My First Million - Talking to a billionaire about how he uses ChatGPT

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

Want Sam's playbook to turn ChatGPT into your executive coach? Get it here: https://clickhubspot.com/sfb Episode 726: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) ...talk to Dharmesh Shah ( https://x.com/dharmesh ) about how he’s using ChatGPT. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:00) Context windows (5:26) Vector embeddings (17:20) Automation and orchestration (21:03) Tool calling (28:14) Dharmesh's hot takes on AI (33:06) Agentic managers (39:41) Zuck poaches OpenAI talent w/ 9-figures (49:33) Shaan makes a video game — Links: • Agent.ai - https://agent.ai/ • Andrej Karpathy - https://www.youtube.com/andrejkarpathy — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 So that's my advice is every day, every day, you should be in chat chit. I don't care what your job is, right? You could be a Somaliator restaurant and you should be using chat chvety every day to make yourself better at whatever is you do. Can I ask you about the story really quick? And you have like a list of stuff here that's like all amazing. It's actually a lot of it's very actionable. But the reason I want to ask you about the story is for the listener, Darmesh founded HubSpot, $30 billion company. You're the CTO.
Starting point is 00:00:31 So you're in your, you're an OG for web 1.0, web 2.0. And your first round, or one of your first rounds was funded by Sequoia. Your partner, Brian, is an investor at Sequoia. So you are in the insider. You're an insider, I believe. You may not acknowledge it. I don't know if you do or do not. You are an insider.
Starting point is 00:00:49 The cool part is that you're accessible to us. When did you first see what Sam was working on? And how long have you felt that this is going to change everything? So I actually have known Sam before he started Open AI. and I got access to the GPT API. It was a toolkit for developers to be able to build AI applications, right? Effectively.
Starting point is 00:01:13 And so I built this little chat application that used the API and so I could have a conversation with him. So I actually built that thing that night. It was a Sunday. I had the whole transcript two years before chat CPT came out. So that's four years ago? It was 2020, so five years ago.
Starting point is 00:01:29 Wow, okay. This summer. And so even then, And as soon as I, like, you sort of have that moments, the same that all of us have with Chad GPT. I just had it two years earlier. And then I'm showing everyone. Like, Brian, you are not going to believe, like, I have this thing, you know, through this company called Open AI and watch me, like, type stuff into it and see, like, see what happens. And we would ask it, like, strategic questions about HubSpot.
Starting point is 00:01:52 It's like, how should it, like, who are the top competitor? And they were, even then, two years before chat, it was shockingly good, right? But the thing you sort of have to understand about the constraints. of how a large language model actually works, is that you type and you have a limited, just imagine this, if we're going to just use the physical analog, the sheet of paper can only fit a certain number of words on it.
Starting point is 00:02:15 And that certain number of words includes both what you write on it, that says, I want you to do this, and the response has to fit on that sheet of paper. And that sheet of paper is what, in technical terms, will be called the context window. And you'll hear this tossed around. It's like, oh, this, you know, chaty-PT has a context, window of whatever, or this model has a context window, whatever, that's what they're talking about.
Starting point is 00:02:36 All right, so why is that, why does anybody care about the context window? It's like, well, sometimes you want to provide a large piece of text, let's say, summarize this for me. Well, in order for you to do that, it has to fit in the context window. So if you want to take two books worth of information and say, I want to summarize this in 50 words, those two books worth of information have to fit inside the context window in order for the LM to process. I said most the frontier models are roughly 100,000 to 200,000. They measured in tokens, which is like 0.75 of a word, but that's like a book. So, yeah, is that a book?
Starting point is 00:03:09 I think it's an average book is like 240,000 words, I think, but I'm not sure. That's not a lot. So the way that I use chatypte is I'll, like, let's say a fun ways, I'll put a historical book that I loved reading and I'll be like, summarize this so I remember the details. So you're telling me that if it's a thousand page book, it's not even going to accurately at least summarize that book? It won't fit. If you pay something large enough into chat GPT or whatever AI application you're using, it will come back and say, sorry, that doesn't fit. Effectively, what they're saying is that does not fit in the context window. So you're going to have to
Starting point is 00:03:42 do something different. All right, a few episodes ago, I talked about something, and I got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper and to explain. And that's what I'm about to do. So I told you guys, how I use chat GBT as a life coach or a thought partner. And what I did was I uploaded all types of amazing information. So I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals, different books that I like, issues going on in my personal life and businesses. I uploaded so much information. And so the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life. Like, how should I respond to this email? What's the right decision, knowing that you know my goals for the future, things like that.
Starting point is 00:04:25 And so I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process, showing the audience, showing you the software that I used to make this, the information that I had chat ChbT asked me, all this stuff. So it's super easy for you to use. And like I said, I use this like 10 or 20 times a day. It's literally changed my life. And so if you want that, it's free. There's a link below.
Starting point is 00:04:44 Just click it into your email. And we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes. And I'll show you how I use it. 10 to 20 times a day. All right, so check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode. I usually use projects, and I have, like, let's say a health project,
Starting point is 00:05:02 and I'll upload tons and tons of books or tons of blood work, and I'm hoping that it's going to pull from all those books in my project. Is that true? That is true. So here, and this is a perfect segue, right? Because this is the next big unlock. So the number one thing to, like, understand in our heads is there's a thing called a context window. Here's why it matters.
Starting point is 00:05:20 So let's, we're going to take a, we're going to pop that on the stack, and we're going to push down the stack, and we're going to come back to it. So the thing we have to remember is two things. Number one, it doesn't know what it's never been trained on. That's one of the limitations, right? So if you ask it something that only you, Sam, have in your, in your files, in your email, whatever, that the training model was, I mean, the LLN was never trained on. It's not going to know those things. Doesn't matter how smart it is, it's just information it's never seen. So it's not going to know that. That's kind of problem number one. Problem number two. So let's say your website for Hampton was actually on in the training set, right? Because it's on the public internet or whatever. But the training happened at a particular point in time. Like they ran the training, ran the training, ran the training, and said, okay, we're done with the training now. The machine is done. Let's let the customers in, right? Now if the website changes, it's not going to know about those new updates that you've made to your website.
Starting point is 00:06:15 Because the training was done at a particular date, if completed, its kind of training course. So those are two things we sort of have to remember is that it doesn't know what it doesn't know. And number two, that the things it did know were frozen at that particular point in time. Right? So it has a seen new information. And those are relatively large limitations, right? So especially if you're
Starting point is 00:06:33 them to use it for business use or personal, it's like, well, I've got a bunch of stuff that I want it to be able to answer questions about or whatever inside my company or inside my own personal life. How do I get it to do that? And so here's the hack, and this was a brilliant, brilliant discovery.
Starting point is 00:06:49 So what they figured out is to say, okay, let's say you have 100,000 documents that were never on the internet, that's in your company, it's all your employee hiring practices, your model, here's how we do compensation, all of it. It's like, oh, you have 100,000 documents. And obviously you can't ask questions about those 100,000 documents straight to chat GPT. It doesn't know anything about those, never seen those documents. So this is, and we talked about this two episodes ago, this thing called vector embeddings and rag, retrieval augmented generation. And I'll, I recommend you folks go listen to that. I think it's a fun episode. But I'll kind of summarize it, which is what you can do.
Starting point is 00:07:24 And what we do is to say, we're going to take those 100,000 documents, and we're going to put them in this special database called a vector store, a vector database. And what we can do now is when someone asks a question, we can go to the vector store, not the LM, go to the vector store and say, give me the five documents out of the 100,000 that are most likely to answer this question based on the meaning of the question, not keywords, based on the actual meaning of the question. So it's called a semantic search is what the vector store is doing.
Starting point is 00:07:51 So it comes back with five documents, let's just say. Now, as it turns out, five documents do fit inside the context window. So effectively, we said, okay, well, yeah, it would have been nice had you trained on the 100,000 documents, but that was not practical because I didn't want to expose all of that. I'm going to give you the five documents that you actually need.
Starting point is 00:08:08 I can just say give it to you in the context window. And now, as you can imagine, it does an exceptionally good job at answering the question when it knows the five documents that should be looking, you just gave it to them, right? So it's having this, so we'll kind of jump metaphors here. It's like hiring a really, really good intern
Starting point is 00:08:23 that has a PhD and everything. Right, they went to school, they read all the things, read all the internet. The intern knows everything about everything that ever was publicly accessible. They're trained, show up for the first day of work. That's all they know. They're not learning anything new,
Starting point is 00:08:36 and they know nothing about your business. Now it's like, okay, well, I know you know everything about everything. I have this question about my business. Here are five documents. that you can read right now and answer my question. It's like, oh, I can do that. I like that analogy, the intern with the Ph.D. and everything.
Starting point is 00:08:54 That's so much how it is, right? It's as helpful and available as an intern, but it's as knowledgeable as somebody with a PhD and everything. And then, like you said, another analogy for that is like, it's a store. You have shelf space, which is kind of limited, but they do have a back. And you can always send the employee to the back and see if they can find it in the back, for you, right? That's kind of like what you're saying. Put it in the database. They can go fetch the specific thing that you're asking for because, you know, you gave it access to the back.
Starting point is 00:09:23 You gave it a badge that lets it go in there. Have you uploaded all of HUB, like, have you figured, first of all, I want to know what your chat ChbT looks like. I want to know how you use it on a, like, I just want you just screen share, just like, show me exactly what you do. But also, have you uploaded your entire life? Like, have you uploaded all of HubSpot to Chat, GBT, where you could just ask it any question? Yeah, multiple times, right? So, and what, for? format. Tell me how you did that. So I did, so OpenAI has called this, it's called an embeddings algorithm that takes any piece of text, a document, an email, whatever it happens to be, and creates this kind of point in the high dimensional space, you know, called, you know, a vector embedding. And, you know,
Starting point is 00:10:01 a point in high dimensional space, physical space that we know of, we think of points being in three dimensions, X, Y, and Z axis. Like, here's where this point is in space. High dimensional space, you can have 100 dimensions, you can have 1,000 dimensions, you can describe each document as this kind of point in space. So what I've done, so it used to be, in the early kind of GPT world, the number of dimensions you had access to
Starting point is 00:10:23 was roughly like 100 to 200 dimensions. And so you would lose a lot of the meaning of a document, right? They would sort of get it right. It would sort of capture the meaning. And then we went to like a thousand dimensions. It's like, oh, well, now it can much more accurately sort of represent and capture a document
Starting point is 00:10:40 of kind of arbitrary length and be able to find it, give it a prompt or given some sort of search query. And then recently, within the last year, we've gone the latest algorithm from OpenAI, Embedding's algorithm, is like 3,72, I think, dimensions. But where do you do this? Do you just literally upload it as a project? You had to do an API connection?
Starting point is 00:11:01 How do you actually do this? I'm being an API connection, right? In fact, I'm running the lease. Let me see where it is now. And anyone can do this, or you have special access because you're friends? No, anyone can do this. The API for the Embeddings model, they have two versions.
Starting point is 00:11:14 they have the 3,000 dimension version, they have a 1,000 dimension version. And is the results of this, like, are you driving a NASCAR and I'm driving like a scooter? Like, is that the difference? Like, if I just, like, for example, what I will do is I'll just like download my company's financials and I'll upload it.
Starting point is 00:11:29 And then I'll like explain what my company does. But the way that you do it is a lot different. Now, are we talking a massive gap in results that you get versus what I get? Yes. The short answer is yes. And the reason is, like, so I do that as well, in terms of how I'll describe the company or whatever, I try to provide it context. And that's why it's called the context windows. You try to provide the LLM context for what you're asking it to do. You know, the difference is that, you know, because I can go through, like, and by the way, the richest, and I'm working on a kind of nice and weekends project right now that takes email, which, you know, so you would be amazed. Like, if you had to write no other words right now, if you did nothing but say, I'm going to take. take all of my emails I've ever written
Starting point is 00:12:16 that are still stored and give it to a vector store, use an embedding's algorithm, and then use ChadGPT to let me answer a question. So if I want to say, oh, I want you to give me a timeline for when we first started using Hub to name products or whatever, and how did that come about? Or what were the winning
Starting point is 00:12:32 arguments against doing that versus whatever? Like, it's shocking how good the responses are when you give it access to that kind of rich data, right? Somebody needs to create just like a $10 a month, a single website that's like, hey, make your chat GPD smarter. And it's a website where it's like, connect your Gmail, connect your Slack, connect your everything.
Starting point is 00:12:53 I would pay them happily, 20 bucks a month to just set this up for me so that my chat, to me give my chat, GBT, like, the extra pill that says, you now have access to my data. Because you're talking about, like, I have the API to the vector embeddings and like, well, I have the flux capacitor too, but I don't know what to do with it, right? Like, I need a button on a website with a stripe payment button that I could just connect the stuff. Is there a caveman version of this? I mean, there are tools out there and there are startups working on it, right? There's two pieces of good news.
Starting point is 00:13:23 One is there are startups working on it. The challenge here is not that they're doing a bad job. The challenge actually comes down to if Phil were a startup and a startup cane to you, it's like, oh, we just started last week. But we've got this thing. It really works. In fact, Darmacian may be an investor. How willing would you be to hand over literally your entire life and everything that's in your email over to this startup? So part of the challenge we have is that the access control that let's say you're using Gmail, which a lot of us use, when you provide the keys to your Gmail account to a third party, there is no degree of real granularity.
Starting point is 00:14:00 You can say, oh, I wanted to read the metadata. That's like level one. Level two access, I wanted to read my full email. And level three is I wanted to be able to write and delete emails on my behalf. But if you wanted to, like, read, like, the actual body of the email, you can't say, I only wanted to read messages that are from Hopspot.com, or I want to ignore all messages from my wife and my family or whatever in the thing. There's no way to control that, right?
Starting point is 00:14:21 So you sort of have to have trust. Is there any product that you would trust right now or that you can recommend that guys like Sean and I should use as chat GPT add-ons or accelerators? No, not that I don't trust them, but it's like I wouldn't trust really anyone. right now with that. And it's one of the reasons I sort of run it locally, even though I know these things are out there. I predict what's going to happen is we're going to have any of the major players. And you can see this happening already, right? We see this with you have the ability to create custom GPs and open AI and do projects and cloud. You have
Starting point is 00:14:55 Google gems, which are essentially like a small baby version of this, right? That says, oh, you can upload 10 documents, 100 documents, and it'll let you ask questions against what it's really doing behind the scenes is creating a vector store. That's effectively what's happening. My expectation is all the major companies will actually have a variation of this. Starting with Google should be the first one because they already have the data. There is absolutely zero reason why Dual Gemini does not let you have a Q&A with your own email account. That's just like insanely stupid, right?
Starting point is 00:15:28 Like I'll just go ahead and say it. It's just there's something not right with the world when they already have the data. And it's like, and they have the algorithm. They have Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is an exceptionally good. model, right? So there you have all the pieces, but have not yet delivered, but I hope is it'll just do. Then tell me and Sean, we're early adopters, but neither of us are technical. What can we do to, I want to get it on this, baby? All right. So give me, give me two weeks. Here's, here's a one thing I do trust, and I trust myself. I'm an honest guy. I'll give you, like, this internal
Starting point is 00:16:00 app that I'm building. Let you point your Gmail to it. It'll go and it'll run for a day or two days or something like that. And then you will be amazed. You will be able to ask questions. And by the way, like, and the thing I'm, like, working on now is once you have this, this capability, right? Like, step one is just being able to do Q&A.
Starting point is 00:16:18 Right? It's like, oh, just, I'm going to step to, like, imagine kind of fast forwarding. Like, it has access to all of your kind of history. So imagine you're able to say, you know what? I'm not doing this, by the way, but if I were, it's like, I want to write a book about HubSpot and all the lessons learned and all, like, everything.
Starting point is 00:16:33 It's all in my email. Do the best possible job you can, writing a book. If you have questions along the way, ask me. Other than that, write the book. I think it would be able to write the book. Wow. What else are you doing with AI? So give me your day-to-day. Like, for example, the CEO of Microsoft had this great thing where he goes, I think with AI, then I work with my coworkers. And that really shifted the way I worked because I used to brainstorm or have a meeting to talk about stuff with my coworkers, which was honestly always
Starting point is 00:16:58 like a little disappointing. I felt like I'm the one bringing the energy and the ideas and the questions. And I'm hoping that they're going to. But dude, just sparring with AI first and then taking the kind of like distilled thoughts to my team of like, here's how we're going to execute has been way better. Like that little one sentence he said, shifted the way I was doing it. How are you kind of using this stuff? Yeah, so a couple of things. So let's start the high level and we'll drill in a little bit. So what we're used to with chat GPT, this is sort of your kind of early evolution of most people's use is because it's called generative AI, you use it to generate things, right?
Starting point is 00:17:32 generate a blog post, generate an image, generate a video, generate audio, all those things. That's kind of the generation kind of aspect. And that's part of what it's good at. Then you sort of get into the, oh, but it can also kind of summarize and synthesize things for me. It's like, oh, take this large body of text, take this blog post, it's academic paper, and summarize it in this way, or like so a 70-year-old would understand it kind of thing, right? So that's the kind of step number two.
Starting point is 00:17:56 Step number three, and we're going to get into how this is now possible, is you can do, effectively you can take action, have the LM actually do things for you. I'll just kind of put it broadly in the kind of automation bucket. Like I can automate things that I was doing manually before. And then the fourth thing is around orchestration. It's like, can I just have it manage a set of AI agents? And we'll talk about agents in a little bit and just do it all for me.
Starting point is 00:18:22 I just want to give it a super high order goal. It has access to an army of agents that are good at varying different things. I don't want to know about any of that. I just wanted to go do this thing for me, right? And that's sort of where we are on the slope of the curve. The first three things are possible today and work well today, right? So you can generate, as we know, it can generate blog posts. It can write really well.
Starting point is 00:18:42 It can generate great images now, including images with text. They can do great video now with higher fidelity, higher character cohesion, all these things. Sean, so the vision you had three years ago when I was on was around creating the next Disney, the next kind of media company. You have the tools now, my friend, to finally start to approach that, right? But then you should sort of move into, and this is what we were just talking about, this kind of synthesis and analysis thing.
Starting point is 00:19:03 This is where deep research kinds of features come in. It's like, okay, well, I want you to take the entire of the internet or entirety of what Sean has written about copywriting, and I want you to write a book just for me that summarizes all of that in ways I enjoy. Because I like analogies and I like jokes and I like this and I like that, write a custom version of Sean Puri's book on copywriting, right?
Starting point is 00:19:22 That kind of synthesis, I think, would be super interesting. And then automation is now possible. So agent.aI is one of those things, There's other tools out there that says, hey, I want to take this work flow or this thing that I do, and I want to just do it for me. Give this a specific. What's a specific, specific automation that you view, views that's like, you know, useful, helpful, saves you time.
Starting point is 00:19:41 I'll tell you a couple. One is around domain names, which is, okay, so I have an idea for a domain name, and I'm going to type words in. And these things exist, and I'll tell you the manual flow that I used to go to. It's like, okay, first of all, I can brainstorm myself and come up with possible words and various simple words, whatever, here's the things. then I'll say, okay, which domains are available? Absolutely zero of them that are good that will pop into my mind are like freely available to kind of just register that no one's registered before.
Starting point is 00:20:05 Okay, fine. Then I'll say, okay, well, which ones are available for sale? Okay, what's the price tag? Is that a fair approximation of the value? Is it like below market, above market? We don't know because there's no Zillow for domain names yet. So create that. So I have something that automates all of that and says,
Starting point is 00:20:21 oh, so you have this particular idea for this concept, for this business, business, whatever it is. Here are names. you're the actual price points. Yours the ones that I think are below market value, above market value. Tell me which ones you want to register. That's in ChatGPT? No, it's an Agent.A.I is where it lives right now.
Starting point is 00:20:37 But now there's a connector between Agent. Dot A.I. and ChatGPT through this thing called MCP, which you'll hear about a bunch if you haven't already. One thing I want to kind of get out there, just so we keep connecting the dots. I want everyone to have this framework in their head. So we talked about large language models. It can generate things. We talked about the context window.
Starting point is 00:20:57 We talked about faking out the context window by saying, oh, we can do this vector database and bring in the right five documents, stuff them into the context window. Here's the other big breakthrough that's happened. I'll say recently within the last year, a year and a half, is what's called tool calling. And what tool calling is is a really brilliant idea. And the tool calling says, okay, well, the LN was training a certain number of things,
Starting point is 00:21:18 but if we had this intern that came in, it would be like saying, okay, well, whatever you know, you know, but we're not going to give you access to the internet. like that would be stupid right we would give the intern access to the internet like if i ask you something that you weren't trained on go look it up right that that would be like thing number one on the first day of work and as it turns out the l lm world the intern couldn't didn't have access to the internet all it had was whatever notes that happened to take during its phd training in all things right and so what tool call it allows and this is a
Starting point is 00:21:45 weird uh weird approach to it but this is because the way lms work so remember the lm it's architect is such that you give it the context window in it's spits things out. That's it. It doesn't have, and you can't reprogram the architecture. Now all of a sudden, we're going to give you access to tool calling. So here's the hack that they came up with. They said, okay, in the instructions that we give it, in the context window, we're going to say, you have access to these four tools. And it doesn't actually have access to the four tools. It's that I want you to pretend like you have access to these four tools. The first tool is this thing called the internet. And the way the internet works is you type in the query and it will give you some things back. You have
Starting point is 00:22:24 this other thing called a calculator. And you can give it a mathematical expression and it gives you an answer back. And you have this other tool that lets you do this. And you can have an number of tools. And so here's what happens. In the context window happening behind the scenes, chat TPT, which is the interface right now that is interacting with the LLA. You're not talking with the LM directly, right? It gets a prompt and it says, okay, by the way, LLM, I want you to pretend like you have access to these four tools. And anytime you need them, when you pass the note back to me, the results, the output, just tell me when you want to use one of those tools. All right.
Starting point is 00:22:59 So we give it a query. It's like, okay, well, I want to look up like the historical stock valuation for HubSpot and when it changed as a result of, is there any correlation to the weather? Is it seasonal or whatever it is, right, in terms of market cap of HubSpot versus seasonal changes. All right, well, that's not something you would have access to. But here's what actually happens. This is so cool, right? So the LM gets it.
Starting point is 00:23:19 And the LM's in the context window that we gave it. We gave it instructions that to pretend like you have the, these four tools, one of which is stock price look up, let's say, historical stock price lookup. It'll pass the output back to the application, not us, and say, and in the output, it says, oh, please invoke that tool you told me I had access to and look up this result. I want you to search the internet for X. What was the weather? I want you to do this for the stock price. And then we do that, we the chat TPT application, fill the context window with whatever it is the LM asked for, and then pass it back in. So the LLM,
Starting point is 00:23:54 effectively has access to those tools, even though it never accessed the internet, it never accessed the stock market, but it pretended like it had access to it, and we never see this. This is happening behind the scenes. Now, here is the big, massive unlock, right? Which is, well, everything can be a tool, right?
Starting point is 00:24:10 Now you don't have to build this kind of vector store or whatever, because you would never build a vector store of all possible stock prices from the dawn of time. I guess you could, but then it's outdated immediately. Now it's like, what if we just gave it 20 really powerful tools, including browser access to the internet? Well, that's like a 10,000, 100,000 times increase in that intern's capability, right? And so that's where our brains should be headed now, which is exactly where the world is headed,
Starting point is 00:24:35 that says, what tools can we give the LM access to that will amplify its ability and cause zero change the actual architecture? Literally, it doesn't have to know anything about anything. It's like to want you to pretend that you have access to these tools. It doesn't need to know how to talk to those tools. It doesn't need to know about API. It doesn't need any of that stuff. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot.
Starting point is 00:24:59 They use Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were incredible. Click-through rates jumped 25%. Qualified leads quadrupled. And people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow.
Starting point is 00:25:22 Do you think that, I mean, this is all mind-blowing, and you have an interesting perspective because, you know, I think three episodes ago that you were on, you created this thing called Wordle. Was it Wordle? Wordplay. That does like 80 grand a month. It was just like a puzzle that you do with your son. It was amazing. But now you have new projects. You have agent AI. You have a few other things. But you still run a $30 billion company. Do you think that the majority of value creation, Like, am I going to, is my stock portfolio going to go up because I own a basket of tech stocks? Or is the best way to capitalize as an outsider? Obviously, you start a company.
Starting point is 00:26:04 Or is it investing in new startups that are using AI or AI for startups? Yeah, it's a big question. Neither an economist nor a stock analyst. But I will say this. The thing I'm most excited about with AI, and I actually said exactly this in a talk I gave, well before GPT on the inbound stage, and I said, as AI is starting to kind of come up, it's not a you versus AI.
Starting point is 00:26:29 That's not the mental model you should have in here. It's like, oh, well, AI is going to take my job because it's me trying to do things that the AI is then eventually going to be able to do. The right mental frame of reference you should have, it's you to the power of AI. AI is an amplifier of your capability. It will unlock things and let you do things
Starting point is 00:26:45 that you were never able to do before as a result of which it's going to increase your value, not decrease it, right? But in order for that to be true, you actually have to use it. You have to learn it. You have to experiment with it. And the only real way to get a feel for what it can and can't do is you have to do it. So I'll give you the very, very simple, everyone should do this.
Starting point is 00:27:04 I do this personally is that anytime you're going to sit down at a computer and do something, research, whatever it is you going to do, you should give chat GPT or your AI tool of choice a shot at it. try to describe, pretend like you have access to this intern that has a PhD and everything. It's like, okay, well, maybe it doesn't know anything about me or what are fine. So then tell it a few things about you. But imagine you have access to this all-knowing intern that has a PhD and everything. Give it a crack in solving the problem that you're about to sit down and spend some time on. And what you will invariably find, number one is you'll be surprised by the number of times
Starting point is 00:27:39 it actually comes up with a helpful response that you would never have expected it would be even remotely able to do. Like, how can it do that? it's because it has a PhD in everything, right? And it's now actually, we'll talk about reasoning in whether models are actually doing that or not if we have time. But, so that's my advice is every day, every day,
Starting point is 00:27:58 you should be in chat chit. If you're a knowledge worker at all, it doesn't actually, you don't even have to be a knowledge worker and I don't care what your job is, right? You could be a Somali at a restaurant and you should be using chat chit every day to make yourself better at whatever is you do. And that might be the introduction
Starting point is 00:28:14 of that orthogonal skill to bring it back to the which I never explained the word refabinal. I'll do in 30 seconds. So orthogonal means a line that's 90-degree intersection to another line. And the most common use is when we have an X and Y-axis, right? It's like, oh, the X-axis and the Y-axis are orthogonal to each other because they have 90-degree separating them. The common usage, when you say, oh, that's an orthogonal concept.
Starting point is 00:28:35 It means it's unrelated. It's completely different. That's like the Y and X-axis are completely independent of each other. You can say, oh, you can be here on the X-axis, but here on the Y-axis, and they're not related to each other. So that's what I mean when I say orthodox. Bobinal concepts or skills or ideas. Yeah, anyway.
Starting point is 00:28:49 Is there anything you disagree with that's kind of the consensus? Because a lot of things you're talking about like, hey, AI is going to change everything. It's super smart. Agents are coming. They can do some stuff now, more stuff later. These are all probably right, but they're also consensus. I'm just curious, like, is there anything you disagree with that you hear out there that drives you nuts where you're just like, people keep saying this? I think that's either wrong, it's overrated.
Starting point is 00:29:12 It's the wrong timeline. It's the wrong frame. It's whatever. Is there anything that you disagree with that you've heard out there? I've heard variations, two variations I disagree with. One that I think spent so much time, hopefully kind of talking folks out of, which is it's just autocorrect, it's not really thinking.
Starting point is 00:29:30 And that's a matter of like, what do you think thinking is, right? It's like, okay, well, if it produces the right output to which we think would require thought, so I think that is flawed reasoning to say, oh, well, and this often comes from the smart. people the most experts in their field because, oh, it's really like a stochastic parrot. You'll hear this phrase, which is, it's like a probability-driven pattern matching based. It just so happens that's been trained on the internet, but it's not really like human intelligence.
Starting point is 00:29:58 And I agree with that phrasing, which is it's not like human intelligence, but that does not mean that all is doing is sort of mimicking stochastically, you know, all the things that's read before, because in order to do what it does, it is a form of creativity, different from what we normally experience. That's kind of thing number one that I'm going to disagree with. thing number two is people are thinking I both disagree with the oh the scaling laws are going to continue forever
Starting point is 00:30:21 indefinitely that the more and more compute we throw out the more knobs we put out of the machine the smarter and smarter it's going to get I think there's going to be a limit to that at some point as if nothing goes on forever it's going to asymptotically move towards we're going to have to come up with new algorithms so that's GPT can't be the dual end of all things right there will be a new way
Starting point is 00:30:37 discovered so I think that's going to happen but I think the smarter and I did I say this other people have said it, the best way to kind of think about AI right now is as you use it, it's to kind of truly find a frontier of what it's incapable of. It's like, okay, it can sort of do this thing, but not very well. If that's the way you describe its response, you are exactly where you need to be, which is if it can sort of do it right now, sort of. If you have to squint a little bit, it's like, ah, it's kind of something, but wait six months or a year, right? Like,
Starting point is 00:31:13 That's the beauty of an exponential curve. It gets so much better, so fast that if it can sort of do it now, it will be able to do it, and then it'll be able to do it really well. That's the inevitable sequence of events that's going to happen. Have you heard this about startups? There's like a kind of the smart money in startups believes that the right startup to build is basically the thing that AI kind of can't do right now. That's the company to start today because you just have to stay alive long enough,
Starting point is 00:31:39 give it the 12 to 18 month runway that it needs for the thing to go. from, eh, didn't really work very well to like, oh my God, this is amazing, but you've built your brand,
Starting point is 00:31:48 your company, your mission, you've, your customer, you've been building that all along the way and you're basically just betting you're going to be able
Starting point is 00:31:54 to surf the improvement of the model. By the way, that's how I feel my company. My company is not related to us at all, but in terms of like our operations, we're like, things are very manual. And I'm like,
Starting point is 00:32:04 oh my God, once I'm able to finally implement AI when it can work for this purpose, my profit margins are going to go through the roof. I mean, that's how I feel about it. which isn't entirely related to that, Sean, but a little bit. One thing I'll plant out there since this is my first million, we like talking about ideas.
Starting point is 00:32:22 At a macro level, here's the entirely new pool of ideas that I think are now available on a trend that I think is inevitable, which is as agents get better and better, right? Right now, most of us when we use AI, use chat TPD, we use them as tools, which is great. Perfect. Fine. over time you need to shift your thinking and think of them as teammates. Think of them as that intern that just got hired, right? And as a result of that, so let's assume for a second, let's stipulate that I'm right. All we don't know is how long is it going to take for me to be right,
Starting point is 00:32:55 is that we're going to have effectively digital teammates that are part of all of our teams. Every company is going to someday have a hybrid team consisting of carbon-based life forms and these kind of digital AI agents. Okay. So if you accept that, the way that's going to happen is not going to be like all of a sudden we one day wake up and every organization now starts kind of mixing them. What's going to happen is it's going to slowly introduce this way. It's like, oh, I have this one task, whatever, that an agent is better at. It's reliable enough for the thing and the risk is low enough.
Starting point is 00:33:24 I'm going to have to do that. We already see elements of that. But here's what's going to happen. As a result of that kind of gradual kind of infusion and adoption of that technology, the way to win and the opportunities that get created is like, how do I help the world? accomplish this end state that I know is going to come. So here, I'll give you some examples. If we were to hire, if you, Sam, were to hire a new employee tomorrow, here's what you would do. You would say, oh, well, I'm going to onboard that employee, spent a couple of days, I'm going to tell them about the business. Whoever's managing that employee, let's say, was a direct report of yours.
Starting point is 00:33:57 Maybe you'll have a weekly one-on-one or every other week or whatever. That one-on-one will consist of looking at the work they did, whatever. It's like, oh, over here, you did this, whatever, and it could be copy editing, it could be anything, whatever the role happens to be, you're going to give them feedback, right? That's what you do for a human worker. All of those things have a direct,
Starting point is 00:34:14 literally a direct analog in the agent world, right? And what we're doing right now is we're hiring these agents and expecting them to do magic, just like if we hired an exceptionally smart, has a PhD and everything employ, and expected them to do magic with no training, no onboarding,
Starting point is 00:34:29 no feedback, no one-on-one, no nothing. Well, your results are not going to vary. They're going to be crap, because you do not make the investment in getting that agent. Now, the big unlock here, so whether you're an HR person or whatever, it's like, figure out, well,
Starting point is 00:34:43 what does employee training look like for digital workers? What do performance reviews look like for digital workers? How do we do recruiting for digital workers? How do we, like, what are all the mechanisms that need to exist? What is a manager of the future? What are the new roles that will be created as a result of having these hybrid teams? It's like, okay, well, now maybe we're going to need someone
Starting point is 00:35:01 that's like the agentic manager, human, that knows all the agents that are on their team or whatever and has kind of built the skill set how to do recruiting for their team, how to do performance reviews, how to do all of that, but for agents or hybrid teams, versus just purely human ones.
Starting point is 00:35:16 That's just a whole other, and we're going to need the software, we're going to need the onboard, we're going to need training, we're going to need bookshort, and we're going to need all of it to kind of adopt, and it's going to take years, right?
Starting point is 00:35:26 It's not by happening overnight. Two years ago, I asked you, is it going to be as bad, or I think you said, I asked, is it going to be horrible or is this going to be amazing? And you said, I saw this with the internet. Nothing is as extreme as the most extreme predictions. I listened to you and I trusted you then.
Starting point is 00:35:44 I actually think knowing what I know now, I'm actually more fearful than I was a couple years ago where I'm like, oh, this is actually going to put a lot of people out of work. And it's maybe not good or bad, but things are going to change drastically more than I thought. And my, so I don't remember how I phrased the question. is this going to change the future more than you thought two years ago or less than you thought two years ago? Has your opinion on that changed? I still think they're going to be unrecognizable. My kind of macro-level sense, and this is maybe just my inherent optimism about things, is that it's going to be kind of a net positive for humanity. And this is the other thing that
Starting point is 00:36:25 lots of people would disagree with me on. There's like, oh, well, is this an existential crisis to the species. And I've not said this before, but I'm going to see how it sounds as the words leave my mouth. I'm probably going to regret it. But in a way we are, actually, and Sam, Sean, you said this earlier,
Starting point is 00:36:43 we're sort of producing a new species, right? So that's like saying, okay, well, homeosapians as they exist, absent AI, is likely not going to exist. So the way we know the species as it exists today with where we have a single brain and in natural form, you know, four appendages or whatever,
Starting point is 00:36:57 maybe that's going to be different. but I think of that as an extension of humanity, not the obliteration of humanity, right? That's the, that's, you know, human 2.0 or n.0 of the way we kind of think of the species right now. So I'm, I think things are still moving very, very fast, and this is the, this is why I think humans have issues with exponential curves. We're just not used to them. When something is just kind of doubling or, you know, every N-months, it's hard to wrap our brains around how fast this stuff, you know, can move. Things that we thought were, like, the things we have today, say, if we had just described them to someone a year and a half ago, there's like, ah, well, chat CBD is cool or whatever,
Starting point is 00:37:36 but it's never going to be able to do that. And now, those are, like, par for the course, right? Like, we can do, like, things with that. We're literally like, oh, there's no way. No way. It's like, yeah, it's good at, like, text and stuff like that, but that's because it's been trained on text. Now I can do images.
Starting point is 00:37:50 Well, I can do images, but, like, video is, like, 30 frames a second. That's, like, generating 30 images per frame of, like, per second of video. It's like, all of that. It's like, yeah, but, you know, diffusion models, the way they work is because you're not going to get, you get a different image every time. So how are you going to create a video? Because it requires the same character,
Starting point is 00:38:06 the same setting in subsequent frames. That's not how the thing is arched. That's not how image models were. And we solved all of those things, right? Now we have character cohesion, setting cohesion in video generationally. Anyway, so my answer is, it's exactly, not exactly,
Starting point is 00:38:21 but it's close to, like, yep, this is what exponential advancement looks like. I'm still of the belief that we're going to have more net positive, that is not to say that in the interim, there's not going to be pain. And there's two things I'll put out there as cautionary words. One is, in the interim, anyone that tells you that there's not going to be job-bustolication, there's not going to be roles that get completely obliterated is lying to you. That is going to happen.
Starting point is 00:38:44 It's already happening, right? There's no world in which that does not occur. That's kind of thing number one. Thing number two, and we didn't talk about this, but we should have, is that because of the architecture of how LMs currently work. Maybe they'll figure out a way to do that. They produce hallucinations. And that's just a fancy way of saying it makes things up.
Starting point is 00:39:05 Right? And that's sort of okay, but not okay, because it doesn't know it's making it up. Because of the way the architecture works, it's like the intern that thinks it's been exposed to all there is to know in the world. It's like, I know all the things. You're asking me a question. I know I know all the things. So I'm going to tell you the thing that I know.
Starting point is 00:39:21 It was like, well, yeah, but you didn't know this. And what you said is actually factually, like, provably, demonstrably wrong and it has as aptly zero lack of confidence in its output, which is fine for some things, if you're writing a short fiction story or something like that, it's not great at all for other things like health care related where you need kind of predictable, accurate responses. So I think we need to be aware of the limitations around it when we're doing research and things like that. And the problem is when we have relatively, I'll say naive, I don't mean this in a disparaging way, folks that are naive to a subject area asking chat GPT for things
Starting point is 00:39:57 where it can't judge the response, right? We're sort of taking it on faith that it's chat GPT and our mesh said it's got a PhD and everything. So of course it's going to be right. Well, no, it's often not right. And it's kind of up to us to figure out what our kind of risk tolerance is. It's like, what is it okay for it to be wrong? How would I test it for my domain, for my particular use cases?
Starting point is 00:40:18 Yeah, so. So you guys know this, but I have a company called Handiotech, Joinhampton.com. It's a vetted community for founders and CEOs. Well, we have this member named Levan, and Levan saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem within Hampton, which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a PDF. It's tedious, it's annoying, and it's a waste of time. And so, Levan, like any great entrepreneur, he built a solution, and that solution is called Mouku. Moku uses AI to automatically transfer data from any document into a PDF. And so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract, you just put a file into Moku and it auto fills the output PDF in seconds. And a little backstory for all the tech nerds out there. Slavon built the entire web app without using a line of code. He used something called Bubble I-O. They've added AI tools that can generate an entire app from one prompt.
Starting point is 00:41:09 It's pretty amazing and it means you can build tools like M-K-U very fast without knowing how to code. And so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you, check out M-O-K-U-K-A-I. M-O-L-K-U-D-A-I. All right, back to the pod. What do you think about this situation where Zuck is throwing the bag at every researcher?
Starting point is 00:41:31 $100 million signing bonuses, even more than that in Comp. And he's poaching, basically his own dream team. He's like, okay, you're not going to, I can't acquire the company. Well, why don't I go get all the players? You can keep the team. I'll keep the players.
Starting point is 00:41:45 And he's going after them with these crazy nine-figure offers. 100 million signing bonus and 300 million over four years, I think is what I saw. Is that true? I think that was like the higher, yeah, the higher end. And some people have said there's even like billion dollar offers to certain people that are out there. This is like job offers. So Darmat's like, were you shocked by this? Because I mean, my reaction to this was, that's bullshit.
Starting point is 00:42:07 First time I heard it. Then I was like, wait, the source is Sam Altman. Why would he say that? And then I was like, okay, that's insane. And then an hour later was like, wait, that's actually genius. Because for a total of $3 billion or something, he can acquire the equivalent of one of these labs that's valued at $30, $40, $40, $20,000 or $200 billion. what a power play. I know obviously your investor in opening eyes,
Starting point is 00:42:28 so maybe you don't like this, maybe you have a different bias here. But I'm just from one kind of like leader of a tech company to another, like what's your view of this move? I think it's one of the crazier moves. If I had to use one word, I would say diabolical. Not stupid, not silly, but diabolical. And here's why, right?
Starting point is 00:42:46 This is the, like, in the grand scheme of things. So this is not just a, oh, can we use this technology and build a better product that will then drive X billion dollars of revenue through whatever business model we happen to have, there's a meta thing at play here that says whoever gets to this first, we'll be able to produce companies with billions of dollars of revenue or whatever, right? Because that's, it's like kind of finding the secret to the universe, the mystery of life kind of thing. It's like, okay, well, whoever wins that and gets there first will then be able to use the technology
Starting point is 00:43:15 internally for a little while and be able to just kind of run the table for as long as they want. So it's got incalculable value, right? the upside is just so high that no amount of, like, if you can increase your probability, even by a marginal amount, if you had the cash, why wouldn't you do it, right? So do you think, A, do you think it'll work? Do you think this tactic will work for him? Do you think he will be able to build a super team? Is he just going to get a bunch of engineers who now have yachts and don't work?
Starting point is 00:43:41 Like, what's going to happen when you give somebody $100 million offers? You put together this, smash together this team of, I think he's got a hit list of 50 targets. and I think like, you know, something like 19 or 20 of them have come on board already. What's your prediction of how this plays out? It feels a little bit like a Hail Mary pass, right? That's, okay, they're going to take this. It's like, okay, well, there's not a whole lot of things we can do. You know, the chips are down.
Starting point is 00:44:03 I'm going to mix metaphors now, too. But that works sometimes. It works sometimes. That's exactly why people do it. People get them. What other option do we have, right? Like everything else hasn't worked yet. So let's try this thing.
Starting point is 00:44:16 But I think the challenge, I still think it's a dial about, smart move. I'm not going to use the word ethics or anything like that. But here's the challenge, though, right? If we were having this conversation, we'll call it two years ago, give or take. Open AI was so far ahead in terms of the underlying algorithm. And this is even before Chad GPT hit the kind of revenue curve that it's hit, just raw, the GPT algorithm, which is so good, and they were so far ahead.
Starting point is 00:44:40 It was actually inconceivable for folks, including me, that others would catch up. It's like, okay, well, they'll make progress. They'll get closer, but then the open AI, it's obviously. is going to still keep working on, and they're going to be far ahead for a long, long time. That's proven not to be true, right? We've seen open source models come out. We've seen other commercial models come out. There's anthropic.
Starting point is 00:44:58 And they have, by most measures, comparable large language models, right? Within, like, one standard deviation, they're pretty good. And sometimes they're better at some things worse than others, but it's not this single horse race anymore. So the thing that I'm a little bit dubious of is that even if you did this, you pull all these people together. Like, it didn't really work for open AI in the true sense of the world, right? like they weren't able to create this kind of magical thing that it's like, okay, maybe they end up doing it somewhere else. But I think there's more smart people out there. The technology is kind of deep seek, prove that you could actually, and they didn't actually have an actual innovation in terms of reasoning models and things like that versus kind of the early generation, large language model.
Starting point is 00:45:37 So jury's still out. How much better is a $300 million over, so $100 million a year engineer over like a $20 million. Is it like, I followed some of these guys on Twitter. And it was, they're fantastic follows. And do you think that their IQ is just so much better or is it because they've had experience? Is it really because they just saw how open AI works and they want that experience? Are they like, is this like espionage? What is how good could a hundred million or $300 million a year engineer be?
Starting point is 00:46:11 Well, that's the thing. So this is software, right? So this is a, you know, a world of like 95% margins. So let's say, I think part of the value is, yes, they're super smart, but even human IQ, asymptotically moves towards a certain ceiling, right? You take smartest people in the world, however you want to measure IQ. And so that doesn't explain away the value, right? That's not that.
Starting point is 00:46:31 It's not that they've seen the inside of Open AI and they have some trade secrets in their head that they can then kind of carry over. It's like, oh, here's how we did it over there, and here's how we ran e-vows, and here's how we did the engineering process. They'll have some of that because we always carry some amount of kind of experience in our heads. I think the larger thing, I think the primary kind of vector of value, is they sort of have demonstrated the ability to kind of see around corners and see into the future, right?
Starting point is 00:46:56 They believed in this thing that almost no one believed in at the time. They sort of saw where it was headed, and they were working at it, tripping away at it, whatever. And that's much rare than you would think. For really smart people to do this stupidly foolish, seemingly stupid, foolish thing, it's like, you're going to do what now, right? And we're still asking ourselves a variation of that question that we would have asked, years ago, except now we have
Starting point is 00:47:19 chat GPT and we have the things in it, and we're still like, well, you say that we're going to have these kind of digital teammates, and they're going to be able to do all these things, and it can't even do this simple thing right, right? Like, we sort of keep elevating our expectations in what we believe is or is not possible. They sort of know what's possible, and they almost think of what
Starting point is 00:47:34 many of us would consider impossible as actually being inevitable. Have you guys... Has HubSpot? Have you made any of these offers? I don't think so, but that's not the game we're in, right? So we're not in that league. We're not trying to build a frontier model. We're not trying to invent AGI. We're at the application layer of the stack.
Starting point is 00:47:49 So we want to benefit from it, right? You know, we didn't, in any layer of my entrepreneurial career, I have not been the guy in the center of the universe or the company. But you're not like, oh, man, I met this person. Like, we need to offer, like, an MBA contract in order to secure this guy. No. And there's a reason for this, right? It's like for the kinds of problems we're solving.
Starting point is 00:48:10 What's the, there's a sports term about the best alternative to the player or something like that, that was replacement. More. Wins above replacement is the metric they use the speed. sports. So yeah, it's just not worth it, given our business model, given what we do. I have one last thing on the kind of AI front. This is one of the things answering your question, Sean, in terms of things I disagree with folks on, is that there's a group of people, very smart, that will say, oh, well, AI is going to lead to a reduction in creativity, broadly speaking, right? Because you're just
Starting point is 00:48:40 going to have AI do the thing. Why do you need to learn to do the thing? And I have a 14-year-old, right? So it's like, okay, well, if he just uses AI to write his essays and do his homework or whatever, it's going to reduce this creativity. And I understand that particular kind of line of reasoning that says, yeah, if you just have it, do the thing, you're not going to. But I think the part of those folks are missing is that, you know, creativity is kind of, in the literal sense of the word, is like, okay, I have this kind of thing, idea in my head, and I'm going to express it in some creative form, be it music, be it art, be it whatever it happens to be. And the problem right now is that whatever creative ideas we have in our head are limited
Starting point is 00:49:21 in terms of how we can manifest them based on our emerging skill set. So Sean can have a song in his head right now that he may be composing things in his head, but until he learns the mechanics of how to actually play an instrument, whatever the instrument happens to be, there's no real way to manifest that, right? We can't happen to his brain and do that. So in my mind, AI actually increases creativity because it will increase the percentage of ideas that people have in their heads, that they will then be able to manifest regardless of what their skills are or not. And I love that. So my son, he's a big Japanese culture fan, a big manga fan, Japanese comic books and anime.
Starting point is 00:49:57 And so he's an aspiring, you know, author someday. And what he can do now, right, and he's been able to do this for years, which is, so he's always had, again, he likes fantasy fiction as well. So he's had these ideas for writing things, but he lacked the writing things. skills. He doesn't know about character development, doesn't know about any of these things. So what he uses Chad GPT for is he's got this like 2,000 word prompt that describes his fictional world. Here are the characters. Here's a power structure. Here's the powers people have. Here's what you can and can't do. And then the way he tests the world as he turns it into a role
Starting point is 00:50:28 playing game. It's like, okay, I'm going to jump into the world. Now you chat GPT. I'm going to do this. Tell me what happens. Oh, this happened. Okay, now I'm going to do this. Okay, well, now you've got this power. And so it will sort of kind of pressure test kind of his world. And so that's an expression of his creativity because the world was sitting in his head, but now he can actually share that with friends, maybe turn that into a book someday because it's going to take the ideas that he has, and hopefully in the meantime, he will kind of develop some of those foundational skills, but he doesn't have to wait until like 12 years of writing education before he can take this idea as a child. He has lots of creativity, but as a practitioner, most of those things that he would love to be able
Starting point is 00:51:04 to manifest in the world, he has nothing close to the skills required, whether it's drawing or writing or anything. So I think that's what AI can help us kind of elevate. Once again, we have to use it responsibly, but it should be able to elevate our skills. I want to show you guys an example of this real quick. So I had this idea not long ago, a couple weeks ago, of creating a game using only AI.
Starting point is 00:51:31 So I don't know if you guys ever played the Monkey Island games from when I was a kid. I played Monkey Island. It was an incredible game. It was basically this guy wants to be a pirate. It's like this very funny, but like 8-bit art-style game. And so I created a version of that called Escape from Silicon Valley. I didn't create the whole game, but I create like the art.
Starting point is 00:51:49 But like, check this out. So I go into AI and I basically start creating the game art. And so it's like the story is basically like deep in San Francisco. The year is 2048. The block is starting his third term in office. You know, Nancy Pelosi passes away, the richest woman on earth. And then, you know, Elon is promising that self-driving cars are coming really, really soon. for real this time.
Starting point is 00:52:12 And here you are, you're this character, and you're in the Open AI office. And basically the ideas. Oh, Charlie. Look at that. What's that? Look at the Charlie bar. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was putting in some references to like,
Starting point is 00:52:23 you know, stuff that I thought was, it would be cool. That is so cool. What did you use to make those images? So that right there was just chat GPT. And the journey mix. I tried using, you know, scenario and a couple other, like, game-specific tools.
Starting point is 00:52:36 Like, check this out. So, like, I created all these, like, tech characters. So it's like I create Zuck and Palmerlucky and like Chimath and Elizabeth Holmes in jail. And I had it basically write the scenes for the levels with me, like write the dialogue with me, create the character art. Dude, that's so sick. Why didn't you do that? Well, because I did the fun part in the first two weeks where I was like, oh, the concept, the levels, the character art, the music, seeing what AI could do. But then to actually make the game, the AI can't do that. And so I was like, oh, now I need to like, I mean, people who build games and years building it.
Starting point is 00:53:11 It's like, oh, this is like minimum six to 12 months doing this like very, very arbitrary project. But I still love the idea. And I'm kind of like packaged up the whole idea. Darmesh, last question. Just really quick, like you, where do you hang out on the internet that we and the listener can hang out to stay on top of some of this stuff? Like are there, like who's a reputable handful of people on Twitter to follow or reputable websites or places to hang out at. That's interesting. So I spend most of my time on YouTube, as it turns out,
Starting point is 00:53:46 and I sort of give into the vibes, so to speak, and let the algorithm sort of figure out what things I might enjoy. It gets it right sometimes, gets it wrong sometimes, so it's a mix of things. But the person that I think, if you want to kind of get deeper into like understanding AI, there's a guy named Andre Carpathy. I don't know if you've come across him, just search for a Carpathy. Dude, you don't want to know how I know. I get so many ads that says, like,
Starting point is 00:54:13 Andre Carpathie said, this is the best product, or Andre Carpathie showed me how to do this. Now, I'm going to show you. Like, I don't even know who Andre is, other than ads run his name to promote him. Yeah, I mean, he's, yeah, one of the true OGs in AI, but he has his orthogonal skill, or one of them. I think he's got, like,
Starting point is 00:54:31 nine, he's probably like a nine tool player of some sort, but he's able to really simplify complicated things without making you feel stupid. Right? So he's not talking down to you. He's like, okay, like, here's how we're going to do this. We're going to kind of build it brick by brick. And you're going to understand at the end of this hour and a half how X works, right? And he's amazing.
Starting point is 00:54:52 So that would be one. So him, any other YouTubers or Twitter people or blogs? On the business side, actually, like, you know, Aaron Levy from Box is actually very, very thoughtful on the, if you're in software and business and the AI implications, there. I think he's really good. Hithen Shah, who you both know, now at Dropbox through the acquisition, has been on fire lately on LinkedIn. So he's one I would go back, especially for the last like three, four months and read all the stuff he's written. I think he's on point. Yeah, so. Those are awesome. Darmash, thanks for coming on. Thanks for teaching us. You're one of my favorite
Starting point is 00:55:24 teachers and entertainers. So thank you for coming on, man. My pleasure. It was good to see you guys. It was fun. Likewise. Thank you. That's it. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit.
Starting point is 00:55:49 And it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.