other side. Whenever there's a mass of people that die in one place, there's something else that's, you know, born and created in another place. When there's economic collapse, then there's a change in the system and a change in the social way that people were acting before. Yeah. This is this is gonna happen, right?

And I'm starting to see it on a wide scale. There's there's all types of differences. Either your people are losing their jobs wholesale or it's a case where you're being let go and then being offered to be hired back, but at a much lower rate, maybe 50% of what you were making before. And initially, when some friends of mine who were coders were telling me the stories, I said well, that makes sense. And they were they were shocked and they were insulted by it and they said oh, you know, you don't understand our field and how much how much time and years and money and training and certifications.

And I said, yeah, I know. You just you got nerfed. It sucks. That's what happens. They came out with this tool and it nerfed your capability and now everybody can do what you do.

So now that everybody can do what you do, what's going to be the evolution? Right? It's really a matter of, you know, what where does it go from here? What do you do from here? The displacement is gonna be super fast, and if you're looking at job numbers, you saw the job numbers released today, and it ain't good.

It's not good where you it's in odd places, so it's not just tech. It's in construction. It's in a lot of different places, But long story short with that is that hiring has slowed down immensely even in corporate, and that that was to be expected. My brother and I have conversations about this often because he's he's much more of an economist than I am. And he said, well, what's your projection?

And I said, well, you're you're gonna see a slowdown first and then you're gonna see hiring just freeze because corps are gonna understand and start to leverage and and see how they can can get this stuff going and how they can make one person into 4 people and all that kind of thing. And then you're gonna start to see some trimming because after you flex how much one person can do, maybe one person is the equivalent of 4 by comparison to another person that's using the tool and they're not very far ahead, but what's really odd about this thing, it's what George was saying, critical thinking combined with creativity. When they look at the studies and they show what's happening when you apply these AI coders to people who don't know how to code, The level of knowledge gain is like 80% plus. The skill gain, their ability to code software is 80% plus when they start using these assistants, meaning that they can do things that you wouldn't have thought possible before. You know, I'm gonna show off something on Friday.

It's gonna blow everyone's mind, and I did it in a day, inside of a day on a weekend. And

it's a blow time. Where should I be? What?

Yeah. And that's the thing is I did it with Quad. And this was before the update dropped. Had I done it when the update dropped, I might have just been able to finish in a couple hours, 2, 3 hours. Maybe.

Maybe less. The majority of the time was the clicking and the copy pasting. It took no time to produce the code. And I would say it was a 2 and 3 chance that it was accurate the first go around. But lately, I've been doing like functions and stuff and it's 1 for 1.

Ask for the function. Here it is. Works right out the gate. It even corrected a function that I I wrote improperly. I forgot to add a little remainder on it, and it was just like, yep.

Here you go. The the the story of the day is just, you know, job loss numbers are gonna be there. Google's gonna be talking about this stuff. A lot of different companies are gonna be talking about this stuff. You're gonna be hearing about, especially related to coding and data processing.

You're gonna hear about job loss in those sectors. It's really just a matter of time. You you have to kinda consider everything to be on a little bit of a pause. And it's this weird thing, and it sucks, I don't know if it sucks or not, it's odd to say it, it's this weird thing where you just have to wait for industry to figure it out. You have to wait for these companies to figure out where they've been able to maximize, and then that tells them where they can put more bodies.

So it's it's interesting when I hear you say that because my mind transports to another place of my life, and that was when I was in the military. And what I would tell the listeners to this or viewers of this is, like, you might literally be in a hurry up and wait scenario. Meaning, hurry up. Wake up with AI. Hurry up.

Make yourself the type of human that can be 4 humans in one with the AI assistant and your human powered creativity, curiosity, all of that stuff. And then you might have to wait to find where the slot that is that you will now fit in. And and, I mean, some people might be fearful of this. You know? I can see where this might become like, oh my god.

What am I gonna do? But I think if you it and I don't mean to say this in any sort of way, but for me, that would be the fuel for me to get off my keister and start just leveraging, learning the crap out of whatever it is that I could learn or leverage around this transformational disruptive technology that is not getting put back in the box. So all that to say, like, if you haven't started today, start today to build yourself into that human that you need to be, but maybe even start to be prepared for a pause moment? And how do you how do you start to enable yourself to bridge that gap today?

So you could wait. You could wait for sure, or you could leverage the hell out of this playing field that's been created for you. Get help from it. Use it to create the opportunity for you. I was having a conversation yesterday.

We keep coming back to this. This change is different in that it doesn't necessarily require humans to happen, but also the change can help us change. We don't have to wait for everybody to get it necessarily and figure it out for themselves. We have this tool now that will help us figure it out. And in that balanced conversation that you're talking about, the reason I'm glad it's smarter than us is it's gonna help us.

It's gonna be a better predictor of the positive to whatever negative is being described, I think, or is happening. So if if you're there and you're like, I'm a coder and I see this happening. I know my job is not long for this world. What should I be doing? Like, this is my skill set.

This is what's happening in the industry. Where can I go create opportunity for other companies who haven't figured this out yet? It's happened for me in marketing and digital marketing. We make all these assumptions because these companies are successful, that they've figured out most of the stuff. They haven't figured out most of the stuff.

Right? People still suck at LinkedIn. They suck at content strategy. And if you can figure out that leverage point because these companies have no choice but to freeze because they've got to figure out how to build AI initiatives into the business plans that had no AI initiatives.

Now I gotta ask you guys something about that. Do you feel because I and I'll say right out ahead of time I do, I 100% feel this way. Do you feel that orgs are doing this? Because of the fact that they the higher ups are just not there, where the people who are actually in the trenches, they're using the software every day, they're using the tools every day. They're maximizing the the capabilities every day.

I'd say most are still sleeping on AI. Yes.

I mean, let's just go you you mentioned multiple levels. Right? Like, do I think leadership in a large percentage of cases has a lot of other things that they're worried about in doing and maybe not leaning into it to the depth of understanding that they should potentially? So I think there are a large amount of employees that are trying to make their work easier and digging into as as well as they can, as fast as they can. Yes.

Do I also believe there's a large portion that like, you don't pay me enough, pal. I'm gonna clock in, clock out. Why do I need to learn that? I've been doing this for I think there's a large portion of those folks too. The thing I wanna go back to, though, is Chris said something about, like, asking it to help you.

One of the hardest things for me as a human is to ask other humans for help. It's a dysfunction that many of us have where we're like, I got this. Let me walk it off. Let me brush it off. Like, I'll figure it out.

Like, I I haven't asked to ask nobody for nothing for all of my life. So why would I start asking anybody for something now? Like but now you're saying, oh, yeah. But ask this other intelligence for we can't even ask each other for help. How are we gonna have an open enough mind to ask it for help?

Right? By the way, I do ask it for help. You you have to have an open mind. You have to have a a different understanding, a a a mindset to, like, what it is and how you're leveraging it. But but for a large portion of humans, even thinking about asking for help in general, let alone asking help of AI, I think there's gonna be a big disconnect for a lot of people there.

I I I see that viewpoint, but then I also see the viewpoint of, well, I'd rather ask a machine than a person because at least other people won't know that I don't know how to solve this problem. I can do it secretly. Well I can secretly know

Or or my secret goes into the model, and now all the world knows about my secret. Like, that's see that's

Unless you're using Claude. Right? Or you're using, like, a temp chat on gbt. Like, there are ways around

this, though. You're answering this from your level of understanding. There's words around it.

They exist. I can't ignore them. That's why we have this show is so that other people can wake up with AI and understand what it is you're supposed to know about how to use this stuff. Yeah. Completely to your point.

If you are uploading spreadsheet information, sensitive information, and you're using GPT, there is open the drop down. There is a little little slider at the bottom that says temporary chat. Keeps you from sending anything over there. The chat the data ends when your chat ends. With Claude, nothing goes back to the model.

Believe me when I say the next iteration won't train on your stuff. It won't need to. And especially the iteration after that. It won't need your stuff anymore. Like, these even the current models you're using, about 25% of the data they're trained on is their own artificial.

It's artificial data. Synthetic.

Synthetic data. Yeah. I love that term. I mean, I don't love it love it, but I'm like, okay. That's kind of a that's a cool way to

To describe it. Yeah.

To describe it. You know?

Yeah. I would I'd say, like, even synthetic intelligence, but, no, I think that's even that's still an animal. I think that's

So back to the back to the irrational human being lane with George. Like, all those things, like, that is the rational argument, Nico, and that is something we want to share and and create education around. But in the meantime, in the space, the rational thoughts come from, I don't know what this thing is, and people around me are giving me the say like, I'm exposed to Nico just as much as my as I am exposed to friend a, b, c, d, which are getting their information from other sources. And I think that's where I definitely learned not to assume, you know, knowledge in any case from that perspective. And that's, you know, you still like, some of the most simple LinkedIn posts, like, about how to create a contact record.

Like, some of those are, like, some of the best performing stuff because at some level, there's somebody new trying to use the thing, and they just don't know. And that's where because I I fully agree with you. I feel like there's key learning points to target at certain segments. And, like, if you can help people understand, if you use these, don't worry about your information being known by everybody. It's just not possible.

And then if you use that, no judgments coming back your way. Like, the all the reasons we don't ask for help, AI is not doing that. Right? It's just straight. There's no subjective responses, and it's just it's not judging you for needing help.

It has no agenda. Right? It's not gonna think anything of you because you're asking for help, and that's where it's just another trust factor of this thing that I could be using in my life, whether it's a human or or a machine, less relevant if I come up with, you know, reasons not to trust it. And that's where really anybody that's advocating for AI, just nonstop education is needed because I just remember being at one of the first, like, feedback forums of the admin hug this year that was related to the sales AI tools and what people wanna see at a prospecting AI and and stuff like that. And it was just like all the like, you have the product team all talking about the functionality of tool.

Meanwhile, all the questions in the chat are about where's the data going, like, all the usual questions about, I love these tools, but if I can't get my leader to understand the safety related to using these tools meanwhile, nobody on the product team or on the call was mentioning, hey. Go to behind hubspotai. Com where all of these questions are answered. And it's, like, so clear. If you knew that existed as a resource, you should use that every day with your leadership team to answer these questions.

And it's just we don't know these things are available, on either side, and we gotta figure out how to help people find these resources.

It's interesting when I hear you say that because I have been helping train people for years. What? 2013? So 11 years now, training people on on HubSpot. And one of the things that has been, kind of understanding is I don't need to know everything.

I just need to know where everything is. Because if I can share where it is, then I can teach it and they can teach themselves. And, Chris, here's the thing is, where is everything when it comes to AI? I mean, oh my god. Just our little Slack channel just our little Slack channel is, like, on some days, it's like, I don't even know.

I don't know. Like but we have this whole world this whole world of AI. How is one supposed to be able to know where all of it is to be able to pick and choose the things that they need to know? Also, in a world, by the way, where you don't wanna use Google anymore, and that's where you used to go to find all the things. So, like, even in ways that we don't think about it being disruptive, it's disrupting the way that we can even find the things to teach or learn the things that we need to know to do the thing with the thing, which is 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.