Latest / Glovisor Podcast / AI Without a Paywall? Meet the Entrepreneur Disrupting AI | Jeff Bermant (Tusk AI) (Ep 63)
Transcript
- Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: One entrepreneur is rejecting the idea that great AI should be locked behind monthly payments, offering a free alternative built for everyone. Welcome to the Glovisor Podcast, where we explore business growth, communication, and personal development through real conversations with people that make an impact. Our guest is a longtime entrepreneur whose journey has taken him from the real estate development into the world of technology, privacy-focused browsing, search, In artificial intelligence. He's the founder and CEO of Tusk Central AI, a platform built to unite leading AI models in one place. Through a privacy-respecting, ad-supported model, he's working to make powerful AI tools accessible to everyone at no cost. Glovisor welcomes Jeff Bermant. jeff bermant: Hey Joe. Thanks for the nice intro and a pleasure to be on your show today. Thank you so much. And I'm here to talk about AI in general and then how are we democratizing so everybody can use AI and not feel like they're behind paywalls or pay stoppages, which is fairly common in the business. And obviously there may be a better way of doing this so that people can enjoy AI. I get a lot of A out of AI. I work on it, use it. least two or three times a day, solving very complex problems that it would take me an hour or so to figure out myself and I can get the AI to do it in thirty seconds. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: Absolutely. But before we get into the big business of it, how did you come up with the name Tusk? jeff bermant: that's interesting. Well, first of all, I went to USC, University of Not Spoiled Children, University of Southern California. So Tusk was a song that USC played a lot. And when you were naming a search engine, You wanted to keep it fairly short. So it and an animal name if you can. So we came up with the animal. We came up with Tusks four letters, very easy. Did I count right? Four letters, yep. and so that that was a name. Also, I named it not to be political at all because we've moved away from any kind of politics. But I felt that people shouldn't be censored. And so I gave you on Tusk, I gave you both left and right. so nobody would miss their opportunity of reading the news and we wanted to make it fair for everybody. But really what we're realizing for us, really the thing that we should focus in is on democratizing AI. And I say democratizing it because we want everybody to be able to use it. I mean, yeah, there's some people who won't quite know what to quite do. so there'll be a learning curve for people. But as I said, it's amazing when you want to solve a problem or you have a question. It's just an amazing tool to have in your back pocket. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: what's interesting to me is that you were in real estate development, which is a tangible investment style, and you went all the way to the opposite end to the world of technology. What what made you make that change? jeff bermant: So I I was born into a real estate family. my dad was a shopping center developer and got my legs at Cowell Banker. My first job, first real job at Coldwell Banker was working for Bob Selleck, Tom Selleck's dad, which was amazing. I I can say is great things about the Selleck family. Bob Selleck, the dad, was amazing as a manager, taught me a lot, loved him. I got to know Tom a little bit. We've actually put on his first bachelor party for him. But I I'm not I wouldn't say I'm friends with him. I I know him through, you know, once in a while run into him or something. but that's how I got started. And then I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I went into real estate development and I built about seven hundred million dollars worth of real estate, mostly office buildings and R D, and then some residential about five hundred homes. and then I Got this itch about solving problems on the web and decided, you know, foolishly or not, I'm gonna take my my strength, which is solving problems. That's really what I'm best at, and bring it to the web. And so we started with two or three. One was a thing called Cocoon, which was the first private secure browser, but we had problems with Google. They wanted not Google, sorry, Apple, they wanted us to be a VPN. I didn't want to VP V a VPN. So we ended that task and moved on to something else. And I've been fooling around with AI for a while. And then when AI became this thing, I was thinking, wait, why are we all paying for this? Is there a better way of doing it? And just thinking out of the box, which I encourage all your young entrepreneurs who listen to take the same tact. Be careful how you spend your money. But But what's great about America is if you have an idea, you can try and bring it to the forefront. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: Absolutely. Now, so you're using AI and you're paying for these services. And at what point were you're like, you know, I can make this much better than what they have today? jeff bermant: Yeah, so that's an interesting question, Joe. So when I got into it, I realized, you know, we were doing a search engine and we were making about twenty dollars per thousand with search and those are clicks and impressions, combination of both. And realized, well, wait, why couldn't we do this for for AI and then we can open it up for everybody? Yes, you'll see a few ads here and there. Honestly, they just don't even bother you. You're so intent on reading it. Yeah, there's some ads I click on. If I put in s I'm a big skier, so if you I put in show me ski boots, you'll see some ski boots as an ad. That to me is just wonderful because I can click on that ad and see if it's worth anything to us. so I got into that and I realized, well, wait, why don't we just build this thing? So it is advertise based. It's not overly cumbersome with advertisement. I would say one ad you might see ninety percent of the time. You wouldn't even almost remember that you're seeing an ad. And the others are Google ads, which are on the side, which don't get in the way. None of this gets in the way of you asking and answering questions with AI. And as I said, if your users haven't tried AI yet, they should dip into it because it can just do amazing things. And I know there's a lot of controversy about the data centers and we can get into that and how I see that. And there's going to be a lot of maturation. There'll be some companies that will fall out. But they spent about nine hundred billion dollars in the last year or two and they're making two hundred billion. That sounds like you're behind the ball. But if you do that for five years and you don't spend a a lot more money, you can make that right side up. And so the AI companies can be successful as well. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: Most of the companies came in with this mindset that they were gonna give us free AI for a little bit, get us hooked on it, and then start charging us a monthly. Now you come in and you're disrupting the whole system. Where do you see this going? Do you see them having to modify their models in order to meet this process? Because your your model is definitely disruptor. jeff bermant: Yeah. No, I I don't see them changing their model at all. because see, we're like a feeder source to them. So they're still making l let's explain this. so they're making on a wholesale basis, they're sending it to us, and then we're presenting it to you. We have to build all the things around it, and they don't have to build that. They're just sending us a straight AI, and then we have to build a lot of the clicking and the remembering and the chat. All that has to be built by us. So they're saving money doing that, yet they're making their wholesale price. So I don't s I see this as disruptive in a way that maybe people say, you know, there's no reason for me to be paying $18. And it's not just $18, Joe. I mean the problem is you get people on and they want three different, they want, let's say they want anthropic, they want Chat GPT. Now you're spending $40 a month. And that gets seriously into your beer money or whatever you're you know, whatever you're pocket change is. So to me, it's it's it's good for everybody. And I think they're counting on guys like me. I don't think they've ever thought about an a full advertising model. They do have like ChatGPT has an advertising model that you pay eight dollars for, but you're still paying eight dollars. And for us, we can show you the same amount of ads and charge you absolutely nothing. And so we do have a a the it's very expensive models We do have a platform for that as well. So you can pay for that. But that's a little different. Once again, it's kind of it go as you want. So if you need like you want to try that expensive model, then you can just pay for it as you're going along versus having a a subscription. So let's say one month you do ten dollars of AI on your expensive model. Next month you don't do any. Well, you're ahead of the game. You didn't spend $18 a month doing that or even $8 a month with the advertising. So to me it's just it's I I'm always been kind of a a people person and believe we should give best value to people. And I believe that if we serve appropriate ads that aren't invading your privacy, and we can make money off of that and you get the service for free, heck eighty percent of the web is free like that. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: Now you mentioned that there's different models within your browser So how does that work? When I put in my prompt, does it find the best model for it or do I have to select a different model jeff bermant: So you get to choose the model you want. You might have heard that Anthropic or Claude or ChatGPT, and there's believe it or not, there's like six or eight models of Chat GPT you can choose from. Some are older, some are new. Honestly, the difference between the two, unless you're a coder, is so very small that you can use the and I recommend use the smaller, less expensive models for daily work. And then if you have something like coding you need to do. Well then yes, sure, you can go ahead and use an expensive model. But it so what happens is you choose the model. However, we have a an app called or an AI called Brainiac and you'll find it in our stack. And if you put in a question on Brainiac, it will go choose the the correct AI for you. So there's 26 models. It might check the one that says, well that's the best for your arithmetic or that's the best for your math or your your conversation, writing letters. So it will select automatically the right one for you. It will show you at the bottom which one you use. So that way you know, if I'm writing a letter, I can just go to this chat GPT or this AI, I should say. Or you can just keep using Brainiac, which is in in our minds is a great way of you, if you're a beginner, I'll say a beginner to the business, to the AI, just use just use our Brainiac and it will pick the best model for you. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: like that. How about if you wanted to create an image? Is that a possibility? jeff bermant: yeah. Yeah, we have image we have we have almost everything that the the main guys have. We built it all ourselves. So that's where we spent our money because they wouldn't deliver that to us. They want to come they don't want us to compete directly in a sense. They want you to build your own, which it's not that hard to do yet. You know, we have a development team that builds that and so yes, you get imagery, you get now you get voice chat. And we're gonna be changing voice chat to chat GPT voice chat, which I find has the ooms and the o's. And and the reason why I said that is because otherwise the voice sounds kind of mechanical. And I I want it what it's doing, oom and it's actually checking something. It's actually doing some search in the background. It's not doing it because you're a human voice, but it's like thinking. and it actually is thinking, which is kind of cool. And it can make it fun. You can you can make it kind of fun. We're going to do a lot of things. We're going to do something like maybe you want To have your eventually to have your chat to be an animal. I don't think I can let people be them be people because then you get into this issue about, well, why do you use my face? You know, you can't use my face without my permission. But certainly no animal's gonna complain. If you use a giraffe and you're talking to a giraffe and it's moving his lips and it's answering you, right? I think that's just kind of fun to do. And so we'll get into that because I'm a very creative human being and I love to make up stuff and see, But like ninety nine percent of things that I make up, my wife goes, That's just nutty. You're crazy. And then there's one percent that filters through that makes some sense. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: Now I I want to talk a little bit about privacy because that's one of the things that you mentioned and I want to know how is it different? Can you explain that to us of their models versus the model that you've created? jeff bermant: Yeah, so it we need to s separate two. on Tusk search, it's more private. There's no such thing. I wanna make sure most people know, unless you actually shut off and use a VPN. And even now that we found the VPNs, I don't know if you read this, but it turns out that PCs, not Macs, PCs will actually even tell the government if they ask them where you went, even through a VPN, without going to the VPN that I didn't know this. I just read this over the weekend, that they're actually recording everything on your PC. So not that they they often do that, but if you're wondering what the government can do, that's one of the things they can do. So our privacy is mostly so people can't necessarily see where you're going, right? we have that SSL slot. But when it comes to AI, AI is more or less anonymous. They don't see your IP address. We might see your IP address, we're totally fine with whatever you do, as long as you don't break the law and the law comes looking for us, you know, we're not gonna get into your business. I have a thing about privacy. I I really believe that you should have the most privacy you can. And of course in advertising, so somebody will challenge me and say, Well, in advertising it can't be totally private. Well, that goes for DuckDuckGo, by the way. When all those guys at DuckDuckGo tell you how private they are, they're actually filtering a lot of that to to Microsoft, through whatever the I forget the channel there. and so your privacy is not as much as you think you're getting, but they I I will say I won't say mislead you, but they hype they hype their privacy. and just really nobody in the government is gonna go chase you for something minor that you're doing. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: is there an ideal user that should be utilizing your platform and is there a user that probably doesn't need to even bother with this platform? jeff bermant: Yeah. Good, good really good question, Joe. Anybody's doing complex work creating like you're creating website, not websites, imagery. So, you know, you're doing that kind of work or you're asking complex questions, we're perfect for you. And you'll find the answers are we're gonna shorten them up a little bit. They're in my opinion, they're too long. You're getting too much information, which you can get too much information and there's an overload. So we're gonna make that a little more congruent for most users. and then the the the expensive models, those are the more complex that you're gonna eventually we're gonna add search. well I should say if you put in ski boots, you'll see in the I I had this experience the other day, give you a perfect one. I love Jerry Seinfeld, I love the Seinfeld show. And I was looking at it for an episode that I really love, Funnier and Hell to Me. And I I put it in my AI chat, it didn't come up because it's not connected to YouTube or to AI. We're gonna do that. We're gonna connect those. So if you put in, you know, something like show me ski boots, you might get an ad and you'll get the writing of a ski booth, but you'll also see some pictures of the ski boots that you can click on and go to. We don't make money on those. It's okay. You know, we don't need to make money everywhere. You know, to me it's this is more about bringing this to the public. sure we're, you know, we're we're capitalists, we agree, but we're I think we're very conscious about what we do. I'm not gonna overload you with ads. I'm not gonna bother you with stupid things. That's not us. we wanna be respectful to our as I've always been in my real estate career, same way, respectful to our users or tenants. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: to discuss a little bit more about the company itself, where is the company? Which stage is the company in currently and where is it headed? jeff bermant: Well, companies were physically located in California, although our developers are almost everywhere. We have a group in small group in India that occasionally does stuff. Most of our main developers are all Americans. They're all here. I love that because we want to keep people gainfully employed. And so we're here. We're still raising money. So if there's any investors that wanna talk about this, I believe this has got huge opportunity, just like the the beginning of Amazon or or or any of the other big ones, Google even. And the reason I say that is because if you look at all the models that have done really well, they're almost all a lot of them are are advertised based at search. I mean look at all the search, Pandora. Those are all companies that are advertise based. Now they're respectful to a to a certain extent, but to me a lot of users around the world and we're around the world already, Don't want to pay $18 a month for something they're only going to use 10 times in the month, right? They're not crazy users and they don't want to pay for it. And I don't blame them. I mean, that's the reason I built this was I was sick of hitting a paywall. I'd hit five or six. So what the what the AI companies do is they give you a little taste and they give you four or five, right? And then they say, please log in. Then they say, after please log in, please pay us. And then it gets worse. When you're overusing their AI for their 18 bucks, they say, sorry, stoppage. Now you need to pay more. So they know they're going, they're not making money with the developers themselves. They're losing money with them and they're trying to they're penalizing everybody else by saying, Sorry, you bet your your amount, now you need to pay me more. I didn't like any of that model. I was like, that's not a model for for basic people. We need to make models so that I mean think of a a disadvantaged person, not gonna be able to pay eighteen dollars a month. I wanted to make it available to them. I wanted to make it available to everybody and worldwide and and that way we can be successful and the user gets a great deal because they're not paying for Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: if we went to Tusk Central AI today, would we be able to do a search without signing in? jeff bermant: Yeah, sure. So we have we have the we have the model two ways. One, you can be totally anonymous and just do a search and it won't cost you anything. You might see it you might see an ad or two. or if you want, like there's some features, like for instance, imagery. Well, imagery is something that you might have to pay for. We'll give you some credits for free, but we might have to ask you to pay and and here's the way the what I love about the way we've set this up, it's pay as you go. So you can Get your taste of it. And then if you want to pay like $2 worth, you can buy $2 worth, you can buy $5 worth. But that way you don't have a subscription. You don't get subscription fatigue. You just buy what you need. It's like going to the store, and you go to the store, nobody says to you that it costs you five bucks. No one says to you, by the way, just leave me $18 and and I'll catch you next time. No, no, we don't want to do that. We want you to pay for what you need and then be done. Right. And and I don't like taking advantage of people like that. I think subscriptions in a way are horrible because they take advantage of people. We were we ran cocoon. We had people on for three years paying, and all of a sudden they woke up one morning saying, wait, I'm still paying for this. I don't want to pay for this. And I was aghast that they were paying for it. And I was like, no more of this. We want to be fair to customers. We want you to want you to buy what you need. And then that's the end of it. You don't have to worry about, gee, I forgot this cancels that subscription. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: If listeners remember only one thing from today's conversation, what do you hope that message is? jeff bermant: that we should get behind democ whether it's us or somebody else, we should get behind democratizing AI. So it isn't costing you it's a fabulous product. Believe me, AI is amazing. Yeah now I I do want to warn people about one thing. You can get what they call hallucinations. With and I did it the other six months ago. I asked the AI I've since I graduated from USC and my chief operating officer is a Notre Dame guy. I asked him who won more games when the coach died. And it turned out that the AI said we did. I was tickled pink, but I knew that was untrue. And it turned out it was an hallucination. I don't know how the AI got that. So you gotta be a little careful. Business wise, it's pretty safe. But if you ask crazy questions, sometimes you'll get a crazy answer. So I I I do want people, but really my goal is let's get this, let's get over the hump of everybody paying for the subscription. If you want to use us, there's not many guys, in fact, I haven't met anybody who's doing word we're doing. We're novel. I think we're gonna be very successful. I still have to do some challenging thing with the with the revenue, but I think this is gonna be a very successful product, and it's great, it's free. You just go on and you use whatever model you want, or you use Brainiac and get your answers, and you can use use it as much as you want or as little as you want. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: Now where can our audience find out more and continue this conversation? jeff bermant: Sure. So I would recommend we now have a new URL to go to. It's called new dot tusksearch.com slash AI. That's new dot tusk search dot com slash AI. It will take you right to the page and then you'll see it in front of you. We do have underneath it, we have a news feed. but I'm gonna be removing the news feed. I don't feel news feeds appropriate. I really want people to focus on what they need out of the AI, not looking at the news. They can go to search and look at news. Let's focus on getting people getting their problems solved. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: Now Jeff, thank you so much for joining us and we really appreciate your time and the value you shared. jeff bermant: Hey Joe, it's a real pleasure and I hope you invite me back as we find more success and we find more challenges with the AI. There's certainly going to be challenges with it. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: Very true. Yeah, and definitely we want to bring you back for many different subjects such as that and and also to follow the process of the growth of tusk as it moves on to the next stage. jeff bermant: Yeah, it's it's a very fun thing, very challenging. I've had a lot of surprises with it, but honestly I love doing it. It's a real passion for me and I love helping people. So to me, this is just one more thing I can do. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR: Excellent. Well, thanks everyone for listening. If this episode inspired you, make sure you share it with someone who needs it. And don't forget to follow the Glovisor podcast for more conversations that make an impact. Till the next time.