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Transcript

What Can Students & Teachers Build with Vultr? · AI Advocates

• 0:00
  Music: Reclaim your time. Time.
• 0:05
  Lisa Dieker: Welcome to AI Advocates. I'm Lisa Dieker,
• 0:09
  Maggie Mosher: and I'm Maggie Mohser.
• 0:10
  Lisa Dieker: And Maggie, we're so excited. Where are we today?
• 0:12
  Lisa Dieker: We're here together.
• 0:13
  Maggie Mosher: I know we are at AI4, the industry's largest AI conference, and we've been speaking and going to roundtables and giving roundtables, and we have been having a marvelous time. And we're excited here to have one of these speakers at AI4 with us to talk to us about the hackathons that he has available. So please introduce yourself. Tell us a sentence or two about yourself, and then we'd love to hear what you what you have available.
• 0:36
  Kevin Cochrane: Well, so excited to be on this podcast with you all. So I'm Kevin Cochrane. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer here at Vultr. Vultr is a public cloud platform that specializes in AI infrastructure. What is a public cloud platform? A public cloud platform is Amazon Web Services. It's Google Cloud Platform. It's the place where you build and run applications like your websites or your mobile apps. So we're a public cloud platform that specializes in AI specifically. So our goal is to help train a next generation workforce, next generation set of developers, to build and run what we call AI native applications.
• 1:17
  Lisa Dieker: So exciting! Well, we're excited because you finally have a sibling that you said is an educator.
• 1:22
  Kevin Cochrane: Correct. My brother is an actual teacher, and his first day back at school is actually today.
• 1:28
  Lisa Dieker: Oh wow, that's exciting that's totally. Well, we're in Las Vegas, and our we'd love to hear for you to just give us a summary of like what Vultr could maybe offer to teachers that they might be interested in something about hacking stuff.
• 1:41
  Kevin Cochrane: So yeah, so so much available for teachers and students, so you know we're big believers in you know enabling you know the workforce of the future. So we do three things.
• 1:54
  Kevin Cochrane: Number one is we produce a tremendous amount of public documentation, and this documentation is something that any student can just read and learn and just copy, paste, click, and do everything. You can self-train and learn everything about AI just by reading our documentations. It's super simple, super intuitive.
• 2:12
  Kevin Cochrane: You can't be beat.
• 2:16
  Maggie Mosher: So they could throw some documentations into like NotebookLM and ask it questions?
• 2:20
  Kevin Cochrane: Even bet yes, but even better. Wait for the point number three. Point number two is we run over 250 hackathons around the globe. So what we do is we set up a challenge, and then we actually give you and a whole environment for you to build an application.
• 2:33
  Kevin Cochrane: So we literally have mentors that sit with you and help you, you know, do new things. And then of course, you know, we judge, and some people win, some people don't. But everyone participates, and every everyone learns something. It's amazing, right? We have 10s of 1000s of people go through our hackathons. Then the third part is we also have like a little agent. So all of that documentation is also just exposed to a nice little simple agent. So all you do is just ask it a question, and it will give you custom curricula, a custom learning path for everything you need to to learn, everything you need to read, everything you need to do.
• 3:13
  Maggie Mosher: And as a teacher, who doesn't like custom? Then you can make it individualized.
• 3:15
  Maggie Mosher: And I love talking to agents because I think it gives you a better idea of what's really going on, rather than scanning all the documents. So that's why you have that right there.
• 3:24
  Kevin Cochrane: Yeah, so we produce so many 1000s and 1000s of of documents, right? So how do you go through all of that?
• 3:30
  Kevin Cochrane: What what where do you start?
• 3:30
  Kevin Cochrane: What do you read? Don't worry about it. We create all this documentation because it actually just feeds the model, and then you just ask the agent, like, I want to do X. Like, what do you want to build today? Just tell the agent, and we'll say, Here's everything you need to read. Here's everything you need to do.
• 3:45
  Lisa Dieker: Awesome. I'm excited. First of all, you said all of the magic words. It's free. You know.
• 3:49
  Kevin Cochrane: Oh yeah, we give. If you're a student, guess what? I'm going to give you $250 with the free credits, and you can just start building.
• 3:56
  Lisa Dieker: I love it. I love it. So my my other assumption though is what grade of a teacher? Because now you know maybe I'm a little AI fearful.
• 4:02
  Lisa Dieker: Is this kindergarten? Is this middle school? Is this high school?
• 4:06
  Kevin Cochrane: I mean, I think I think kids should start as early as possible. I really do think. I mean, even going to elementary school or definitely middle school. I mean, like kids are like sponges, right? They can learn anything. So I think like put the put power in their hands, just give them access, and you, you remarkable what kids will do. But yeah, it's for everybody. I mean, we run a lot of university programs, so definitely, if you know, for people like yourselves, I'd love to sit down, set you up with an account, get you hacking, and we can do it.
• 4:41
  Lisa Dieker: So now, if I'm an elementary teacher, I might be afraid to put the kids on the system, but maybe we could hack something together.
• 4:47
  Kevin Cochrane: We'll Hack something together, correct.
• 4:49
  Kevin Cochrane: That's right.
• 4:50
  Lisa Dieker: We could turn the kids through.
• 4:51
  Kevin Cochrane: That's right.
• 4:53
  Lisa Dieker: FERPA, COPPA, anything you need to worry about, like in the science class. Sometimes for teachers because that's always a big issue.
• 5:03
  Kevin Cochrane: Right. But um, so.
• 5:05
  Kevin Cochrane: Oh yeah. So.
• 5:05
  Lisa Dieker: Like like student identities protected. Anything That might not be what your business model is. So like that?
• 5:06
  Lisa Dieker: we just wanted to make sure teachers understand.
• 5:07
  Kevin Cochrane: Yeah, no, 100% 100% So, you know, you do need an email account. That's that is that is very very important. So you need an email account. You know, for younger for younger kids, you know, they could always, if they don't have an email account, they could use a parent's email account, and then that way the parent can monitor the communications that we're sending them, because we do send them communications like when we, for example, issue them credit, we have to send them a confirmation of receipt of credit. So there's an email that you have to get.
• 6:04
  Maggie Mosher: teachers has control of, or parents have control of, and then.
• 6:23
  Kevin Cochrane: That's right, 100% 100% going to change the world. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't know what we see coming out of our hackathons, like real kids that see real everyday problems and that they build something that fixes it. It's wild, wild.
• 6:42
  Maggie Mosher: What is the coolest? thing you've seen?
• 6:43
  Lisa Dieker: That's what I was going to ask.
• 6:44
  Kevin Cochrane: Oh, the coolest thing I needed to see was like an application, like so. One of our, we do a lot of university programs in India as well as the United States, and then one of it was, you know, in India, right? One of the big problems is people don't know, well, the you know the whether the local water is like healthy, right?
• 7:01
  Kevin Cochrane: And so what they did was they actually built like a like a model that actually took all of these data sources across the government and analyzed it, and then would let and then build an application so people could ask questions and basically just say, "Is it safe to drink the water here?" And then the model will give them a pitch perfect answer. Well, water here historically, you know, has been contaminated six months ago from the chemical spill, and you know the clean, the cleanliness, you know, might not be great. You may want to do bottled water, and it was really like something that really could really matters. Really matters, right?
• 7:42
  Kevin Cochrane: It's absolutely amazing. Yeah, you make a difference now.
• 7:46
  Kevin Cochrane: Exactly.
• 7:47
  Maggie Mosher: Really matters.
• 7:47
  Maggie Mosher: It wasn't AI that probably came up with it. It was creative or creative teachers that used AI.
• 7:52
  Kevin Cochrane: That's right, and I think getting kids into these hackathon programs and solving real world problems, I think, is really really important because you know what we don't want them just using AI to generate content to put on Instagram. Like they have to understand, like AI is a tool that they can use to build a future, right? It's not for creating images on Instagram, right? So we have to train them to do something real and meaningful that gives them hope and fulfillment and makes them the best person that they can be, not posting on Instagram.
• 8:29
  Lisa Dieker: Your enthusiasm is great. Well, my last question for you is, I'm a new teacher.
• 8:32
  Kevin Cochrane: Yes.
• 8:32
  Kevin Cochrane: Congratulations.
• 8:34
  Lisa Dieker: And it's the first week of class and.
• 8:36
  Kevin Cochrane: Congratulations.
• 8:38
  Lisa Dieker: I'm recording this podcast today. When do I do?
• 8:40
  Lisa Dieker: Where do I start? Like, what's the simplest thing you would tell me about AI? As a novice teacher that maybe knows just enough about AI to be dangerous.
• 8:48
  Kevin Cochrane: Right. I would literally. I think the starting point is go to our agent and just start asking questions.
• 8:55
  Lisa Dieker: Okay awesome.
• 8:55
  Kevin Cochrane: Because everyone starts at a different level of awareness, different level of curiosity. Just start with what is it that you need to learn today, and ask our agent, and our agent will give you a perfect response. We we invest a lot to make sure our agent is super helpful.
• 9:11
  Maggie Mosher: We want to thank you so much for helping us give teachers back their time and to be able to send to students. And we will link everything you told us about on this podcast and YouTube station.
• 9:21
  Kevin Cochrane: Awesome! Thank you guys so much. Take care.