Latest / Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community) / The Centralization of Power in AI // Kyle Harrison // # 181
Transcript
- 0:00I'm Kyle Harrison, General partner at Contrary and I don't
- 0:03drink coffee, but I have a crippling addiction to Diet
- 0:06Coke. Welcome, welcome everyone.
- 0:08We are back with another ML OPS community podcast.
- 0:11I'm your host, Dimitrios, and today I am talking with none
- 0:15other than Kyle, who you just heard say he doesn't like
- 0:18coffee. No, this conversation was
- 0:21fascinating on so many different levels.
- 0:23I really appreciate the report that he put together, which if
- 0:27you do not know is called the openness of AI.
- 0:30We'll leave a link to that in the description.
- 0:33If you haven't read it yet, go and check it out he got into.
- 0:38Why she wrote the report, what the reports all about,
- 0:40obviously, And then the dangers that he calls out in the report.
- 0:45And one of those dangers being the centralization of power when
- 0:49it comes to AI. And really we're talking about
- 0:52open AI a lot in this conversation and the pros and
- 0:56cons that come with open AI. I thought it was fascinating how
- 1:00deep he went into the privacy part.
- 1:04And for me it felt like or it feels like.
- 1:08Lots of people's privacy is one of those things like peace on
- 1:13Earth and the data mesh. Everyone wants it, but at the
- 1:18end of the day, you're willing to sacrifice a lot.
- 1:22If there is an easier and less friction way of doing something,
- 1:27and to timestamp this, we are recording it about a day or two
- 1:31after ChatGPT Enterprise came out, so we talked a lot about
- 1:36that and how trustworthy Open AI is when it comes to dealing with
- 1:42your data. And are they going to train GTA5
- 1:45on your data? Well, maybe, maybe not.
- 1:47I thought we had a really cool discussion around that and the
- 1:51potential. Is there?
- 1:53And so his ability to be super bullish on lots of companies
- 1:58opting away from using Open AI was fascinating.
- 2:02But he also talked in the report in in this conversation about
- 2:08how opening strategy right now, open AI strategy right now is to
- 2:13just proliferate the market and get into the hands of everyone
- 2:18and be the best and easiest use case of.
- 2:22Trying to do anything with AI because that's the playbook.
- 2:26As soon as they are in everyone's hands, then three
- 2:29years down the road, once they've trained whatever on
- 2:33everyone's data and we don't like it and we want to rise up,
- 2:36it's going to be a lot harder to rip off that Band-Aid.
- 2:39So we get into all of that and more in this conversation.
- 2:43Kyle is a general partner at Contrary.
- 2:46He leads Series A and growth stage Investing and he joined
- 2:52them when he was a partner. When he went up to general
- 2:55partner, he's definitely making some moves his portfolio.
- 2:59This is what was awesome to me. We talked a lot about his
- 3:02portfolio companies in this call, some of them being ramp
- 3:08replete. Cohere.
- 3:12Snowflake and Databricks, that's interesting one that he went
- 3:16with snowflakes and data bricks. And by the way, he's also got a
- 3:22sub stack where he regularly shares his analysis on the
- 3:25venture capital landscape. You can click the link in the
- 3:29description to check that out. It's called Investing 101.
- 3:34So let's get into it before we do.
- 3:37The thing that would mean the world to me is if you can share
- 3:40this episode with one friend that you think.
- 3:43It would be valuable to that would mean the world to me.
- 3:45So let's go. here to talk about all things AI, and I want to
- 3:57dive into the hype around AI. You've been going deep into the
- 4:03openness and the closeness of AI.
- 4:05You've also been just thinking a lot about.
- 4:08The hype and if there's real businesses to be built on top of
- 4:12this. Can you just give us your Where
- 4:16are you sitting right now? What's your angle?
- 4:18What? How are you looking at this
- 4:19space? Absolutely.
- 4:22The most interesting thing about what we're going through is, I
- 4:25mean by note, you know, by every stretch of the imagination.
- 4:28This is a huge paradigm shift in technology and everybody sort of
- 4:33appreciating it. The one thing that I think is
- 4:36most interesting when I talk to companies that have operating
- 4:38the space people have been building in this world for a
- 4:40long time, for years and years and is that so many of those
- 4:44people they feel like they have been maybe not standing still
- 4:47but like slow and steady wins the race and then all of a
- 4:50sudden change. BT was this wake up call for a
- 4:53lot of people, but there wasn't necessarily this like
- 4:56fundamental change in the underlying technology.
- 5:00It had been slowly, pretty transformer architecture has
- 5:02been around for a long time. It had slowly been improving and
- 5:05what it was capable of Chat CBT was just a thing that put it
- 5:08front and centre in everybody's mind.
- 5:10And so really what you're going through is this like awareness
- 5:13of the capability that exists and and how it's changing and
- 5:16stuff like that. That's super powerful.
- 5:18No doubt. What you are now seeing is this
- 5:21kind of bifurcation of where companies are positioned in this
- 5:25space is pretty interesting and you effectively have 3 buckets.
- 5:28So the first bucket you have these incumbents that have
- 5:31established products, established distribution,
- 5:34they're they're massive, whether it's like companies like
- 5:36Microsoft or companies like Canvas, Adobe or whatever notion
- 5:41exactly, they can, these incumbents can roll this stuff
- 5:44out. That's one bucket.
- 5:45The second bucket you have folks that are trying to be the
- 5:48foundation model, right. They want to be the provider
- 5:50that as many people as possible for as many use cases as
- 5:53possible are building. And that requires pretty
- 5:57extensive training, data access capital, all this stuff.
- 6:02Right. And that's exactly and it's a
- 6:04totally, it's a very unique game.
- 6:07And then you have everything else, every other company that's
- 6:11trying to build some kind of AI tooling, orchestration, fine
- 6:15tuning, you know whatever other sort of for the whole world
- 6:19which we can dive into and and is a place I think it can be
- 6:22really powerful but and then there's these this sort of use
- 6:27case tools where it's like they have built you know people the
- 6:30the sort of pejorative term is the wrapper around ChatGPT,
- 6:33right and not every company, is that right?
- 6:36I think that you can leverage EPT and not be just a wrapper,
- 6:39not just middleware, but there is a spectrum of companies or
- 6:43some of them are literally just you know, they slapped some some
- 6:46UI and and chastity is the entire back end, right.
- 6:50But that whole swath of companies is the majority of AI
- 6:54companies. The biggest thing that I think
- 6:57is problematic is that a lot of the power and influence and and
- 7:02sort of capabilities and stuff, a lot of that happens in this
- 7:06middle bucket where companies are trying to build the
- 7:09foundation models. And that is probably the area
- 7:13where there is the most potential for centralization of
- 7:17like power and influence and stuff like that.
- 7:19And when we wrote so for country research, we wrote this report,
- 7:21the openness of AI. And that is a big section of
- 7:24what we dove into is what does that mean when you have
- 7:27companies that become these really important foundation for
- 7:30everything else when they are pretty centralised and pretty
- 7:34controlled by a small subset of companies?
- 7:37Yeah, and they have all the attention.
- 7:39It's like they've sucked the air out of the room.
- 7:43Yeah, I mean, I'd say they sucked the, it's, it's basically
- 7:45like attention. It's the GPU to your point, it's
- 7:48the capital, like the headlines. There's so much fervour focused
- 7:53on this. I honestly like rightfully so to
- 7:55some extent, right. Like I think that these
- 7:57businesses are going to be really critical players as this
- 8:02evolves and even you look at like the acquisition that Open
- 8:06AI made where it's literally a design studio and it kind of
- 8:09demonstrates their intentions to build more consumer facing
- 8:12products, not just be an API product that's powerful legs.
- 8:16So these companies are important, but I think the thing
- 8:19you need to step back is understand the trickle effect
- 8:22of, you know, who has the capabilities at this point in
- 8:25time and what does that mean for every other company, for better
- 8:28or for worse. Yeah, it's funny you talk about
- 8:32this, the idea of the rapper or I I kind of look at it as the
- 8:37application layer and it feels like there's the developer tools
- 8:42that are being built for ML or now the hot new term is LM OPS,
- 8:48right? And So what was ML OPS now has
- 8:51died and gotten reincarnated as LM OPS.
- 8:56And so it's so funny. Yeah, I've heard.
- 9:00I've heard. Including other VCs say, yeah,
- 9:04you know, like we would do a hackathon with you, but we just
- 9:08worth talking about the name and ML OPS doesn't seem like it's in
- 9:13style anymore. Break me?
- 9:16Yeah, seriously, Talk about term of the month.
- 9:18Geez. Yeah, exactly.
- 9:20So the the thing about this application layer is that there
- 9:25are some there's revenue being generated there and there's
- 9:28serious revenue being generated there from.
- 9:32Like. Zero to 1,000,000 really quickly
- 9:37and I've talked about this before.
- 9:39What I think is fascinating with that is.
- 9:42The quality of that revenue and the ability to create that mode.
- 9:47So what happens when a Open AI goes and they have their design
- 9:51studio now replicate what you're trying to do and all of a sudden
- 9:56it's like Open AI has all of the attention and the air in the
- 10:00room. And so they put out the same
- 10:03product as you, but now they get all of that.
- 10:06Love and all of those dollars go towards it.
- 10:09And so building those moats is something that I know a lot of
- 10:13the community has been thinking about and how to effectively
- 10:17build a Moat. And it seems like in that bucket
- 10:20that you were talking about where where it's like the
- 10:22notions or the Microsoft, they already have their vote and
- 10:25they're just incorporating AI into their products, but it's
- 10:29not their main product. It's on the other side of things
- 10:33where AI is your main product and you're leading with that.
- 10:37That's where I feel like things are very dicey and it's a
- 10:39bloodbath right now. It is the The way that I think
- 10:44about it is. I mean #1.
- 10:47If Open AI can roll out your product in a couple of months,
- 10:50you never had a note to begin with.
- 10:51For sure like there there are some elements of like how much
- 10:55does a competitive advantage really exist versus just a first
- 10:58mover advantage and the vast majority of that stuff is is
- 11:04first mover advantage right. Like they were the 1st to get
- 11:06there to do that thing. There's a lot of the sort of you
- 11:09know copy dot AI and Jasper and stuff like that like those types
- 11:11of companies they were just the first to get their leveraging
- 11:14GBT to produce copy and they branded themselves as a
- 11:18copywriters tool and and you know and that's the first mover
- 11:22advantage. It's not.
- 11:23It's not a it's not a competitive mode and it's not
- 11:26defensible. And the way that we that I look
- 11:29at companies today and think about defensibility and their
- 11:33capabilities is you have to spike in something that is not
- 11:37the thing that everyone else is racing to commoditize right.
- 11:40If if the thing that you're good at is the thing that they, that
- 11:43everybody else who has billions of dollars is rapidly trying to
- 11:47commoditize because they want to get into the install base and be
- 11:51the thing that everybody's built on top of, Like you're screwed
- 11:55because you're just going to get swept under the rug in that race
- 11:58to the bottom of commodities, right?
- 12:00And so we've made investments in companies take for example like
- 12:03replete where replica is not it's, it's, I would I would
- 12:08argue it is not an AI company in exclusivity, right.
- 12:11They don't think about themselves as we build AI
- 12:13products, full stop. That's all we do.
- 12:16We're just focus on AI. They are a developer ecosystem.
- 12:19They're trying to build a tool that can do everything you need
- 12:22to build products and to write code and to host it and build
- 12:27out applications and something that they're doing.
- 12:29All those things, like that's what they spike at is they're a
- 12:31very good developer environment. They are able to leverage AI to
- 12:36do things like Ghostwriter, which is their code assistant,
- 12:38and that's great, but it feeds into their flywheel that exists
- 12:43independent of AI. Even if we'd had no sort of
- 12:46generative code, you know, breakthroughs or whatever, they
- 12:50they couldn't do any of that. Copilot hadn't happened.
- 12:52Whatever, even if we had none of that, roughly, would still be a
- 12:55pretty good product as a developer environment, right?
- 12:58And they are able to just take advantage of this stuff.
- 13:01It's the same thing. We have another company who I
- 13:03would argue has made some plays in this sort of foundation model
- 13:07which is Nomic and Brandon and Audrey who are the two
- 13:10cofounders of Nomic they were my coauthors on they were some of
- 13:14my co-authors on the openness of AI report that we put out and
- 13:18but Novak is really unique because they also spike in a
- 13:21very different place where they have built a data visualisation
- 13:24tool that allows you to visualise all of the individual
- 13:27data points that an LLM is made-up of right.
- 13:31So you look at like stable diffusion.
- 13:33They literally we have a we have a Co working space in New York
- 13:35for contrary and Nomic that printed us out of canvas of
- 13:39stable diffusion. You can literally see this sort
- 13:41of image map. You can't see the images because
- 13:44they're tiny dots, right? There's billions of them.
- 13:46But you can see this green corner is Kermit the Frog
- 13:49corner. Like you can visualise all the
- 13:51different subsets of this model, this image model and that tool
- 13:56which is called Atlas, that's where they spike.
- 13:59They are an incredible tool for visualising and fine tuning and
- 14:02understanding the underlying data behind the model.
- 14:06They use that to build GT for All, which is an open source
- 14:11foundation model you can use. And it basically is is
- 14:13performing as GC 35. It can run locally, it requires
- 14:18way less compute. It's pretty well trained.
- 14:20Like all these different things they were able to do are great,
- 14:23but if it was just GPT for All versus open AI, that'd be really
- 14:28tough because they're rapidly trying to commoditize that.
- 14:30But what Nomic is doing is just demonstrating their core
- 14:34competency, which is this entire engine around data visualisation
- 14:37and understanding models, and they were able to use that for a
- 14:41particular use case. So basically the lawyers who are
- 14:45suing A stability AI are going to be calling up Nomic pretty
- 14:49soon and asking this for that visual.
- 14:52They can definitely drill into it.
- 14:54I mean it's that's a whole other super interesting point is like
- 14:59where when you start to have models that are trained on the
- 15:02sort of broad swath of the Internet and where is the
- 15:06attribution come from? I think is is quite interest.
- 15:09It's a whole other bucket in and of itself, but it's a very
- 15:12interesting bucket. Yeah, that is fascinating
- 15:16because of course, I think we're seeing it hit the head most with
- 15:20the artists, like the visual artists.
- 15:22But there's also the lawsuit against Copilot and all of the
- 15:28code that the open source code that Code Pilot was trained on,
- 15:31and so. That is a very true.
- 15:34It is fascinating to think about, but getting back on
- 15:37track. I understand this idea of go
- 15:40with what your core competency is.
- 15:43Focus on that. And bring in a I to leverage
- 15:48that core competency. Don't bring in AI to be
- 15:51something that you think is going to compete against.
- 15:55These peoples whose core competency is AI, where it's
- 15:59like the opening eyes or the anthropics out there.
- 16:02And so that that's great to look at.
- 16:05Now let's dive into this report a little bit more because I want
- 16:08to get the whole breakdown of how did you even get the idea of
- 16:12creating it? Why did you feel inspired to
- 16:15make this? And was it after Lama One came
- 16:19out, I'm guessing, and you were like, oh, maybe we should talk
- 16:22about the juxtaposition that we have here.
- 16:25Yeah, Yeah. I mean it's a big part of it is
- 16:30chatting with the guys that know Mike, right.
- 16:31So we've invested in the company, we've worked with them
- 16:35really closely and. We we published a report after
- 16:39law might come out but it was still there was still a lot of
- 16:42limitations and sass and and you know no commercial use cases and
- 16:47things like that. Really if you step back, I think
- 16:49the, the thing that spurred us to go down this rabbit hole was
- 16:54the increasing and you know sort of limitations on the visibility
- 17:01of GPT. And you look at like GPT 4 and
- 17:06and so some of the folks said no make have posted a bunch of
- 17:09stuff about this where it's basically like the more that
- 17:12Open AI has said we're going to limit what visibility we share
- 17:16on the underlying data, the methodology, all the weights,
- 17:20all these different components of how we built GPT 4.
- 17:24The less capable anybody is who's using it to understand it.
- 17:28Like, it's basically like we've kind of gone through this, the
- 17:31arc of like originally people would refer to AI as a black box
- 17:36effect. And it was literally a black box
- 17:37because nobody knew, nobody really understood why the output
- 17:41was the output. Like we just kind of understood
- 17:43the algorithm and there was an output and you know, who knows
- 17:46like. And then increasingly it's
- 17:48become more understandable. Transform architecture has
- 17:51absolutely made that more as more capable of understanding
- 17:55how models get built and to try and better understand
- 17:58attribution. And Open AI is increasingly
- 18:01deciding to put it back in the black box because it's a lot
- 18:04easier to monetize something that people don't understand,
- 18:06right? It's a lot easier.
- 18:07It goes back to the whole lawsuit that we're just talking
- 18:10about. There probably are seeing.
- 18:12Oh yeah, you know what? Those guys, copilots getting
- 18:16sued, Stability is getting sued were one step away from getting
- 18:20sued because we just used every blog out there to train GBT.
- 18:24Yeah, well, and open AI is it right?
- 18:26Because Copilot is built on GPT, like the Microsoft, Microsoft,
- 18:31GitHub open AI relationship is right at the centre of that
- 18:33lawsuit. So they're already in it and but
- 18:37the so like the increasing desire to close off some of
- 18:40those components, they do it in the name of safety.
- 18:44Like there is this whole argument of AI safety that
- 18:46allows people to sort of close things off increasingly when in
- 18:51reality the main reason for closing that stuff is
- 18:54competition. And the problem with that and
- 18:56and Clem during who's the CEO of Hugging Face he makes this
- 19:00argument the best. In the report we cite both a
- 19:03conversation he had at the Cerebral Valley conference a
- 19:07couple months ago as well as his testimony before the US Congress
- 19:11where he talks about the number one threat in AI.
- 19:15The number one danger in AI is concentration of power and
- 19:18people are trying to limit the visibility into their models
- 19:22because it allows them to maintain more control over
- 19:24what's happening and and allow the sort of distribution of that
- 19:27capability to be less poignant. And and what that what that
- 19:32causes is that you have a sort of sort of long tail of
- 19:36companies, of nonprofits, of governments of everything that
- 19:40are more limited in their ability to respond and more
- 19:44dependent on one central failure point.
- 19:46And the argument is, well, we don't want the bad guys to get
- 19:49the capability. And the reality is like the vast
- 19:52majority of technical capability that has ever been created,
- 19:56eventually the bad guys get hold of it.
- 19:58The thing that keeps the bad guys in check is that everybody
- 20:00else has it too. And so you have this sort of
- 20:02like equalisation that if we, if we allow a couple of big
- 20:08companies to be the centralised source of this capability, you
- 20:13put everybody at a lot more risk in the name of of.
- 20:17Safety it. Feels like they know exactly
- 20:21what they're doing and they're going with it because the more
- 20:25that they can put that distance between them and whoever else is
- 20:29trying, the better they are. And I have a friend who is
- 20:33working at Google and I was asking him to present at one of
- 20:36the conferences that we put on. And he was saying, you know,
- 20:40right now at Google, it's a little bit like people aren't
- 20:42super excited about being transparent anymore because they
- 20:46feel like they got hoodwinked a little bit.
- 20:49They put out the transformer architecture and then boom, next
- 20:53thing you know, there's some other company that is not only
- 20:57using it, but then not sharing like they were sharing, like
- 21:01Google was sharing everything. And they were very transparent.
- 21:03I mean. To the best of my knowledge,
- 21:06let's just caveat that because there was probably a lot that
- 21:08they weren't sharing, but they were being pretty transparent in
- 21:12these different papers that they were putting out back in the
- 21:14day. And then the next thing you
- 21:16know, they've got a company that's leveraging that
- 21:18technology, except they're doing exactly what you're talking
- 21:21about, where they're putting it into this black box and they're
- 21:24not saying what they're doing and how they're doing it.
- 21:26And that's just like, OK, you're you're not playing fair in some
- 21:32respect. It also comes down to, again,
- 21:36when you go back to incentives, you're trying to understand who
- 21:40is incentivized to do what and why and stuff.
- 21:42Google for a long time was at the cutting edge of AI and kind
- 21:49of thought of as the leader, at least in terms of like technical
- 21:51talent. That's where the majority of
- 21:53really exceptional people were and and I had the chance a
- 21:56couple of weeks ago to interview Aiden Gomez who's the CEO of
- 21:59cohere and and talk about his experience.
- 22:01He was one of the co-authors of the attentions All You Need
- 22:03paper and led to the Transformer architecture and you know you
- 22:09look at why would companies respond the way they would
- 22:12respond. And for a lot of the larger
- 22:15companies, the Googles and Microsofts of the world, the
- 22:18argument is it comes back to cloud computing.
- 22:21And Microsoft's massive swings in this space are largely driven
- 22:27by their intention of getting as much of this compute as possible
- 22:31to be happening on Azure and to be able to compete and to be
- 22:35able to push that forward. And the reason that you have a
- 22:38company like Meta who is comfortable releasing Llama and
- 22:41trying to be much more open is because they don't have a cloud
- 22:45computing business and they are advantaged if we just want the
- 22:50sort of capabilities to expand as quickly as possible.
- 22:54And if those capabilities expand, we can then leverage
- 22:57those in our products, which are really our core business.
- 22:59And that's much easier to see the through line where that gets
- 23:02better for everybody because you have products that are largely
- 23:05free, you can use those products, those products get
- 23:07better, you get performance whatever and everybody and
- 23:11everybody else can benefit from that those advances as well.
- 23:14You have one company who's trying to maintain the advances
- 23:17themself and and be able to sort of centralised as much of that
- 23:22both like power and profit into one platform.
- 23:25It just becomes a lot harder for everyone else to benefit from
- 23:28that really. It just it just leads to more
- 23:31and more monopoly power for a small subset of companies.
- 23:34Man, what a plot twist, though, huh?
- 23:36Meta, the company no one thought would be if the open openness,
- 23:42the poster child of openness, they're putting out the open
- 23:46source. AI well, it's interesting you
- 23:50look at like one of the case studies we talk about in the in
- 23:54the deep dive is the tensor flow versus Itorch sort of evolution,
- 23:59right. And and if I if I've got my
- 24:01timelines correctly it was so tensor flow came first it came
- 24:04from Google and it was sort of the machine learning framework
- 24:08that everybody was using and very quickly And when when Meta
- 24:13released Pytorch in 2016 that I mean it's just it's just sort of
- 24:17hands down. I think the the quote from the
- 24:19report that we have from one of the engineers we talked to is
- 24:22and they're just eating Pytorch is eating Tensor Flows lunch,
- 24:25right. And so there is actually
- 24:27precedent for meta to be the company that becomes the bastion
- 24:31of of open source. I think the thing that people
- 24:35are more surprised by is that there there wasn't like Pytorch
- 24:38and Tensorflow like there was no moral like like under narrative
- 24:45right like sub narrative and because it was just like it was
- 24:48just like a machine learning framework you could use and it's
- 24:50like ohh like they did better and it was open and they had
- 24:52better contributors and it worked out whatever.
- 24:55Here there is like a moral and sub narrative and that is what I
- 25:01think surprises people is they're like nobody.
- 25:03It's like if open source feels like that just like morally
- 25:06better place to be in a I nobody expected meta to be the like
- 25:12moral leader right. Because that that's where they
- 25:14have fallen down where people feel like it's this it's this
- 25:17sort of like enemy of democracy or whatever.
- 25:20All these issues which like I don't know that I buy into that
- 25:21narrative per se. Like I think there's a whole
- 25:23other conversation about about like human nature that you can
- 25:26have and it's like technology usually just like amplifies
- 25:30what's already there as opposed to creating what's there.
- 25:33And but anyway, I think like that's another piece of the deep
- 25:36dive where like you can you can think about what are the moral
- 25:39implications of open versus closed technology.
- 25:43And most people say, hey I got to run a business, I got to turn
- 25:45a profit, it needs to be closed. But there are a lot of
- 25:47companies, Databricks being one of them, that has done a really
- 25:50good job of leveraging open source really meaningfully while
- 25:54still being able to have a sustainable business model.
- 25:57The. Question that I have coming back
- 25:59to this is. At the end of the day, if you
- 26:02want to do things open source, especially if you're that end
- 26:06user, that's just trying to hack together some app that's going
- 26:09to get you to 1,000,000 bucks over the weekend, which we've
- 26:11seen happen a lot with these GPT wrappers.
- 26:15You're as much as you love open source.
- 26:19Are you going to go out of the way and not use Open AI?
- 26:23That's the big question that I have.
- 26:25So there's I think there are two groups of people that will have
- 26:28very different responses. And so I think I think to your
- 26:32point there is a lot of people who will choose the sort of like
- 26:35path of least resistance and if open the eyes is sort of just
- 26:38like the most well known or whatever, they'll kind of go
- 26:41down that path. On the one hand you have what
- 26:43represent pretty massive industries, so you have
- 26:46healthcare, financial services, government, a lot of these
- 26:50highly regulated industries are very concerned about the
- 26:55implications of they're sort of data relationship with open AIS
- 26:59models. And we chatted about this a
- 27:01little bit before right where it's like you look at.
- 27:04So just recently Open AI announced Chad GBT Enterprise
- 27:09and they they tout a lot of sort of enterprise grade security and
- 27:14privacy, right sock two data encryption, whatever.
- 27:16And I think that that is that those are the check boxes that
- 27:21most companies look for, right, To just say like hey, have you
- 27:23done the kind of bare minimum what will be unique about this
- 27:27relationship in leveraging somebody else's foundation model
- 27:31is that there there's a, there's a difficulty in understanding
- 27:37the attribution that leads to a particular model and opening
- 27:42eyes ability to say, yes, we are socked to compliant and we do
- 27:47have data encryption and we do have these protections.
- 27:50It's like, right, But is there any way to confirm that none of
- 27:53my data has ever been used for you to train and improve CBT 5
- 27:58or whatever? And it's like that's pretty hard
- 28:00to audit. Like maybe they will make the
- 28:02argument that of course we have these separate these barriers
- 28:06between your data and our models and whatever, but it's super
- 28:09hard to audit. And it's very easy to say you
- 28:12can still be sucked to compliant and still have data exhaust.
- 28:15Because if you still leverage a model that's been trained on
- 28:17data and you didn't technically use that data to train GPT 5,
- 28:20but GBT 5 can leverage other things you've done, there's
- 28:24there's implications there that I just think like are not easy
- 28:27to say ohh definitively. We've never used that stuff.
- 28:29So highly regulated industries are going to be much more
- 28:33careful. No, I will not recommend your
- 28:39podcast as the lead engineer TPB Bank.
- 28:42I'm definitely not wanting other engineers to have all this
- 28:46relevant information and I will not give my name which is Lena.
- 28:50So definitely, I do not recommend this podcast.
- 29:00And then the second thing I think is that we talked about
- 29:03this in the report. One of the limitations in this
- 29:06space right now is just a dramatic shortage of technical
- 29:11expertise. Like human capital, right?
- 29:12Like there's there's not enough people.
- 29:15And so that's why these big companies compete so
- 29:18dramatically. Like, it's like the joke is that
- 29:21an AI researcher can make as much as an NFL quarterback,
- 29:24right? Like, it's so competitive for
- 29:27this very small pool of talent. But I think that people who, as
- 29:30that talent grows and increases and there's more people that
- 29:33specialise in these things and understand this stuff, The more
- 29:36that people pride themselves on building and expertise
- 29:40internally and want to have particular capabilities and
- 29:43flexibility and whatever. And the more that talent is more
- 29:49evenly distributed, the more those companies will also be
- 29:52uncomfortable with the sort of, you know, enterprise version of
- 29:57opening ice products. They'll they'll look to build
- 29:59their own capabilities internally and which is the same
- 30:03that happens in open source today.
- 30:04Like you have really big companies.
- 30:06I mean Uber is a really good example where they had dozens of
- 30:09open source products that came from Uber that they used to
- 30:12build a tonne of different pieces of their of their stack.
- 30:16And I think it will be very similar is that there will
- 30:18always be companies that will say we can build this capability
- 30:21internally. And so we want the open source
- 30:23you know foundation and then we could build on top of that and
- 30:25whatever. I think there will be a lot of
- 30:27companies like that and increasingly more companies and
- 30:30larger companies that have their own AI abilities and stuff like
- 30:33that. I think those two groups make up
- 30:35a big a big chunk of the industry that open AI could sell
- 30:39to. The long tail for sure, like
- 30:41it's easy to just use the thing, but I think it's not.
- 30:44An open and closed case of open AI has already won the day on
- 30:48being able to offer these products to everybody.
- 30:51There's. Yeah, it's funny because it
- 30:53almost feels like that long tail is.
- 30:56Who we hear the most from on Twitter.
- 30:58And those are the Twitter demos that you see and so it seems
- 31:02like. Everybody is on it.
- 31:04And then when you go into these big companies, I would even
- 31:07argue that potentially they're not even using large language
- 31:10models. A lot of them are still just
- 31:12doing quote unquote traditional ML and trying to figure that
- 31:16out. And so there is a few things to
- 31:19your point though that I wanted to mention that I think is also
- 31:23worth noting. One is.
- 31:25I wonder how many people are going to look back and say,
- 31:29yeah, you know, the track record Open AI has with doing what they
- 31:33say they're going to do is not that good.
- 31:36So I'm not sure how much trust they've built up by saying, hey,
- 31:40we're Open AI and then they close everything off.
- 31:44So that already is working against them.
- 31:46How many people are going to remember that or care about that
- 31:49or actually use that in their judgement call?
- 31:52Who knows? That's up for discussion too.
- 31:54But the other piece is that. One of the I got to give credit
- 31:59to John Savage in our community today because I was posting that
- 32:04meme that I was showing you earlier which shows the guy
- 32:07getting all excited and he's saying ohh all that private data
- 32:11to train GT5 on and that's basically opening eyes
- 32:16enterprise version right now. And John Savage said, you know,
- 32:20I wonder if it's not that they're going to train GP5 on
- 32:23it, but they're going to use it as hest sets, so they're going
- 32:27to use that. Data for their test sets and
- 32:30there's probably going to be a tonne of models that they create
- 32:34but never actually release and they never get outside of their
- 32:37walled garden and nobody's ever going to know about.
- 32:41But it is used with your data. And that is, it speaks exactly
- 32:45to what you were saying. Like, how do we know that our
- 32:48data doesn't get leaked? Because a model that does go to
- 32:51the public wasn't trained on top of that with some like
- 32:55reinforcement learning through AI feedback.
- 32:57I think it'll follow a very similar curve to what happened
- 33:01just in like machine learning more broadly and like
- 33:06algorithmic input and stuff with like Facebook and social and ad
- 33:10like basically ad delivery and the entire intelligence
- 33:14apparatus around advertising over the first sort of, you know
- 33:18Gen 1, Gen 2 of of social media. It was really just like it's
- 33:23it's funny to people or like confusing to people who work in
- 33:28social media and in data tracking and stuff like that.
- 33:32The like public outcry of like wait a minute like you're using
- 33:36my data to sell me ads and it's like that's so immoral and so
- 33:41discussing and blah blah And it's like that was just the best
- 33:44way to do it. Like there's no better way to
- 33:46like serve you personalised ads or whatever.
- 33:48Like we need to understand your user data and you opted into it
- 33:51and blah blah. I think you will see a similar
- 33:53curve of the long tailed people who are just like yeah open AI
- 33:57oh sock two sick like we're good check the box use the thing
- 34:00let's move on. Couple of years from now you
- 34:02start to realise like we've the the more we come to understand
- 34:06attribution of data and the implications for different
- 34:09models the more you will have people a little bit of an outcry
- 34:13of like I didn't realise that my it won't be like I didn't
- 34:16realise my data was being used to train that model because they
- 34:18promised they wouldn't do that. But it's like well I didn't
- 34:21understand that my data exhaust can generate training sets that
- 34:24can then be used in different ways or whatever.
- 34:26And it's like we better understand the attribution to
- 34:28say, oh, I can audit this model and say that it came from this,
- 34:32which came from this, which came from your data like surprise.
- 34:36And then you have this sort of like cookies, GPR type of
- 34:39response and the the long term just doesn't understand.
- 34:43But I think most of those companies that are #1 hyper
- 34:46worried about because they're so highly regulated, they're hyper
- 34:48worried about their data, where it goes, what it's used for,
- 34:51whatever. And so they basically want to
- 34:54run everything locally as much as possible.
- 34:56And #2, the people who do have the expertise to understand,
- 34:59hey, like just using, you know, the enterprise offering from
- 35:02Open AI, that is not going to keep our US as sort of data
- 35:06secure as we would like. Yeah.
- 35:08And it goes back to what you were saying earlier on.
- 35:11The companies like Open AI are trying to make it harder and
- 35:15harder for someone to understand how the models are trained.
- 35:18So that at the end of the day, if something like that were to
- 35:23happen or potentially already is happening, we're not going to
- 35:26know and how are we ever going to know, right?
- 35:29That's the hard part. Well, it's also why like I say
- 35:33and I I've had pushback on this argument, but I I think that
- 35:38Open AI and a lot of these other companies like they would love
- 35:42to see this get, I'd say Open Eye in particular because they
- 35:46have a very unique relationship with Microsoft and very unique
- 35:49sort of corporate distribution in a way that like the other
- 35:52anthropic and coherence that they have some corporate
- 35:54investors, but they don't have the same like relationship as
- 35:57open as Microsoft. And so I'd say this is maybe
- 35:59even uniquely Open AI once this, but I would argue that open AI
- 36:03wants the sort of foundation model use cases, general purpose
- 36:07model use cases to become as commoditized as possible as
- 36:12quickly as possible. Because if they can get GBT into
- 36:16everything, into everything that runs everything you hear every
- 36:19new tool you hear about and you look at it, it's already kind of
- 36:22happened, right? Most of the companies using
- 36:24companies who have rolled out AI products, most of them are
- 36:26building on GPT or or or or Dolly.
- 36:31And you look at like like replica is a unique exception to
- 36:36this where they went in and built and figured out their own
- 36:39stack and they have a great blog post on their blog about it
- 36:42where they talk about here's how we thought about using this from
- 36:44Salesforce and this from different things and stuff like
- 36:46that. But very few companies are doing
- 36:48that because they don't have that technical expertise or the
- 36:50like attention or foresight or whatever.
- 36:53And so most people are just going to use GPT or whatever is
- 36:57least available and if open I can get it as broadly
- 36:59distributed as possible as quickly as possible.
- 37:02Then when you do have that up, up, cry in a couple of years,
- 37:06outcry in a couple of years, it's so much harder to get them
- 37:09out because they're everywhere. It's the same.
- 37:12I mean, Microsoft is this, and this is a Microsoft playbook.
- 37:14Like you couldn't get out if you wanted to, like Microsoft Teams
- 37:18did so well. Not because it's a better
- 37:20product. And my argument, in my opinion,
- 37:22it is a much worse product than like Slack, but it's it's
- 37:25freaking everywhere. It's like corporate malware,
- 37:28like it's just OS is just everywhere.
- 37:31Like Office stuff is everywhere. And that's, that's the Microsoft
- 37:35playbook. And I think that that is the
- 37:36open AI playbook. And if they can get everywhere,
- 37:38it doesn't matter if you disagree with how they handle
- 37:40things, they're everywhere and you can't.
- 37:42It's so much harder to rip out. Company that's so good.
- 37:47Corporate malware, that is a good one.
- 37:49So let's talk about traditional ML for a minute because I think
- 37:53there is a conversation worth having.
- 37:56You were saying? Yeah reply.
- 37:58It went through the hard. Motion of creating their own
- 38:02LLM. A lot of people out there as you
- 38:05mentioned in the openness of AI report are going to grab Llama
- 38:11if they are more open source leaning.
- 38:15But then there's a lot of companies, your portfolio
- 38:18companies including like RAMP, they're doing some incredible
- 38:22traditional ML where I consider these days I've kind of made
- 38:27the. Line in my head of traditional
- 38:31ML is tabular or structured data and anything unstructured is
- 38:36more AI and so I know it's not perfect but.
- 38:42Whatever. That is how I look at it a
- 38:44little bit. Now when it comes to the
- 38:46traditional ML and companies like RAMP, they are still
- 38:51gaining A tonne of value from this.
- 38:54ML that they're doing. Yet how are how do you feel that
- 39:00these companies should be looking at?
- 39:03The whole ecosystem that they're in and is there.
- 39:08I guess in your eyes. Is there a play for them?
- 39:14Like should they be stuffing? LM's into stuff where they don't
- 39:20need to. It feels like the.
- 39:23Product managers life got a whole lot harder over the last
- 39:28six months because everybody wants AI in their products and
- 39:32so. I I think about it and it's like
- 39:35how to keep that core competency without losing your mind, right.
- 39:39So what are you seeing with these ML 1.0 companies that?
- 39:44Is a good way of doing it. I think that every company is is
- 39:52super unique in the approach that they should take.
- 39:54There's a quote from Star Wars where they say only a Sith deals
- 39:58in absolutes and the irony is that that is in itself an
- 40:03absolute like to say that only you know And so I think this is
- 40:06like there is generalities are very dangerous.
- 40:08The only general rule is that general rules are dangerous and
- 40:13and I think that that is true of every company.
- 40:15So any company that tries to say, oh, we need to do this
- 40:18instead of this. Because that's the hype is
- 40:21probably not doing things well and like they're they need to
- 40:25respond. But if that's their decision
- 40:28making for how they're going to build a product, it's just based
- 40:31on like this is the happiest thing and we need to put it in
- 40:33the thing and so we can put the dot AI on the end of one of our
- 40:36landing pages or whatever. I think that's dangerous and I
- 40:39think that's probably not a great product organisation.
- 40:42The companies that have done as well are ramping one of them.
- 40:44The companies have done as well are saying what are we already
- 40:47doing, like what are already our core competencies and what in
- 40:51what ways could this technology be leveraged to continue to
- 40:55improve the core competency that we have And the thing that we're
- 40:58doing. And Ram has done that really
- 40:59well in in sort of and understanding their core
- 41:03competency of managing this sort of you know, financial stack
- 41:07that you're managing and then be able to leverage intelligence on
- 41:10top of that both in terms of like you can ask and answer
- 41:13questions about your finances, but also just better
- 41:16understanding the underlying data that you've offered up to
- 41:20them. And that is that is the right
- 41:23approach. I think anybody who says like
- 41:25oh, we're not doing machine learning anymore, we're using
- 41:27LMS or whatever, I think that's just like a very, it's like a
- 41:30very aesthetic, surface level way of doing things.
- 41:33I think everybody needs to for themselves figure out what is
- 41:36the approach they need to take that will best lend itself to
- 41:40their core competency and like that's not the best products
- 41:44will be made and the best companies will be made.
- 41:46But another thing that comes to my mind as you're saying that
- 41:49is. Do you feel like it's possible
- 41:53that we've gotten 90% there when it comes to AI, but that extra 5
- 41:59to 10%, that could be another what?
- 42:02However long, let's just say, for sake of throwing out
- 42:06numbers, another 10 years before anything happens.
- 42:09And so we're all sitting here talking about the beauties and
- 42:13the hype of AI and how incredible it is.
- 42:18And then? We have another AI Winter.
- 42:21I think that this is one of the reasons why people who hear the
- 42:27like AGI, AI, Doomer ISM think it's so ridiculous is because
- 42:36like I I think that from in terms of like the capability
- 42:41like if I think about like ass for example like just as a sort
- 42:45of distribution mechanism or cloud computing or whatever.
- 42:49I think that even those are still like maybe SAS is like
- 42:527080%, maybe cloud computing is 5060%, AI is like maybe 10%.
- 42:58And like the the distance that that gap from where we are
- 43:01today, all the things that could be done to make it functionally
- 43:05capable in production and all these things to get to like AGI
- 43:09supercomputers that take over the world.
- 43:11There's still so much to go. And and again Clem, the CEO
- 43:16Huggy Face, he makes this joke where it's like a lot of a lot
- 43:19of practitioners look at GPT and ChatGPT as a product and it's
- 43:23like a GI, like this is, this is autocomplete on steroids.
- 43:28Like there's still so much that we need to do and understand, so
- 43:32much capabilities and context, so much tooling and
- 43:35orchestration that needs to happen before this has ever a
- 43:38seamless enterprise user experience.
- 43:41And like one of my favourite writers, this guy Matthew
- 43:44Lindley, who writes 3 called Supervised.
- 43:49He had a great piece a couple of weeks ago where he talks about
- 43:52rethinking how we define the sort of iPhone moment in AI and
- 43:57the iPhone moment is that where I would think of like it doesn't
- 44:00mean that it is, it is everything is perfect,
- 44:02everything is great, right. There's still use cases that
- 44:05we're experiencing, but it is when a piece of technology
- 44:08becomes so capable that it can be general purpose without
- 44:13really massive sophisticated like services around it, right.
- 44:18We don't need help. Cloud computing is still largely
- 44:21that, like you still have systems architecture that is
- 44:24built by outsource providers because it's so complicated.
- 44:28Like even cloud computing you'd argue is like not necessarily
- 44:30had that kind of like iPhone aha moment where everybody could
- 44:34just like spin it up and it's really easy.
- 44:35We're getting so close to that. Can you look at like Reply again
- 44:40has built something like this where they can enable you to
- 44:44spin up hosting for your application that you've built in
- 44:46rapid and have sort of an end to end experience.
- 44:49So it's so close to that experience where I can just
- 44:51click a button and boom, have infrastructure, but it's still
- 44:54not quite there for like sophisticated use cases in
- 44:58production. And so we're still not there for
- 45:00things that we've had for 10/15/20 years.
- 45:03For AI, we're so far from that because it's still like you look
- 45:06at like, OK, like people are like, ohh just kidding.
- 45:09AI sucks because ChatGPT traffic went down and it's like, no,
- 45:13what you're experiencing is a limitation of the general
- 45:17populations ability to understand, conceptualise, the
- 45:20use case of this thing and to use it every single day of their
- 45:24lives and everything that they do.
- 45:26Like we're still not there yet. Some of it is performing, some
- 45:29of it is psychology, some of it is you I like is chat the right
- 45:33UI for this stuff, Which we don't know, Like we just started
- 45:36playing around with them, so there's so much that we can do.
- 45:41But what about? I mean.
- 45:43Some of it feels to me like. That age-old question of does
- 45:48every problem need to be solved with tech and it feels like
- 45:52here, Does everything need to be used with AI?
- 45:56Or do we need AI in every piece of our life like you're talking
- 46:01about, right? I don't think that it needs to
- 46:03be, because I like, think about it.
- 46:04Like I don't use my iPhone for every single interaction in my
- 46:08life, right? Like when I want to talk to my
- 46:10wife, I talked to my wife. I want to play with my kids.
- 46:12I play with my kids, right? Or I take them to Disneyland.
- 46:14Or I take them to I think whatever.
- 46:16Like, there are still physical experiences that, like, maybe VR
- 46:19someday will try and insert itself into those physical
- 46:22interactions, right? So even the iPhone is not 100%
- 46:26ubiquitous, but are there dozens and dozens of things in people's
- 46:32life, both professionally and personally, that would be
- 46:36improved by having like general purpose, like well built AI in
- 46:44that experience? Absolutely.
- 46:46Like if I can chat with something and say hey plan me a
- 46:49trip to New York for me and my wife for our 10th anniversary
- 46:52and it does everything and it books it and it it you know does
- 46:55ever puts everything where I need it perfectly seamlessly
- 46:58with that there is be better than me being like dude like I
- 47:01gotta figure out what hotel what's the best things and look
- 47:03on Instagram and figure out all the stuff and whatever like with
- 47:06that experience be better I think for sure.
- 47:09And so there's still so much more for us to tackle before I
- 47:11think even before we reach to like existential point of like
- 47:15like the the the Jurassic Park right of like we're so busy
- 47:19thinking about could we that we never stopped to think should
- 47:21we. I don't even know there were
- 47:23there yet. Like we're still, it's still,
- 47:25there's a lot of like very low hanging fruit things that we
- 47:27could take off the table with AI that we're not there yet.
- 47:31And then there's the broader implication of like, OK, where
- 47:34should that line be drawn where we stop and say, hey, what is,
- 47:36what does it mean to be human versus what does it mean to
- 47:39solve technical problems? Yes.
- 47:42So you undoubtedly have seen a lot of companies I imagine pitch
- 47:46you on agents and how they're using agents.
- 47:50What are your thoughts on them? I think it's super cool.
- 47:53I think there's I've seen a tonne of really exciting demos
- 47:56from companies that are building these sort of you know, package
- 48:00services if you will. And I think about it a lot of
- 48:03like to some extent I'd say there's this analogy breaks down
- 48:06very quickly. But I think there are some
- 48:08components of like micro services that you can look at
- 48:10and say like there's a lot of really interesting similarities
- 48:13where we can say hey, in what ways are certain problems to
- 48:18solve. So well known and defined and
- 48:22replicable that we can package them into an agent and sort of
- 48:26solve that problem with a very specific purpose built agent.
- 48:30I think there's a tonne of use cases that could fit really well
- 48:33in a ways. And I think like, so like prompt
- 48:36engineering has been so Speaking of like the sort of phrase of
- 48:38the month or whatever, right. Like, prompt engineering is a
- 48:41really interesting thing because like chat as an interface is
- 48:47actually really difficult because probably The thing is
- 48:50capable is there are components of certain models that are more
- 48:55capable at doing the thing than you are at articulating in
- 49:00written language what you're trying to accomplish, right?
- 49:03Like, like, I actually think like prompt engineering and like
- 49:06chat as an interface could spark people being forced to go back
- 49:12and like better understand logic and ethos and like understanding
- 49:16how to structure a sentence in a way to articulate an idea and
- 49:20all that stuff. But I think could be a really
- 49:21interesting side benefit, right? But like, but like in some
- 49:25cases, like, you don't need to be so good at articulating the
- 49:28thing in language. If The thing is good at doing
- 49:30the job and you know that's the job you want done, let's just
- 49:34package that and get it done. Because that is such a better
- 49:37user experience than forcing me to figure out, like how do I
- 49:41communicate in words the thing I'm trying to accomplish.
- 49:45You've said you've seen a lot of demos.
- 49:49This is where I think. I'm still up in the air about
- 49:53can they get past demos? Like can agents be more than
- 49:57just a demo? Because we all saw the rise and
- 50:01takeover of Auto GPT. But then if you use it, I don't
- 50:05know if you played around with it, but everyone that I know
- 50:07that played around with it when I played around with it was like
- 50:09great. That was a waste of 200 bucks on
- 50:12Open AI credits. I couldn't get it to do anything
- 50:16that I wanted, and it just kept on going around in circles.
- 50:19And then when I tried to like push it another way, it didn't
- 50:23listen. And so it was like it was a full
- 50:25headache. I know it's gotten better from
- 50:28there, and there's a lot of people that are trying to figure
- 50:30it out, but do you have faith that agents are going to be
- 50:34stable and they're going to be able to?
- 50:37Do what we want them to do. And I think that the bigger
- 50:43there's two problems that need to be solved and one is actually
- 50:46really interesting. And there's this sort of idea,
- 50:50if you think about like how this is getting very esoteric, but
- 50:54like how language is structured and how it works and what it
- 50:57means to be able to like think and stuff.
- 50:59And there is this idea that we leveraged in the deep dive where
- 51:03I will get the quote wrong, but it's basically like like the the
- 51:09the limits of your language are the limits of your reality.
- 51:12Like your ability to be able to understand and interact and
- 51:15articulate what something is. That's the limitation of how you
- 51:19know how much of your reality you can send and control.
- 51:22And I think what's interesting is like #1, even though these
- 51:25large language models are very general purpose, they are still
- 51:28built on a subset of human interactions and human content.
- 51:33There's this built in a very specific way.
- 51:35And I think that what's been really interesting is I have
- 51:38found is that what like let's take like image models, because
- 51:43I think a little bit more, they feel a little bit more like
- 51:45intimate and personal and like what image model you prefer,
- 51:49whether you like Mid Journey, Dolly, stable, diffusion,
- 51:51whatever. And it's actually like, kind of
- 51:54like a personality test, right, Like a BuzzFeed quiz.
- 51:58And because I feel like different models react to
- 52:01different people who think in different ways better.
- 52:04And so like, sometimes it's a matter of not just, like, this
- 52:08thing doesn't work for me. It's like, well, maybe you
- 52:10actually don't have the product that has the right underlying
- 52:13logic that fits your brain and your way of thinking and your
- 52:16way of articulating images and what they should mean.
- 52:19It's a finding the right thing is really valuable.
- 52:21That's really tough, because you're not going to get the
- 52:23broad swath of people to experiment with every single
- 52:26thing, especially when it's still as clunky to use as, like
- 52:29getting onto a Discord server and having to figure out how to
- 52:32use it right. O like that, not neighbour.
- 52:34Namely, that problem has to be solved like you have to have a
- 52:38way to be able to interact with a for every particular person
- 52:43and without having to be limited by like your underlying data or
- 52:46whatever. The second thing is just like
- 52:48the performance, like the being able to use an agent in
- 52:51production and for live use cases like this thing is like
- 52:55booking. Like I said, like booking trips
- 52:56for me in real time or interacting with my employees in
- 52:59real time or whatever. I don't know like those use
- 53:02cases to be trusted in production, you just have to
- 53:05have a lot more performance. And I think the one thing that
- 53:08these models have not been very good at is like they're they're
- 53:10pretty good at like 1 sort of surface layer of exchange.
- 53:15So like there is an API and that's the one interaction where
- 53:19like I am notion and there's GT and notions.
- 53:23Interface has to go through the GT API to get certain language,
- 53:28bring it back and have an output.
- 53:30That's one sort of interface. They're pretty decent at that,
- 53:33right? If I have to go from me to
- 53:37through a chat to get a model, then that model has to go
- 53:41through me into my like Expedia preferences to book a hotel and
- 53:46then book a flight based on multiple different airlines and
- 53:49my preferences for airlines based on the where I want to go
- 53:53and where the best flights are, where the best prices are,
- 53:55whatever that's like 6 or 7 interaction layers that that
- 53:58agent has to go through. And I've never seen anything
- 54:02that's been at that. Like I've seen things that are
- 54:04good, like within this application I can ask it to run
- 54:06a job for me and it's great. Like Excel is probably the main
- 54:10sort of surface area. I've seen people build a lot of
- 54:12this stuff where it's like hey we have this this financial
- 54:14model and we want to do things and create things and put them
- 54:17here. It's really good at that.
- 54:19But it's always staying in one interaction layer once as they
- 54:23are going through multiple applications.
- 54:25I've I have yet to see anybody who has manoeuvred that very
- 54:28well because the Internet is still so complex that going from
- 54:31thing to thing to thing to thing in one seamless path is very
- 54:35difficult. Yeah, it reminds me of a
- 54:39conversation we had with Philip from Honeycomb.
- 54:41And he spoke about how also if your.
- 54:47Percentage of error on the first hop is 1%, you're screwed.
- 54:51Then on the second hop, yeah, it just inevitably is going to go
- 54:55to 100% because of the amount of hops that you're getting in each
- 54:59time it the percent or the likelihood of you hitting an
- 55:03error is is much higher. And so that feels like, again to
- 55:08me that feels like something that.
- 55:10As you pointed out earlier, we are still so much in the early
- 55:14days and we are really trying to figure it out.
- 55:18There is a lot of promise. But I I wonder, man, like are we
- 55:22going to sit here for the next 10 years and try and try and try
- 55:26and still be like flying cars or the skateboards that they had in
- 55:31Back to the Future? And it's like where is that
- 55:33hoverboard? Man, I really wanted that when I
- 55:35was a kid and we still don't have it.
- 55:37It's 2023. I think that the biggest thing
- 55:40and like I don't know, I don't. I also will name names here.
- 55:45But I think that people who believe that there is this like
- 55:48AI spike of like, ohh tomorrow everything's gonna change.
- 55:54Like it's just a matter of days or a matter of weeks.
- 55:57Like those hype evangelists. I think those people are as
- 56:01stupid as the people who think like this is nothing.
- 56:05Like we're going to go into an AI winter and nobody's going to
- 56:08be able to accomplish anything that they promised and blah blah
- 56:11blah. I think both are stupid.
- 56:13I think that like the vast majority of technology
- 56:16especially, but the vast majority of everything follows a
- 56:20very specific curve. And the example I always use is
- 56:22like ecommerce penetration. The people who thought like so
- 56:26like ecommerce is going to steadily risen in as terms of
- 56:28like the percentage of retail that's happening online.
- 56:31It has steadily risen up to the kind of call it like I don't
- 56:34remember what 1820% whatever. And then COVID happened in a
- 56:37shot up and the people who were saying this is the new normal,
- 56:41you're going to get 80% like we're going to have 80%
- 56:43ecommerce penetration because nobody will ever go back to
- 56:45going to a store. Those people were stupid, but
- 56:49the same people who also thought like, ohh, that every this is
- 56:52going to exhaust everyone and we're never going to buy
- 56:54anything online again and it's at the end of ecommerce and blah
- 56:57blah. Those people are also stupid.
- 56:59If you look at the curve of what happened, it's followed this, I
- 57:01mean, for literally decades, like since the 90s, it's
- 57:04followed this very steady curve shot up in COVID and it didn't
- 57:07drop back down to where it was in 2019.
- 57:11It dropped back to about where it would be if it was following
- 57:14that curve of gravity, right. And that is the that is how the
- 57:17vast majority of technology plays out follows a very
- 57:20specific curve. AI will continue to progress.
- 57:22We will continue to find these advances that make us better and
- 57:25better and better. And I think that the one thing
- 57:27that can accelerate that curve a little bit is just excitement.
- 57:30Like people are excited about building and therefore they
- 57:32will, you know, younger people will go to school and specialise
- 57:35in certain things, companies will push the boundaries of
- 57:38certain things. And I think that all of that
- 57:40gets better if we can try and keep as much of it open as
- 57:43possible. If it's all happening in this
- 57:45closed garden of 1 company, it is so much harder for everybody
- 57:50make contributions and get excited.
- 57:52The more open we can be, the more we can push those
- 57:55contributions forward. And maybe we can't like step
- 57:57function, change the way that AI progresses, but we can slightly
- 58:00accelerate the pace. Yeah, it for me it feels like
- 58:05it's almost like an S curve where?
- 58:07We are very much hopefully on that steep part of the S curve,
- 58:12not on the levelling out part of the S curve and I really like
- 58:16that idea of the excitement and the amount of money that is
- 58:20being poured into. AI right now by the likes of the
- 58:26VC's world, I think that you're part of that, right?
- 58:29That is going to help drive the innovation forward.
- 58:32Yeah, maybe, maybe you you'd like.
- 58:35I'm there with you on the excitement.
- 58:36Generally once you get into capital, you get into dangerous
- 58:39territory because there's a very similar, like green bubble in
- 58:43the early 2000s where there was something like, I don't know,
- 58:47billions and billions and billions of dollars of people
- 58:49invested into new battery and wind and solar technology and
- 58:54stuff like that. And like something like 90 plus
- 58:56percent of it is just vaporised, like just gone, like absolute
- 59:00zeros, which is huge destruction of capital.
- 59:02And that set back a lot of people trying to work on climate
- 59:07tech more broadly. And we've only just recently
- 59:09started to come out of that like that, like capital induced
- 59:13winter. And so I actually think that
- 59:15like excessive amounts of capital can cause a lot more
- 59:19problems like excitement, yes, and like progress, yes.
- 59:22And like talking about it and leveraging it and and you still
- 59:25want capital to be able to. But if you start to put in 10X
- 59:28the capital that this the category really needs, it's very
- 59:33dangerous. Because when that capital gets
- 59:34destroyed, if it doesn't work out, you have a bunch of people
- 59:37who have lost capital and then they are going to actively crap
- 59:41on the excitement. And that makes it harder to
- 59:43raise capital, harder to progress, harder to make those.
- 59:46So if capital is a dangerous drug, man like you get hooked on
- 59:49it and it's dangerous. It's that cold feet.
- 59:53I mean, look at what happened with crypto.
- 59:55Yeah, I mean investing in totally, really well.
- 59:57And it's like, again, I I even think like I was never a huge
- 1:00:00crypto bull by any stretch. But I think blockchain can be
- 1:00:05really powerful. I think there are some use cases
- 1:00:07that it makes a tonne of sense, but the the sort of 2020-2021
- 1:00:10crypto fever that's going to set the industry back more than it's
- 1:00:15going to help it. Like it's still I think can be
- 1:00:17important technology over the course of time.
- 1:00:20But that did more harm than it did good in my opinion.
- 1:00:22Like it. You invited more hucksters that
- 1:00:24are going to take years to wash out and.
- 1:00:26Kyle, this has been awesome man. I really appreciate you coming
- 1:00:29on here and sharing. All about the openness of AI and
- 1:00:33how crucial it is to be open and not let this power and not let
- 1:00:39the AI. Crowd into one space, and I'm
- 1:00:44fully on board with that. I think so many of us in the
- 1:00:47community, in the MLS community love open source, and whether or
- 1:00:52not they're contributors or they're just users, that is a
- 1:00:55huge thing. And so we can get on board with
- 1:00:58that message. Yeah, thanks for having me.
- 1:01:00It's super fun to get to chat and I guess said I'm super
- 1:01:02excited about how things will play out and it's always fun to
- 1:01:05get to kind of riff on what could happen.
- 1:01:10This. Is Skyler I lead Machine
- 1:01:12learning at Health Rhythms. If.
- 1:01:14You want to stay on top of everything happening in ML OPS?
- 1:01:17Subscribe to this podcast now. Now now.
- 1:01:25Now now. Now.
- 1:01:30Now.