#24: Artificial Intelligence in Business: Understanding AI, AGI, and Future Trends

Welcome back to the junction, a podcast by Venn

Technology about AI and automation without the jargon.

Hosted by me, Mel Bell, and my co host, Chase Friedman.

We're thought leaders, industry experts, and visionaries

here to unpack the latest trends in

AI and how we're using it.

Listen for practical advice and a little bit of

banter on how to improve your business and career

by being at the junction of it all.

We're so excited you're here.

Let's jump in.

Happy tax day. We did it.

Have you filed yet? Yes.

Have you?

You know I have.

You know, it's like waiting till the last second.

Mainly because I do pay my taxes.

I do pay them on time.

I just tend to not really do

them until, like, the weekend before.

Well, lo and behold, I think I accidentally

threw away one of the w two.

Rachel's w two.

And of course, she was asleep when I needed it.

And anyway, we got it.

Now I just need to file. So. Got it. It was a quit.

Like, it was a quick, like, I know my

wife is gonna be, I told you so.

Should have done it three weeks ago, 10%.

And I'm gonna be like, nah, we got it. It's cool.

I'm Team Rachel on this one.

I know everybody that listens that does anything

tax related, they're gonna be like, yep, you

should have done it four weeks ago.

Here's what I'll say.

So I loaded all of our stuff up, like, two months

ago, and now they really have made it very easy to.

I'm just using a pretty basic tax platform, but

they suck in your w two electronically, even if

you get it mailed to you for most. Yeah.

And I've got a.

Don't have a very complicated tax situation.

We've talked about this.

Got a couple dogs, don't have any kids.

Those don't get anything for that.

You need a tax break for dogs.

I had three dogs, man.

They were a lot.

I had to vacuum my house, like, every day.

Oh, preach. Yeah.

Thank God for Roomba.

Roomba is great. I love Roomba. I love the idea.

But three dogs worth of dog here. Roomba.

You still gotta work around Roomba. Yeah.

No, but Roomba would choke, and then

I'd have to clean out the roomba. That, too. Anyway.

End up cleaning out more things than

I feel like I need to.

So I just went back to my Dyson. Well, the.

The Dyson is one of the most unsung heroes of the.

Of the entire household. I will tell you that.

The Dyson, like, it's.

It's a godsend. Dyson, roomba.

I've got this Norwex thing.

Like, yeah, you've got dogs.

You're gonna, you're definitely gonna

have to do some cleanup.

But needless to say, none of that

is a deduction on the tax return.

But I had everything loaded up like two months ago.

Oh, for sure, come yesterday. Yeah.

My husband's like, so we're gonna file our taxes.

I was like, you've got the login file away.

And you know who still ended up doing it? You. Me.

He was like, I just want to make sure.

Just check all the, just check all the things.

I got suckered into it.

He's like, I can't find the login.

I was like, it's in one password.

He was just telling me how much he loved one password.

But mysteriously, when it came time to file

taxes, couldn't find it in the shared vault.

It's like having to click the button.

I'm sure some people got refunds and

some people have to pay, right.

And just not knowing 100% that you may be right or

you may be wrong is like, really makes some people anxious.

Yeah, just gotta pay the man. Well.

So in honor of tax day, actually,

this is a really happening topic.

Thought would be cool to explore further how

businesses are just looking at the tax outlook.

There's a lot of automated solutions out there now.

Companies are layering AI into this stuff and a

lot of finance professionals are figuring out, especially finance

executives are making this a top priority.

Like Ernst and Young came out with this report and

we'll link this out in the show notes that 96%

of businesses say they're transforming their tax operating model in

some way, shape or form over the next several years.

And some of it is to build out their own capabilities.

But a lot of the reports, findings showed that

they're going to outsource or what they're, this new

term I had not heard of, co source.

So it kind of supplements.

Hey, we're going to take some of the more

repeatable tasks that are not considered high value, highly

strategic, and we're going to co source that using

either a firm or technology so that we can

divert those finance resources internally to more strategic initiatives.

Oh, yeah.

Well, that makes a lot of sense.

Obviously the tax code is very complicated, right.

Or you wouldn't necessarily have

to figure out all that.

But we're not just talking about

personal taxes, we're talking about taxes.

When you send out an invoice, taxes for registrations.

Nexi is somebody came up with that wherever you

have a nexus, you have to register and I

have to get file all the time.

It's a really hot topic because it

represents a significant liability to your business.

Well, if you weren't charging sales tax tax before

and you are now, it could be a significant

amount of money for your recurring customers. Right.

Um, but, um, taxes are good in most cases.

Um, sure.

Why are they so complicated though?

I mean, that's the thing.

I think this is what it keeps coming back to

and why the trends are going the way they are. Yeah.

Because it continues to get more complex.

So as I was reading, because for those of you

who are listening that don't know, I'm not an accountant.

I'm not a tax accountant by any stretch. Not yet.

None of it? Nope.

I stay in my lane in sales and marketing.

Uh, there's so much, especially if you are not just

like going out of multi state, but like multinational.

That said, it's not just for the Microsoft's

and like the big multinational billion dollar companies.

Um, a lot of what I was reading about, you

know, the small growing, fast growing businesses, is that you,

you really should stay on top of it.

Like now is the time to kind of lay the

foundation for how you're going to set up your model

because it's just going to continue to get complex.

And then when events happen, like COVID-19 and

then all of a sudden we're in this

weird hybrid workforce place and now they're adding

environmental regulations and there's something else, this, like

BEPS 2.0, which, have you heard of that?

Actually, I have not.

Okay, well, under the.

It's basically countries can impose different

corporate tax rates on multinational companies. Okay.

So, you know, it's like one of those things you could

be operating and not even know, I guess, that you are.

Oh, yeah.

Well, I mean, the idea, when you

are charging sales taxes, you're charging what

you should be collecting, right?

So you can forward that money

on to whichever government, municipality and.

That's a tough word. A tough one. Yeah. Right. Who.

Whoever you're supposed to give the money to, right?

And if you collect $5 and the man says,

hey, you owe ten, well, yeah, go find that

customer that's, you know, three weeks ago that picked

up a sandwich at your sandwich shop. Right.

It is really weird though, because when we started talking

about this internally a few weeks back, and it's been

a conversation for a long time, but, um, I was

reminded of this, this receipt that I got from a.

It was clearly a shopify store

that I had purchased something from.

I think it was a piece of apparel,

something that probably came from a shop out.

Well, maybe it wasn't out of state.

I don't recall.

All I know is there was this, like, Tarrant

county crime tax or, like, Fort Worth something.

And I looked at my husband, I was like, what is that?

And it was just this, like, really random, kind

of ticky tacky, like, line item applied for some

sort of tax that I didn't even know until

after I essentially put this in my cart.

And now it's time to file or,

you know, charge my credit card.

And you think about that.

So if there's, like, going back to the municipality example,

one thing in a county or a city or a

state or you layer all those things and having.

Being able to collect on that based on where

the buyer or where your business is, like, it's.

I feel like that could become

a spider web really quickly.

Well, it certainly is, because the way that it works, and

if there are any tax professionals out there that want to

tell me that I'm wrong, I'm happy to hear it.

I'm wrong all the time.

My wife tells me every day. Right. But there are.

They call them rate tables, and it's when

you are in this specific location, right.

These different rates apply to you, whatever they

are, whether they come from the federal government,

the city government, your local city council. Right.

Like, in this one moment, I just bought something

for $10, and all of these different rates apply

to come up to be whatever your total is.

Um, and what ends up happening, right, if.

If you're lax on this kind of stuff, is that.

Well, you didn't know that the city of Arlington

was now collecting, you know, a crime tax. Okay.

I mean, not a lot, right?

One order, not a big deal.

Well, 10,000 orders, right?

Times, I don't know, $3.

Right, is now 30 grand.

Well, you're not paying attention. Right.

Just rocking and rolling because

you're raking in the dough.

Well, now you're at 100,000 orders

times $3, and that's $300,000.

And what ends up happening, right, is you don't

pay, and then that city sends you a forfeiture

of notice to do the right to do business. Right.

So you can no longer do business there. Yep.

When I start ragging up penalties, right.

Maybe they're gonna try to, I don't

know, shut down your local store.

Who knows, right?

So it all kind of boils back to there's a

ton of information you have to manage well, and let

me just throw in a quick stat here to that,

since you went on the little tangent.

The average small business pays somewhere around like

20% of its annual gross income and taxes.

So there's like, and may, that may not

seem like much, but sounds every little. Right.

Yeah, every little bit counts. What's.

But why, again, I go back to,

like, why is it so difficult?

So there's all these tools out there

that help calculate tax on invoices.

And like, how does one decide, like, the

strategy that they need to go build?

We probably can't lean in and provide advice on that.

Like, here's how to build out

your, your co sourced model.

But we dabble in this world a lot.

We talk to finance professionals all the time that they

have an ERP CRM, they have a payment processor. Right.

They need to collect tax.

Well, you have, I mean, you have, it's

kind of, um, it's synchronous versus asynchronous.

Um, so when you go to shopify, you need the

tax right now because I'm about to click pay. Right.

So as a Shopify store owner, I don't

want them to wait even 2 seconds.

I need the instant calculation.

Then you've got the asynchronous deal where we

can calculate tax in several seconds, and that

doesn't really impact whatever workflow we're talking about.

There's two worlds in the automation space.

One that is, maybe you could call it retail

calculation, if you will, like on the fly synchronous.

And you've got asynchronous where like, we could create

an invoice today, and then a couple seconds later

you get the tax rate, and then you send

out the PDF of whatever is owed.

And there's sort of two parties or two

types of companies right now, at least from

my experience, that handle this type of stuff.

Stripe is getting heavy into this space.

Synexis is another shop that we've

been kind of talking with.

So call out to those guys.

Um, there's tax jar, which is what stripe purchased.

There's Avalara, there's vertex. Right.

Um, and both of them, all of these folks,

kind of focus in these two areas of, well,

let me from a, like, what's the tax number? Right.

Doing it asynchronously or synchronously?

Um, and so we are kind

of focusing on the asynchronous side. Right.

What's the tax?

Not leisurely, right, but what's the tax?

Because I don't have somebody trying to be down

my door to give me a credit card.

The intent behind that is to take in the address

where we need to calculate tax, send out the information

to an API endpoint, and then return it.

The integration itself is relatively straightforward,

but the complication comes in volume.

We could be talking about

hundreds of thousands of orders.

It's not just one.

If you're only charging tax on one order, then may

not have a Nexi, you know, you're probably not going

to have a nexus or you probably don't care. Right.

So we're certainly talking about

decent amounts of volume. Right.

And between those two, if you're on a

shopify, you don't, probably don't need something because

Shopify is going to calculate tax for you

and you're already paying for that service.

So we've been primarily focusing in the asynchronous world

where people don't know what the tax rates are. Right.

And once they get into it, they're not

going to try to figure out all the

rate tables because they change every day.

So why does a tool like, or publisher,

let's say like Shopify have this capability?

But maybe my ERP doesn't. It's.

Well, historically, the tax tables

have not changed fast. Right.

Like 30 years ago, people would just pass,

you know, a tax here or there, and

then you can update the tax tables.

When you go to the grocery store, a lot

of the PoS systems actually have the tax tables,

like in their on store database, and they push

new tables whenever they get updated.

The challenge is that we're not talking about grocery stores

where you go to the parking lot and you walk

in with your dog and, you know, do your thing.

We're talking about global, like, instant calculation.

So if you're in Brazil and you want to

check out and grab, I don't know, your leash. Right?

Right.

I need instant tax calculation for you.

And then me, I'm in Texas. Right.

And I'm going to buy right now, too.

Well, I need instant tax for that.

So Shopify needs to have stored all of the different

tax tables for almost basically anywhere in the world.

So they've got a massive problem that they've solved.

Businesses, the folks that we, I think

hopefully we're talking to today, right.

They may operate in specific regions or specific

areas of the world, and they're not necessarily

set up to utilize the Shopify deal. Right.

Where tax can be calculated instantly, like what

we do, we'll spin up a contract. Right.

And the contract states that you

will pay with three invoices.

And we have to figure out, sorry,

where's your, you know, what's your address?

Where we're going to send these?

And are you tax exempt?

And are you tax exempt? Right.

There's a lot of additional things that go

into these asynchronous processes, because if you are

tax exempt, you might still maybe have to

pay tax in some situations, maybe not in

the United States, but what about Brazil, right?

I don't know if Brazil has non exempt status.

Anyway, you come up with all these questions

and it really boils back down to, well,

I need to automate a lot of this.

We are building out integrations that allow us to

connect to these services that will tell us the

instant, near instantaneously what the tax rate is for

this particular kind of service, for this particular address

or location, if you will.

It works out really well because everybody wins.

The customer pays what they're supposed to pay.

The business owner, well, I guess they still would

technically have to have a liability because they get

to give the money to the tax man, but

they collected exactly what they're owed.

And then the people that are providing the tax

rates are incentivized to continue to update to make

sure that they're right, because if they're not, then

I'm not going to be a customer anyway. I don't know.

It's like the most boring topic

that is super hot right now.

Because of all of the possible combinations and automations that

you can build for us, it's gained even more traction,

I guess, for the last, I'm not going to say

the number of years, but like, the digital filings and

the, hey, we need real time transactional information.

That's really been driving, I think, a lot of these

initiatives and why a lot of finance and accounting executives

are, and business owners are focused on it and trying

to understand who can do it really well.

And not just the who, but the how, like, the tools.

Because you, you know, with a lot of the stuff that

we do, especially if it is okay, it's not just you

selling something on a recurring basis, but then there's all the

other kind of, like, tax events that happen throughout the year,

and you should be able to dial those up and dial

those down almost like on an as needed basis.

And that's where technology can kind

of fill in the gaps. Right.

Um, well, so from another aspect

to maybe not to stoke fear. Right.

But a lot of these municipalities got

it right, are becoming technology advanced, so

they have a faster way to determine.

Well, Mel hasn't filed her taxes yet. Oh.

Oh, this other person, they filed $0, but

I saw the line out the door.

They're not sending in what they owe us. Right.

And now you're in, and now you're.

Now we're going to audit you. Right. And.

And they can audit everything, you know, I

mean, you're operating a business in their area.

Like, well, now you just sign up

for a whole world of pain.

Cause they're gonna ask for everything, right?

So doing it right is the best way to

doing it, and doing it right the first time

is always better than doing it wrong, because ultimately,

you could be out of business.

So, long story short, lots

of automation opportunities, right?

So if you need help in this

space, you know, I know some people. Yeah.

I mean, I think with anything that we talk about

trying to take the technology out of it and really

understand, like, what is the root issue, what are we

trying to solve, and, um, what are our key initiatives,

and how can we utilize a technology, but specifically automated

workflows to boost our efficiency, but also, in this case,

protect the business and protect your resources.

So, um, in a, you know, finance and accounting,

I keep seeing as kind of being one of

those occupations that's sort of been on the list

of, like, it's hard to find talent.

Not as many people may be entering

into that field, into the workforce.

And so as much as we talk about diverting talent

to other high value activities, if you are in the

situation where you haven't been able to find or retain

that level of talent, um, then, you know, that's where

another area where tools can fill in that gap, or

you might be using a tool that's extremely expensive.

I'm not going to point any fingers at

anybody, but you probably know if you're paying

a very large fee to whichever solution. Right.

There are alternative, cheaper, better,

faster solutions out there. Right.

So it's always good to look, um, I think

people get stuck in this idea that, well, that's.

It's the tax thing, right.

We got to pay it, you know,

whatever it is, we got to pay.

Um, but ultimately, there are.

There's more solutions that are coming out to

the market where there used to be really

only one for this asynchronous type of setup

for the folks that we're talking with and

building out integrations between tax solutions.

And I think it's mostly the ERP.

Are there other apps?

What is that workflow?

Yeah, well, ERP is certainly hot for us because they

are generating invoices that need to calculate the tax right

now so that Mel can pay her invoice.

Another spot where we're seeing this is in the CRM,

so we can send out like estimated tax amounts.

Nobody likes to see that.

Well, you're, Bill, you're, I'm going to quote you

100 grand and then they get the invoice and

it's actually 120 because there's 20 grand in taxes.

Right.

Nobody loves that.

So another hot end is to calculate the tax

based on the address that you gave me. Right.

So when I go and give you a

quote, you have, you know, accurate information.

Um, I mean, ultimately we, we want to make

sure that the customer knows what they're going to

end up paying at the end of the day.

Because if they, I mean, if they sign on

the dotted line, they're going to take it on

the chin and pay the 20 grand anyway. Right.

But they're not going to be happy about it.

So anytime we can provide that kind

of information upfront is super helpful.

So we're doing that on the quote side. Right.

And in your CRM.

So HubSpot, Salesforce, sugar. Right.

Wherever you got some kind of quoting workflow

or some kind of order workflow, that's a

huge area where we can come in and

provide that tax rate based on that address.

We can do it in significant amounts of volumes.

Usually we don't see hundreds of thousands of quotes.

It's more about that communication, ensuring that the customer

knows what they're agreeing to pay so that when

they get the invoice they're not upset about it.

Sure, that makes sense.

Well, I guess as we continue to see, you're actually

headed off to San Francisco next week, stripe sessions.

I suspect there will be a lot of,

I don't know, discussion around all this stuff.

Like the world of payments and finance, things that

directly impact these functions, funds flows is like the,

the topic that nobody loves to talk about.

And then when you get into the

weeds in it, it's very complicated.

But Stripe has, has APIs that

do all of this stuff automatically.

Like intercompany transfers are, I won't call

it a click of a button. Right.

But they bought tax jar.

The API for the tax piece is very interesting.

A lot of capabilities that you get access

to simply by utilizing this additional, you know,

I won't call it attack on. Um. Right.

But they're just enabling you to do

more in one kind of spot. Right.

So you don't have to go to ten

different places to get access to this information.

Um, yeah, that whole payment space

is, uh, is, is big, right.

More and more people are coming online,

even in third world countries, right.

And, um, you even know in countries where,

like, there's always been online, but people are

now wanting to do business there, right.

So think of like a shopify.

And this maybe not be the

best example, but their customers. Shopify.

Customers who want to do business in, I

don't know, Brazil or, I don't know, you

must have you got Brazil on the mind.

What's super nerdy?

You planning a trip? What's going on here?

There's a computer game called Victoria Three, and they just

came out with this DLC where you can be Brazil.

And what's a dlc?

Downloadable content. Thank you. Yeah.

Your husband's going to be like, really?

Yeah. But you.

Anyway, so I was playing Brazil.

So Shopify, right?

You want to do business in Brazil?

Shopify says we don't do it there.

Well, they're going to push for it, which

means if they do it for one customer

that does is on the Shopify platform, they're

going to do it for the 300,000 customers. Right.

And they just opened up a

world of like, instantaneous payments.

So anyway, this whole topic will continue to expand.

And I think the interesting thought is that people

probably don't think about, because it's not really sexy,

is that when these cities realize that they can

collect tax faster by introducing a crime rate tax,

they're going to come up with, I don't know,

like what I saw the dog tax.

Yeah, it'll be something. Well, yeah.

People walking through parks not picking up after the.

Okay, now they need to pick up.

They need to pick up their. Someone's.

They're paying someone to go pick it up after you.

They need to pick that stuff up. Agreed.

They need to do that right now.

Now in my own backyard.

Like, I don't have a problem with

it, but, like, in a public space.

Let's go anyway. Yeah.

Cause if everyone did that. Exactly. You just add up.

Oh, no. It's frustrating. Right. I have a.

But that's why there's a tax for it if there is. Right?

Oh, that's actually a great idea.

Like, no, I'm not suggesting we add the tax,

but just like some city listening to this.

You're gonna pass a dog tax? Oh, no.

Well, let's move on to the next one

because I think people are getting frustrated with

the fact that we've beat taxes to death. Yeah.

It's tax day though, right? Like, woo. Tax day.

Well, by the time this comes out, they

will have either, you know, they will have

paid their taxes or they'll get a refund. Yeah.

For those of you, I'm all about paying $0

because you either, like, if you get a refund,

you gave the government too much money.

It's the same thing with sales tax. Oh, my gosh.

But if you owe money, you didn't give the

government enough, and now the government is underfunded.

And, I mean, okay, whatever, you get it. So. Yeah.

Well, hopefully it shakes out for everyone.

I am going to connect with you

when you're at sessions next week.

I'm very interested in hearing about the,

you know, what'd you call it? The.

The financial flows.

Funds. Funds flows.

Is that a new term?

I think it's stripe specific. Okay.

But it's basically like, you

could think of Uber, right?

Uber takes your $10, and you know that you're paying

the guy driving the car, but Uber takes the $10,

gives, hopefully, a majority of it right to the driver.

Uber takes their share, but they also now owe tax.

Right, to whichever government that

you were just writing in.

So stripe calls these funds flows.

Cause your $10 gets split, like, eight different ways.

Maybe not that many times, but, like, it's

not just you're paying Uber, you're paying the

driver, you're paying Uber, you're paying somebody's taxes.

My driver better get paid.

And I give him those rating.

He better give me a good rating, too.

Wouldn't you know, like a 4.84.95.

I just actually got into a, let's call

it a healthy debate on Saturday night about

my Uber driven, Uber like rating. Yeah.

And you talk about frustrated.

Why doesn't Uber, like, give you a

summary of how many trips you've taken?

That would be a very easy feature.

I think they're holding that back for some recap.

Like, I want to know that I've ridden.

I can tell you, you know, okay, you've

been a rider since, let's just say, 2014.

How many thousands of trips is that?

Because somebody's 4.9 on three trips is

nothing on my 4.5 on 3000 trips.

So when I tell you that I also have a

4.9, you're going to say, well, I've ridden 30 more.

Yeah.

Well, that's what I want to be able to do. Oh, right.

Next time. Next time.

It's a really selfish feature request.

You know, that reminds me of, like,

the credit thing that China has.

It's like the social credit deal.

You know what I'm talking about? No.

Basically, like, if your score is really low and maybe.

Actually, this is kind of the same thing.

Like, if your score is really low

on Uber, like, you can't ride. Right.

I have heard that they do

prioritize, like, a higher rating.

I'm very protective of my rating.

If I, you know, like, you're going with a group.

I tend to be a bit more of, like the. You book it.

No, you.

No, you book.

I'll pay you.

Yeah, I'll book it on the beginning of the night, not

the back half of the night, depending on if you ever.

Y'all.

If you ever get to ride with Mel

in Uber, make sure you go cray.

So she gets.

She gets a one star.

I'll use my code word. Get out.

Orange Julius.

Yeah, that's a good one.

Okay, so you had a hot take,

I think you wanted to share. Oh, yeah.

Guy on.

Guy on Twitter.

So head of.

I can't ever say meta, meta, meta.

I don't know how they look at the

brand announce, like, how do you pronounce it? Meta.

Yeah. Okay.

I hear some people say meta, meta, meta.

Like PETA from. Really? I don't know.

You've heard it that many different ways?

Yeah, I think it's just accents, right? I don't know.

Meta. Right.

Facebook head of chief AI scientist, right, says that we

will experience, and I'm paraphrasing here, we will experience AGI

at some point in our lifetime, but it's not happening

next year, and it's not going to be with the

large language models that we have today.

And for our folks who are new here, who are

still getting up to speed on all the incredible amount

of acronyms that are available into the world, can you

just break down a quick AGi versus AI?

Like AGI, automated general intelligence.

And how does that differ from what people kind of know?

You could. Some people.

I'm certainly going to get roast for this. Right.

AGI could be automated general

intelligence or artificial general intelligence.

Depends on which generative.

Yeah, there's all.

I think it all gets kind of mixed up,

especially with so many people in the world.

But what makes you differentiate AGI versus AI

versus artificial general intelligence, in my view, is

something that is that the intelligence is so

good that it's beyond every person's individual intelligence.

Right.

Like, you could talk about marketing.

This thing's better than that.

Like, any better than you. Right?

Better than me, better than anybody. Better.

The best person in the entire world.

AGI represents the best of the best, but beyond

the human capability maybe almost to the extent. Right.

Where they can come up with stuff

that has never been developed before.

Um, so AI is a set of systems that can perform

tasks to the level or with instruction from a human, whereas

AGI can, on its own, with human like intelligence.

So AI, right, artificial intelligence is something that you

can work with, and it knows some things.

Artificial general intelligence is this idea that

represents, like, they know everything about everything,

and they can come up with stuff

that has never been thought of before.

Think of, like, vaccines, right?

In theory, like, AGI could come up with

a vaccine for cancer, for all cancers, and

do it in relatively short order.

And they're not programmed to do that. Exactly, right.

They just have so much intelligence about all

these things that you could say, hey, Agi,

I need to solve stage four breast cancer

with a vaccine that looks like this.

And in theory, right, it could spit

something back that says, well, you should

do something that looks like this.

And in theory, you could, you know, make

the vaccine and it actually cure the cancer.

That's what artificial general intelligence

is like, or automated.

If you go down the automated

route, it's more of like a.

Well, it knew in advance that there's all

these things or all these problems, and it

would just start spitting out answers, right.

Solutions to those.

So this hot take is that it's going to.

Agi is going to run all over everybody's jobs

and take away most of what we're doing today,

most of what is what we would consider our

high value added tasks, our original thought, our creativity.

Well, so if you follow the news as much as I

do, maybe I don't need to do this as much, right?

But if you follow the news even over from this

past weekend, so if this comes out on Friday, right,

this would have been the weekend before taxes were due.

There were a lot of folks on.

On the phone, on Twitter or whatever, exodus, you

know, whatever socials that were coming out and saying,

basically fear mongering of like, well, chat bot is

going to take 80% of the workload, and your

workload will be reduced by 80% in scope.

There were some others that

were kind of similar, right?

Like, we've got a year until the

world is going to fall apart. Anyway.

I can't remember every single name,

but they were high level.

Like the Elon Musks.

They were like, I don't know about that, but

you've got multiple people saying the same kind of

thing, and you're kind of like, I mean, maybe.

Right, well, now you've got another high level

guy that's actually very, very intelligent coming out

saying, no actually, that might happen, right.

But it's not happening with today's technology, nor

the technology that's being developed right now.

So it's just like a realistic gut check of when

we might have a component of AGI, but we don't

have all of the components, and it's probably going to

be a while before that actually happens.

Um, so I think less of it as like a fear

mongering thing, and then more of a, like, things are changing.

At least in the last 18 months, have been

changing so quickly, you cannot keep up with them.

Right.

And when you have something like that, it's

almost like a runaway deal where the biggest

corporations will take advantage of those things and

the smallest will just, I mean, ultimately die. Right.

Um, anyway, my takeaway is that people need

to tap the brakes a little bit, right.

We need to learn what we're capable, what these things

are capable of doing right now, and then not worry

so much that your job is going to be gone.

Um, I think in my hot take is that

we've got five to ten years before we even

get close to something that is agi.

It'll just start to blur a little bit more.

What's a good example? Like, the Internet.

The Internet just kind of slowly came in.

Maybe not slowly.

I don't know which timeline you're on, but ultimately

I don't see this being as the armageddon, the

revolution, where the robots came in, whatever.

Is there something that you do

to ground yourself when it.

Do you get a level of like, oh, this is kind of scary.

I think what I've been doing, and people probably just don't,

maybe are not capable of doing this or just don't want

to do this in the evening, but I, like, play around

with this stuff just to toy with it, right?

Not to like, jailbreak it or do weird stuff

at all whatsoever, but more so, like, okay, well,

what if we tried to do this thing?

Actually, you may remember this, I built a

whole website, automated it, I created the.

Well, I didn't create any content,

set up this whole thing.

I don't want to put the domain out there.

It's actually still live.

I turned off the content generation, but I'll

just toy with it to see what's possible.

And where it hit walls is where I'm

like, ah, yeah, well, I can't do that.

So whatever that is and whatever domain that's

in, like, we're good, you know, that's interesting.

So when you start to feel maybe overwhelmed by

it or it, maybe it's not even that.

You're just like, let me go test it and see if

it's actually up to the par of what people are saying.

Yeah, you do an exercise of, let me

go to recess with this AI, right?

And you go play.

What I do is I.

I go back to, like, a.

I play this game with myself, and I think, what's

the last thing that I did that AI couldn't do?

And I play this exercise of many, many episodes ago.

I challenged you to a back and forth of what is a job?

Some, you know, AI isn't going to take any time soon.

Oh, yeah.

We go back to, like, fly fishing, which you've

since, like, come up with a theory about that.

But, you know, I.

If I was to play that right now, you know,

I attended a crawfish boil over the weekend, and I

went to see three bands play some live music, and

I saw, like, 50 pit masters smoking barbecue.

And I think people love that there were so many people

at that event, and if it was just a bunch of

robots and avatars and, like, that wouldn't be any fun.

That's not going away.

So I try to, like, it's not that that's the, um, the.

The answer, but when I.

You kind of can easily start to spiral on

this stuff and go, what does that mean for.

For my job or for my existence? And what.

What does five years look like?

And I don't know.

Maybe that's just an encouragement to anyone listening

that if it starts to feel overwhelming, think

about that thing, that very human activity or

human connection that you had recently and really

challenge yourself to think.

It's not just that AI can do it, but maybe we

can decide whether or not we want it to, right?

We still have choice, at least for now.

I really like that.

I think if, let's just say chat GBT five

comes out and automates 100% of your job.

And there's some other, other article that I

saw today that was like, well, if that

happens, everything is going to cost a penny.

Like, great, now everybody can do everything. And I.

I like looking at it. I love that take.

Like, if everything costs a penny,

well, what would you really do?

Like, I probably played more video games, right?

And the people that love to

cook would probably cook some more.

You know, like, wherever this is going, it's not

going to take the human out of it.

It's not going to take the creativity out of it,

because we're just going to start doing more of what

we love, and that's what we like to say event.

We get you back to what you are good at.

You could also say what you really love.

Yeah, that's great.

Well, let's end it on that note.

It's, like, heartwarming, you know?

Like, man, I can't wait to play more videos.

We went from this, like, really scary

to, like, the warm fuzzies people at

half the people have already checked out.

Cause they're like, oh, they're fear mongers.

No, that's what I was trying to say. Don't be afraid.

Yeah, but they're already gone.

The people that are stuck around, we should

ask them for fan mail, you know?

No, that defeats the purpose. Okay, no fan mail.

You don't ask for fan mail.

You just get fan mail.

Mel, if you want to send me fan mail, that's cool.

All right, well, thanks, everyone, for sticking around.

We had so much fun talking about taxes and didn't

think it was gonna be as fun as it was.

Can you even say fun and tax in the same sentence

like we just did, the way we talked about it?

Next week, though, I'm gonna go

ahead and catch up with Chase.

He's gonna be at stripe session,

so we'll do this virtual.

And I'm really excited to hear about what

is going on in the world of finance.

And finance flows, the flows of money.

All funds flows.

The money flowing back and forth. All back and forth.

Yeah. World goes round. Yeah.

In the meantime, if you have an idea, a

topic, a question, a hot take about AI and

automation, we would absolutely love to hear it.

Email us at thejunction@venntechnology.com.

In the meantime, keep it automated.