Apple Won’t Mention AI But We Will

[00:00:00] Jess Bahr: Hello.
[00:00:00] Jess Bahr: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Marketers Talking AI, your favorite LinkedIn live show where marketers come together.
[00:00:09] Jess Bahr: I don't know if we're your favorite show.
[00:00:11] Pavel Konoplenko: One day we will.
[00:00:13] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
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[00:00:16] Jess Bahr: Please help our feelings.
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[00:00:23] Jess Bahr: You'll get notified of all upcoming episodes.
[00:00:26] Jess Bahr: And we're super excited for this to be our weekly series to keep growing.
[00:00:30] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, lots of things happening, so there's always going to be new things for us to talk about.
[00:00:35] Pavel Konoplenko: And also hi, everyone.
[00:00:38] Jess Bahr: I feel like we're still just in the beginning of the hype circle for AI.
[00:00:43] Jess Bahr: Very much so, yeah, because we're in it, right?
[00:00:46] Jess Bahr: We're talking about this every day with clients, with ourselves, with chat, GPT.
[00:00:50] Jess Bahr: And I think when you're in it, it can feel like everyone's in it.
[00:00:54] Jess Bahr: But there's still just an astronomically high number of people who are not in the AI ecosystem yet, so a lot more opportunity.
[00:01:03] Pavel Konoplenko: And I think we're going to see multiple hype cycles with this.
[00:01:06] Pavel Konoplenko: There's going to be a hype cycle.
[00:01:07] Pavel Konoplenko: It's going to die down, and there's going to be another one.
[00:01:09] Pavel Konoplenko: It's going to die down, and it reiterates upon itself.
[00:01:12] Discussion on Apple's Latest Release - The Vision Pro

[00:01:12] Jess Bahr: So talk about hype cycles, though.
[00:01:14] Jess Bahr: I think this can lead us into the first thing we want to chat about, which is Apple.
[00:01:19] Jess Bahr: And I don't think I've ever heard Apple actually talk about AI.
[00:01:25] Jess Bahr: I feel like they're like, anti hype cycle.
[00:01:27] Jess Bahr: They're like, you guys are calling it AI.
[00:01:29] Jess Bahr: We've been calling it machine learning since the Think.
[00:01:33] Pavel Konoplenko: Apple traditionally has been anti hype.
[00:01:36] Pavel Konoplenko: I mean, even think about the metaverse, like, when the metaverse hype was happening, I don't know, a year ago, whenever that was, apple was very much anti metaverse.
[00:01:45] Pavel Konoplenko: They're like, no, we're not doing that.
[00:01:46] Pavel Konoplenko: That's not where the future is.
[00:01:48] Pavel Konoplenko: And I think part of their branding itself is in creating their own category.
[00:01:53] Pavel Konoplenko: And I think them not talking about AI is an intentional decision to not get compared to the current tech trends and for them to set up their own story.
[00:02:04] Pavel Konoplenko: And obviously the big story from the announcement was the division pro.
[00:02:09] Jess Bahr: I was shocked, to be honest.
[00:02:11] Jess Bahr: I was shocked.
[00:02:12] Pavel Konoplenko: Do you tell?
[00:02:15] Jess Bahr: Partially because I think it looks real ugly.
[00:02:22] Pavel Konoplenko: I have mixed feelings about it.
[00:02:24] Pavel Konoplenko: One, it's not gorgeous, but it's beautifully designed.
[00:02:29] Pavel Konoplenko: That's what I will say.
[00:02:30] Pavel Konoplenko: It definitely has the Apple flair for the design component, the form component.
[00:02:36] Pavel Konoplenko: Yes, I definitely have some qualms about it because it's large and it just sits on your face, and there's like a wire coming out of it and.
[00:02:46] Jess Bahr: A wire for not even a wire.
[00:02:49] Jess Bahr: I thought it was an antenna.
[00:02:51] Jess Bahr: Maybe at first, but I feel like when Apple comes out with things, they're often first to market.
[00:02:59] Jess Bahr: Okay.
[00:02:59] Jess Bahr: They're often first to market with their thing.
[00:03:02] Jess Bahr: I will never forget the feeling of seeing the iPhone announcement.
[00:03:06] Jess Bahr: It's my ipod that can make calls and do the internet like, wowzers.
[00:03:12] Jess Bahr: And I think if I were to envision Apple building a product, it often feels very just.
[00:03:19] Jess Bahr: It feels endemic to the thing that you're doing.
[00:03:22] Jess Bahr: And so I think when I thought about them building a wearable, I would anticipate them partnering with Warby Parker to design a regular glasses frame that has the computer built into it, that looks and feels like part of your everyday guess.
[00:03:39] Pavel Konoplenko: I think there's probably limitations that we don't know about.
[00:03:45] Pavel Konoplenko: And I feel like, not that this was a rushed announcement, but I think they needed to do something and they needed to create a new category.
[00:03:53] Pavel Konoplenko: And I don't know if the time is now, I don't know if they could have or should have waited a few years to actually develop that.
[00:03:59] Pavel Konoplenko: Because maybe we're five years away from being able to have small enough chips and energy sources for it to actually look like glasses and still be as powerful as it is.
[00:04:10] Pavel Konoplenko: Because I think that's where they focused in on it's incredibly powerful in what it's able to do, just from a technological standpoint.
[00:04:20] Pavel Konoplenko: So maybe that was the trade off they needed to go into.
[00:04:23] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:04:26] Jess Bahr: I think Microsoft is going to be the big winner of Apple's vision announcement.
[00:04:31] Jess Bahr: We think about the iPad when it first came out.
[00:04:34] Jess Bahr: It's a consumer device.
[00:04:36] Jess Bahr: Microsoft Surface would not exist without the iPad to make using a tablet more normal for people.
[00:04:43] Jess Bahr: They have an iPad at home.
[00:04:45] Jess Bahr: They're liking the feel of it.
[00:04:46] Jess Bahr: It's so convenient.
[00:04:47] Jess Bahr: They want it at work, it increases the demand for it.
[00:04:50] Jess Bahr: Tablets are normal in the workplace because Apple normalized tablets at home in the form of the iPad.
[00:04:56] Jess Bahr: And so I think that the vision announcement.
[00:04:58] Jess Bahr: And when eventually it's expensive, you know they're going to sell out.
[00:05:03] Jess Bahr: People are going to buy it when they get used to using this device, not for gaming and entertainment, but for more practical stuff around the house and at home.
[00:05:11] Jess Bahr: I think it's going to increase the demand for it in the work world.
[00:05:14] Jess Bahr: And then we'll see HoloLens take back off because when HoloLens came out, the applications were limited.
[00:05:20] Jess Bahr: It's super expensive.
[00:05:21] Jess Bahr: It still is as far as I'm concerned.
[00:05:23] Jess Bahr: But I think Microsoft will be the real winner of this Apple announcement.
[00:05:27] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah.
[00:05:28] Pavel Konoplenko: And if you even think about the iPhone, and it created this new category that allowed Android to become a thing a few years later.
[00:05:36] Pavel Konoplenko: Because Apple, even though they're not technically the first to market as a smartphone, they were the first to market with this cohesive device.
[00:05:44] Pavel Konoplenko: The touch screen combines everything and it just opens the door for lower cost, more practical.
[00:05:51] Jess Bahr: Apple had a, I don't know if everyone remembers, PDA's personal data assistance, palm Pilots.
[00:05:58] Jess Bahr: Apple had a version of the Palm Pilot that was the Apple Einstein and it just never took off.
[00:06:03] Jess Bahr: I would say Apple Einstein is equivalent to Google Glass, where it was this technology, this item way before yeah, way ahead of its time.
[00:06:13] Discussing Apple's Ecosystem and Data Privacy

[00:06:13] Jess Bahr: The user experience and the ecosystem.
[00:06:15] Jess Bahr: One of the announcements coming out of WWDC that's been announced recently too, is Apple is trying to make it easier for people to develop games and apps for the Isore and for their platforms.
[00:06:25] Jess Bahr: And I'm sure Vision right.
[00:06:27] Jess Bahr: They've said that all of your apps will be available in it.
[00:06:30] Jess Bahr: It's really like the proclivity.
[00:06:34] Jess Bahr: I want to use the word proclivity.
[00:06:35] Jess Bahr: I don't know if it's a good word, the desire to use it.
[00:06:39] Jess Bahr: And then it's the ecosystem that keeps people in a.
[00:06:43] Pavel Konoplenko: And Apple as an ecosystem player, they have that unlock.
[00:06:49] Jess Bahr: They have defined what the modern ecosystem is.
[00:06:53] Pavel Konoplenko: And even with machine learning, AI, and how they're uniquely positioned to take advantage of it is because AI and machine learning would function best from a wide array of data.
[00:07:07] Pavel Konoplenko: And because of this ecosystem, they have a lot of data points about you, from your health to your movement, your location, your photos, all of these things that a lot of the other players, whether it's social networks who are trying to hop onto the AI train, they just don't have that capability and that depth about you.
[00:07:29] Jess Bahr: Apple has so much data on you, all the devices, all the apps in your phone, and Apple has so much data, they admit about having about, like, think about how much they have from just I'm kind of blabbling her now.
[00:07:47] Jess Bahr: But cross app data sharing is really difficult because of privacy restrictions, a ton of other stuff.
[00:07:54] Jess Bahr: But all those apps, that data is living on your iPhone, right?
[00:07:58] Jess Bahr: It's all in there.
[00:07:59] Jess Bahr: And so, yeah, I feel like they would have probably I don't know what percentage of the phone market Apple is.
[00:08:06] Jess Bahr: I know for PCs, Windows is still like 70%, but Apple will probably have the largest data set in the world, I would argue.
[00:08:14] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, next to the NSA.
[00:08:21] Pavel Konoplenko: I think part of their pivot to privacy that they undertook like a few years ago, they knew about AI, they knew where it was going, and even with the Vision Pro, there was a big focus on privacy.
[00:08:32] Pavel Konoplenko: Like within that announcement of the Vision Pro, they talked about all the data about your eye movements.
[00:08:37] Pavel Konoplenko: A really interesting point came out because you're controlling the Vision Pro with your eyes.
[00:08:41] Pavel Konoplenko: So if you're, let's say, browsing a website, that's how you interact with the Web page.
[00:08:46] Pavel Konoplenko: It's just with your eye tracking.
[00:08:48] Pavel Konoplenko: And they made sure to mention on the announcement that the data of your eye tracking will not get passed down to advertisers, because you can imagine how from a heat map, looking to see, oh, eye tracking movements, like marketers would salivate to have that data.
[00:09:05] Pavel Konoplenko: But Apple killed that conversation right there, saying, no, this data stays on the device.
[00:09:11] Pavel Konoplenko: No one has access to it until you actually wind up clicking it.
[00:09:14] Pavel Konoplenko: So I do feel like their move to privacy was an anticipation of them going into the announcements of the Vision Pro, but also from the AI machine learning perspective.
[00:09:25] Pavel Konoplenko: We have a lot of data on you, but don't worry, we're not letting.
[00:09:27] Jess Bahr: It go outside when you feel safer about giving your data over because it's not going to go anywhere.
[00:09:34] Jess Bahr: But your data is only as safe as the thing that it's stored on.
[00:09:40] Skepticism around the use of AI in Social Media Platforms

[00:09:40] Pavel Konoplenko: Which is then interesting to see how Facebook is getting into AI with the I don't know if you saw the announcement of it's not an announcement.
[00:09:47] Pavel Konoplenko: It was a leaked rumor that Instagram is like, developing an AI chat bot.
[00:09:52] Pavel Konoplenko: And the idea there is you're going to have this built in chat bot.
[00:09:57] Pavel Konoplenko: It's going to answer your questions, offer advice, et cetera.
[00:10:00] Pavel Konoplenko: But I don't know if I would trust Facebook with my like, I don't know how serious I would get in asking anything outside of just using it from a novelty.
[00:10:10] Jess Bahr: They I came up we both came up.
[00:10:14] Jess Bahr: Pavel in the days of running ads on Facebook pre Cambridge Analytica, and I remember running campaigns for large retailers where they had targeting that was whitelisted, that was like, very specific targeting they would make just for that retailer using a bunch of data that they didn't announce that they had that they wouldn't share.
[00:10:33] Jess Bahr: They had.
[00:10:33] Jess Bahr: I think, Facebook we've learned that we can't necessarily trust with our data because there's not a lot of governance with it.
[00:10:39] Pavel Konoplenko: Not at all.
[00:10:39] Pavel Konoplenko: And then again, you see, like, Snap has the AI chat bot.
[00:10:43] Pavel Konoplenko: I think TikTok is developing I don't think it's live or anything, but TikTok is developing a built in AI chat bot.
[00:10:50] Pavel Konoplenko: And then you think about all the companies behind it because right now people are concerned about the privacy and the whole China thing with TikTok.
[00:10:57] Pavel Konoplenko: How many people are going to be revealing any sort of data to the AI?
[00:11:00] Pavel Konoplenko: And then how effective can it be if it doesn't have that data?
[00:11:03] Jess Bahr: You know, it's interesting, too, when you look at the Google Play Store or Apple Store, like eight of the top ten apps are all owned by Chinese companies.
[00:11:14] Jess Bahr: And so even if you don't have all the data in one spot, if you're using, like, Wish Lemonade lemonade is the new one.
[00:11:24] Jess Bahr: Like lemonade with yeah, yeah.
[00:11:27] Jess Bahr: Lemonade is, like, growing in popularity.
[00:11:29] Jess Bahr: I mean, TikTok already owned by Byte Dance, as we know.
[00:11:32] Jess Bahr: Wish is one of the top ones, I think.
[00:11:36] Jess Bahr: But, like, Wish Sheen, there's that new one that just came have I think what people my stance on it is people get really paranoid that their data is being looked at.
[00:11:50] Jess Bahr: You're an anonymized number.
[00:11:51] Jess Bahr: You're an anonymized code.
[00:11:53] Jess Bahr: They don't necessarily know, like, Pavel has done x, Y and Z.
[00:11:57] Jess Bahr: But advertisers hit you through your anonymized code, right?
[00:12:00] Jess Bahr: And how much does it take to really match that code to your name?
[00:12:04] Pavel Konoplenko: And they connect that data back to other available data that they can purchase, whether it's from your purchase histories, you can take a bunch of animized data and then put it together in a way that you can have a decent, reasonable profile about who you are, which is where the concerns are.
[00:12:22] Pavel Konoplenko: And that's what people don't think about.
[00:12:24] Pavel Konoplenko: They don't think about all of the other data that's available.
[00:12:26] Pavel Konoplenko: The headline, you know, China TikTok is stealing your data, but there's just so much data that Visa has on.
[00:12:34] Jess Bahr: You remember when a majority of Americans had their Social Security number leaked by the credit bureau that's supposed to protect your Social Security number?
[00:12:45] Pavel Konoplenko: The irony never fails.
[00:12:48] Jess Bahr: And they paid a smaller fine for leaking the Social Security numbers of a ton of Americans.
[00:12:55] Jess Bahr: They paid a smaller fine than Facebook has paid in GDPR violation fees.
[00:13:01] Pavel Konoplenko: I am curious how much Facebook has paid over a lifetime for all of the class action lawsuits they've had.
[00:13:08] Jess Bahr: I feel like this is like a hey, Google question.
[00:13:12] Pavel Konoplenko: Well, maybe we can ask.
[00:13:15] Jess Bahr: I also when I started reading about that too, my first thought was that idea that the Internet is dead and so how much is it going to be like chat bots or other AI talking to the AI chatbot in order to figure out what they're going to answer, to figure out how to get into the answers.
[00:13:33] Jess Bahr: The number one question I had as soon as Chat GPT started rolling out was, how do I get in search results.
[00:13:39] Jess Bahr: Mark Schaefer had shared on LinkedIn that he got a speaking engagement from being how do we get the search results?
[00:13:49] Jess Bahr: Talking to bots.
[00:13:50] Jess Bahr: Talking to bots.
[00:13:51] Pavel Konoplenko: But then the question is, how different is that than already what we have?
[00:13:55] Pavel Konoplenko: Because a lot of the content like, you have a lot of content writing tools, AI powered content tools that are SEO optimized and that's already trying to interact with the Google algorithm to understand what are the Google bots and the crawlers looking for, how do we structure that data?
[00:14:12] Pavel Konoplenko: The content already has been written for Google search results already.
[00:14:17] Pavel Konoplenko: And that's why I don't know if you've heard about the Reddit hack for getting Google results.
[00:14:24] Pavel Konoplenko: Like if you're trying to get meaningful data from a Google search, just type your question in and type in Reddit because then you're actually going to get meaningful information and insight.
[00:14:34] Pavel Konoplenko: Because if you're just trying to Google something, you're just going to get the first ten results are going to be overly optimized pages that are meaningless.
[00:14:43] Jess Bahr: Yeah, where I thought you were going was how North Face ruined the Wikipedia SEO hack when they shared it on Reddit.
[00:14:53] Pavel Konoplenko: Reddit is this magical third that exists as a counterpoint to the other.
[00:15:04] Jess Bahr: Quora and Reddit together are like a mullet.
[00:15:07] Jess Bahr: Quora is like the professional side.
[00:15:10] Jess Bahr: And Reddit is like the party.
[00:15:13] Jess Bahr: Yeah, I'm in a subreddit called OnlyFans.
[00:15:15] Jess Bahr: It's a subreddit dedicated to fans, like actual fans.
[00:15:19] Jess Bahr: And it just trolls, like OnlyFans the adult site.
[00:15:23] Jess Bahr: And so there's a lot of joy in Reddit, but there's also a lot of like, what are we really talking about here?
[00:15:30] Pavel Konoplenko: I think the only advantage that I can imagine with having Instagram rolling out AI, chat bots and TikTok and Snap is that it can lead the way into more of a mass adoption, into interacting with AI and kind of teaching people this is how it exists.
[00:15:46] Jess Bahr: It could though, also have, I think, a really negative effect of like, this is AI.
[00:15:51] Jess Bahr: AI is like when you pick up and call into customer service and you just start saying operator on repeat until you get to a human.
[00:15:59] Jess Bahr: I think if people are having bad experiences with the chat bot, and if their only exposure to AI is a chat bot and they think that is AI, they could end up thinking AI is this frivolous useless thing that doesn't know, that can't read their incorrect spelling.
[00:16:17] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, well, that would be the equivalent if a person's only experience of using phone technology is calling customer service.
[00:16:26] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:16:26] Pavel Konoplenko: And then, you know what?
[00:16:27] Pavel Konoplenko: Phones suck.
[00:16:28] Pavel Konoplenko: I don't know why we invented phones.
[00:16:30] Jess Bahr: The dumbest thing because it's terrible.
[00:16:32] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:16:35] Pavel Konoplenko: I'm curious what the use case would be on Instagram, chat bots and Snap bots.
[00:16:41] Pavel Konoplenko: Snap Bots.
[00:16:42] Pavel Konoplenko: Snap AI Bot.
[00:16:45] Pavel Konoplenko: Because right now you have search every platform now, like a built in search bar.
[00:16:51] Pavel Konoplenko: And at some point a search bar was of revolutionary things like, hey, you could now search whatever you want in here.
[00:16:59] Pavel Konoplenko: You can find profiles, can find hashtags.
[00:17:02] Pavel Konoplenko: And people had to adopt themselves to using these new forms of interface.
[00:17:07] Jess Bahr: You had to write for Search also.
[00:17:10] Pavel Konoplenko: And then they introduced Voice Search and now you can do things with Voice search.
[00:17:13] Pavel Konoplenko: So I think that's the advantage that the social networks have in general is that they have that built in network for people to try out new technologies.
[00:17:23] Pavel Konoplenko: And I think we'll keep seeing this evolution of this early adopter curve where the people who know how to use AI, enterprise level workers, that's where the real innovation happens.
[00:17:38] Pavel Konoplenko: And then it kind of trickles down into the social networks, into more of the frivolous uses of AI.
[00:17:45] Jess Bahr: I think ultimately having AI at the consumer level is good for the business applications because it gives you more demand, right, and it kind of normalizes a bit and more data.
[00:17:58] Jess Bahr: What kills me though is I feel like everyone is just like throwing AI and it's like, I love account based marketing.
[00:18:04] Jess Bahr: I love it, but there's so many places that just throw ABM on anything to make it sound like the hottest trend that there is.
[00:18:11] Jess Bahr: And I feel like AI is becoming that like $0.06 has conversational AI inbox is it really AI?
[00:18:18] Jess Bahr: No?
[00:18:20] Jess Bahr: I guess so, maybe, but it's not.
[00:18:23] Jess Bahr: I think they're just putting AI on things to make it seem like new and shiny, when really you're just taking your machine learning powered system and you're calling it an AI even when there's no interface to it.
[00:18:36] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, I 100% agree with you.
[00:18:40] Pavel Konoplenko: And that's marketing.
[00:18:41] Pavel Konoplenko: At the end of the day, it's like, hey, what are people talking about?
[00:18:44] Pavel Konoplenko: And we talked about it on the last episode.
[00:18:47] Pavel Konoplenko: How are companies responding?
[00:18:49] Pavel Konoplenko: And do they even have any legitimate service offerings outside of like, hey, sign up for our waitlist and let us collect some data.
[00:18:57] AI Technology: Power and Fear

[00:18:57] Pavel Konoplenko: And I think part of the trend conversations around how a lot of these software tools are getting AI thrown onto it is the other side of it is kind of the fear mongering that goes around AI.
[00:19:12] Pavel Konoplenko: One side of it is, oh my God, AI is going to make every tool superpowered.
[00:19:16] Pavel Konoplenko: We got to ten x your productivity.
[00:19:17] Pavel Konoplenko: Also, it's interesting, so many of these tools keep using ten x productivity as like the benchmark baseline for what AI does.
[00:19:26] Pavel Konoplenko: I'm sure none of it is scientific, but ten x sounds a lot better than it can marginally improve your productivity if you know how to use it.
[00:19:35] Jess Bahr: Grant Cardone is like kicking himself because he started the ten X conference a while ago, too.
[00:19:39] Jess Bahr: And his thing, it's always ten Xing.
[00:19:42] Jess Bahr: It's got to ten x everything.
[00:19:46] Jess Bahr: If you two x it, what if you double your shit?
[00:19:49] Pavel Konoplenko: What if you could quadruple it?
[00:19:55] Jess Bahr: If you're like Apple and you can get like 10% growth, that's like insane.
[00:20:02] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, but 1.1 x doesn't sound you.
[00:20:04] Jess Bahr: Don'T need to X anything.
[00:20:07] Jess Bahr: We're going to 0.1 exit.
[00:20:12] Discussing the future of AI and its implications

[00:20:12] Pavel Konoplenko: But the other side of it is the ten x productivity side.
[00:20:16] Pavel Konoplenko: That's like the fear mongering side where it's like, oh my God, AI is going to lead to human extinction in the next two years.
[00:20:23] Pavel Konoplenko: And I think that's where this there was like an article about the prime minister of UK, one of the ministers to Rishi Sunak, he had made some quotes that AI is going to lead to the extinction of humans.
[00:20:39] Pavel Konoplenko: Or I don't remember the exact details.
[00:20:41] Jess Bahr: Within like two years, it'll wipe us out.
[00:20:43] Pavel Konoplenko: And it was interesting because when I first saw that article, my media thought was like, oh, I can't believe he said it.
[00:20:52] Pavel Konoplenko: But then it's like, once you read the article, oh, it's like one of his ministers said it.
[00:20:56] Pavel Konoplenko: And it's like, again, it's easy on the media side to jump on here's like a big name, here's what they said.
[00:21:04] Pavel Konoplenko: And you have all of these ex Googlers who are like, oh, it's interesting.
[00:21:09] Jess Bahr: And this kind of ties in.
[00:21:12] Jess Bahr: But what I've seen on TikTok recently is a number of people who are going back and reading Ted Kaczynski's manifesto.
[00:21:26] Jess Bahr: The Oklahoma City unibomber.
[00:21:29] Jess Bahr: Yeah, the Unibomber, they're reading his manifesto because his manifesto is predominantly about the rise of, essentially the rise of computers, the rise of machines, the rise of AI, the impact that it could have on society.
[00:21:42] Jess Bahr: And people are reading, and they're starting to be like, whoa.
[00:21:45] Jess Bahr: To me, this actually makes a little bit of sense.
[00:21:47] Jess Bahr: And that scares me because that was such, like, a radical stance, ultimately, right?
[00:21:52] Jess Bahr: There needs to be governance.
[00:21:54] Jess Bahr: There needs to be something to help make sure that stuff's in check.
[00:21:57] Jess Bahr: Even what we've seen with AI hallucinations, it can lead somewhere.
[00:22:01] Jess Bahr: But I feel like people have been saying the machines are coming for us since Terminator.
[00:22:06] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah.
[00:22:07] Pavel Konoplenko: And it's a great, I think, Sci-Fi trope.
[00:22:10] Pavel Konoplenko: I don't know.
[00:22:11] Pavel Konoplenko: I have really mixed feelings on the fear mongering of AI.
[00:22:14] Pavel Konoplenko: So predominantly, I'm very optimistic.
[00:22:17] Pavel Konoplenko: I don't actually believe it will create the harm that people talk about.
[00:22:24] Pavel Konoplenko: When I think about it, I do keep an open mind that I could be wrong.
[00:22:27] Pavel Konoplenko: So I'm constantly thinking about, how could I be wrong?
[00:22:30] Pavel Konoplenko: Am I being naive?
[00:22:31] Pavel Konoplenko: Am I being overly optimistic around it?
[00:22:34] Pavel Konoplenko: But I think our relationship as humans with technology has always been very complicated, this idea of technology killing people.
[00:22:42] Pavel Konoplenko: And the example I think about is cars.
[00:22:45] Jess Bahr: Oh, my God.
[00:22:45] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:22:47] Pavel Konoplenko: There's a great thought experiment.
[00:22:50] Pavel Konoplenko: I couldn't find it anywhere.
[00:22:51] Pavel Konoplenko: I don't know where I heard it.
[00:22:52] Pavel Konoplenko: But it's like, imagine like, an alien species comes down and they give you this technology where you could travel from point A to point B almost instantaneously.
[00:23:01] Pavel Konoplenko: And it's great.
[00:23:02] Pavel Konoplenko: It's super convenient.
[00:23:04] Pavel Konoplenko: But the catch is, for us to give you this technology, we're going to have to kill, like, 100,000 humans every year.
[00:23:10] Pavel Konoplenko: And that secret technology from aliens is actually cars.
[00:23:15] Pavel Konoplenko: And when you think of it in that way, on some level, we have always had to deal with convenient technology killing humans, because, again, car accidents, or they kill.
[00:23:31] Jess Bahr: I think, though, there's always going to be people who resist whatever it is, because the government has tried to reduce the number of automobile deaths.
[00:23:39] Jess Bahr: And so what did they do?
[00:23:41] Jess Bahr: They mandated seatbelts in cars.
[00:23:44] Jess Bahr: And there were so many people against seatbelts in cars, which to me is like, asinine, why would you not buckle yourself into this thing that you're moving in?
[00:23:59] Pavel Konoplenko: It's also interesting how different it is from country to country.
[00:24:03] Pavel Konoplenko: So I found out like, a week ago that I never rode in a car seat when I was a baby in Soviet Union times, because that was never, like, a thing background.
[00:24:12] Jess Bahr: Pavel grew up in Ukraine.
[00:24:13] Pavel Konoplenko: Yes, I grew up in Ukraine.
[00:24:15] Pavel Konoplenko: I was born during Soviet times.
[00:24:17] Pavel Konoplenko: So we had all of the things there.
[00:24:21] Pavel Konoplenko: Or I guess we didn't have all the things there.
[00:24:26] Pavel Konoplenko: But, yeah, it's interesting because every country does have this different approach, this idea of safety.
[00:24:32] Pavel Konoplenko: And then the question is, what is the role of the government in providing the safety and enforcing some of the ethics?
[00:24:38] Pavel Konoplenko: But I mean, overall, I do think a lot of the fear mongering is overblown.
[00:24:42] Pavel Konoplenko: And even with Sam Altman, he's like, on this world tour of talking to all these politicians, I just constantly see him in the news, and he's almost begging for government regulation and talking about how powerful his company is.
[00:24:59] Pavel Konoplenko: And I'm like, I don't know, that's, like, seems a little bit not manipulative, but it's good marketing because you constantly see his name in the news.
[00:25:07] Pavel Konoplenko: You constantly see OpenAI in the news.
[00:25:09] Jess Bahr: Well, I think it's also positioning OpenAI to become part of the committee that makes the governing rules and that has.
[00:25:17] Pavel Konoplenko: The relationship with the governments.
[00:25:18] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:25:19] Dialogue on AI's Impact on Workforce

[00:25:19] Jess Bahr: Let me tell you what the best way to win a sales deal is.
[00:25:21] Jess Bahr: If you have a prospect you're selling into who says, hey, here's my rubric for scoring all the vendors I'm looking at.
[00:25:29] Jess Bahr: What do you recommend I do?
[00:25:31] Jess Bahr: And oftentimes vendors, if they're good, they'll say, hey, we have a rubric that you could actually use.
[00:25:36] Jess Bahr: And that rubric is set up to make them look great.
[00:25:39] Jess Bahr: And that's like the best thing to do if you want to have a growing company.
[00:25:42] Jess Bahr: If you can set the rules and you know that it's in your favor.
[00:25:46] Pavel Konoplenko: And it also positions OpenAI as the leader in this because they're doing the things that the leaders would do.
[00:25:54] Jess Bahr: I would argue they are.
[00:25:55] Jess Bahr: Essentially they're the most well known, for sure, too.
[00:25:59] Pavel Konoplenko: They're the most well known and almost objectively speaking, on numerous measures.
[00:26:06] Pavel Konoplenko: GPT Four is like the most accurate and the most powerful of the tools currently.
[00:26:11] Pavel Konoplenko: I mean, open source models are very close behind, which is also going to set up a very interesting play between open source and companies like OpenAI.
[00:26:19] Pavel Konoplenko: But I think his fear mongering tour is really good at positioning them strategically with the relationships with the government and also in positioning OpenAI as, like, this is the powerful technology.
[00:26:32] Pavel Konoplenko: They're the ones who have developed the best thing, which is also dangerous.
[00:26:37] Pavel Konoplenko: And whenever he talks about it, it reminds you of how dangerous and great they are on some level.
[00:26:44] Jess Bahr: Yeah, this is Skynet.
[00:26:46] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah.
[00:26:46] Pavel Konoplenko: I don't fully buy into the fear monger.
[00:26:48] Pavel Konoplenko: Again, I'm willing to be wrong, but I do think the Hype cycle and the Hype train of AI operates on both sides.
[00:26:57] Pavel Konoplenko: Both it's going to ten x your productivity.
[00:27:01] Pavel Konoplenko: And part of it, too, is like, this idea, it's going to replace all these jobs is because we have this assumption that AI will ten X everything, and it's going to do this amazing work because AI is just so great.
[00:27:12] Pavel Konoplenko: And that kind of leads in a slippery slope to it's going to lead to massive suffering because it's going to replace all these jobs.
[00:27:20] Pavel Konoplenko: And then there's nothing that we can do.
[00:27:22] Jess Bahr: Essentially, it's the industrial revolution happening to the thought economy.
[00:27:27] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah.
[00:27:27] Pavel Konoplenko: The creative knowledge workers.
[00:27:29] Jess Bahr: Yeah, they never thought it would happen, but the ones who are able, I think, to embrace the tools and learn and run with them are the ones who are going to do really well.
[00:27:40] Jess Bahr: Your job is not going to be replaced by AI.
[00:27:43] Jess Bahr: It's going to be replaced by someone who understands how AI worked.
[00:27:45] Jess Bahr: And honestly, you might replace two people's jobs by that one person who gets it.
[00:27:50] Jess Bahr: I saw the same thing in manufacturing, right, because I came up in process improvement.
[00:27:55] Jess Bahr: And you'd have all these older workers who'd been at the factory like 20 or 30 years, and they had just seen all their jobs kind of stripped away as they became more productive.
[00:28:04] Jess Bahr: You used to make ten widgets a day, and now you're making 90.
[00:28:09] Jess Bahr: But ideally, as you displace some of those workers, you move them to roles where they're able to be more value added, where they're able to still be impactful at having to be on the factory floor.
[00:28:20] Jess Bahr: You find space for them, but not everyone always makes it.
[00:28:24] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, and I think part of how workers today can do a better job of setting themselves up is learning.
[00:28:32] Pavel Konoplenko: And it's interesting to see a lot of these companies.
[00:28:35] Pavel Konoplenko: Google just announced some courses that they have on generative AI where they're teaching you the difference between AI and machine learning.
[00:28:42] Pavel Konoplenko: And I think one of the courses is an introduction to their own model of machine learning.
[00:28:50] Pavel Konoplenko: Of course it is, and I love how Google does know.
[00:28:52] Pavel Konoplenko: It's this idea of like, they're using education as a strategic competitive advantage where they're going to teach you how to use their tools.
[00:29:00] Pavel Konoplenko: And then that's how we got a whole generation of SEO consultants who've gotten all these SEO certifications from Google.
[00:29:08] Pavel Konoplenko: And that works out to Google's favor completely.
[00:29:11] Jess Bahr: Oh, yeah, all the courses, because Google has a ton of certifications with the goal of helping you get jobs too.
[00:29:16] Jess Bahr: And it's all focused on because Google invented like the site reliability engineer, SRE, as a function started with Google and they're so invested in, I think, building that current and next generation of workers because it just keeps them more in business long term with it.
[00:29:33] Pavel Konoplenko: I love it, and these courses are definitely the gateway for that.
[00:29:39] Pavel Konoplenko: But yeah, I think it's interesting to see how it evolves.
[00:29:42] Pavel Konoplenko: I think for people who are worried about being displaced by AI, I think there's nothing better than actually using it and trying out chat, GPT and a lot of these other tools.
[00:29:58] Pavel Konoplenko: There was an interesting comparison that I came across and then I thought deeper about is this idea that humans are better at comparing than generating.
[00:30:06] Pavel Konoplenko: So even asking if you're creating a social media plan or social media post, being able to get multiple variations and then picking the best one out of it.
[00:30:17] Pavel Konoplenko: And I think that's like the same way that when we take tests, multiple choice questions tend to be the easiest ones because you can.
[00:30:25] Pavel Konoplenko: Just look at the choices and you don't know how you get to the answer, but this one feels the most right.
[00:30:33] Jess Bahr: Instead of having to identify of the world of possibilities, what's right, you can identify what's wrong.
[00:30:40] Jess Bahr: Here's four options.
[00:30:41] Jess Bahr: What's wrong out of these?
[00:30:43] Jess Bahr: And what are you left with?
[00:30:44] Pavel Konoplenko: And AI is really good at generating these things for that knowledge worker to use their own expertise to figure out, hey, this is the wrong one and this is the most right.
[00:30:54] Pavel Konoplenko: And then work with that variation to improve it.
[00:30:58] End of a Live Session with Jess Bahr and Pavel Konoplenko

[00:30:58] Jess Bahr: Well looking at the clock, we are at time.
[00:31:01] Jess Bahr: So thank you, everyone, for joining us.
[00:31:03] Jess Bahr: If there's topics, questions, anything you want us to chat about, please drop it in the comments below.
[00:31:08] Jess Bahr: Replays will be up on LinkedIn.
[00:31:10] Jess Bahr: We'll be posting these to YouTube and continue to expand.
[00:31:14] Jess Bahr: And a thank you next week, next Thursday, like subscribe eastern time, all the.
[00:31:21] Pavel Konoplenko: Bells that you have.
[00:31:24] Jess Bahr: Bye.