#26: OpenAI Takes on Google with New ChatGPT Features
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.
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here to unpack the latest trends in
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Let's jump in.
Okay, Chase, just because I am more interested in
your reaction to the OpenAI announcement than I am
actually in the way in which they delivered it,
I have not paid attention to the headlines.
Cause I want your take.
So on a scale of one to ten, where one is
very, extremely dissatisfied and ten is like, wow, mind blown.
I'm so excited. Yeah.
Where are you sitting on this announcement from OpenAI?
Ten's at the top, one's low, I
think, because we've approached just the whole
thing from really, truly a business perspective.
And how do I use OpenAI or just
this AI stuff from a business perspective?
From that viewpoint, it was a three or four today.
But if you're an individual heavy user of this
stuff, or you have hopes and dreams of building
out a massive B two C type app, then
you're probably a lot higher on that scale.
But I find it wild.
Last week we talked about how they registered search
dot OpenAI.com, and Sam said something on Twitter.
If you correlate what people say on Twitter
to stock prices, you can see the moment
that he said that Google stock dropped.
And I ran the numbers and
it was like billions of dollars.
With Sam said four words, he typed forwards,
and he moved this stock billions of dollars.
And that just blew my mind.
So that kind of set my
level expectations of like, super high.
Like, okay, we're moving big money here.
Like, in the grand scheme of things, like nobody.
Well, I guess unless you're in the finance world, you
don't really care about how much the stock moves.
But for that to happen, like,
that's a really, really big deal.
Um, it reminds me of when Elon said something
like, oh, yeah, we're going to take, um, we're
going to take Tesla private or whatever, and the
stock blew up and now he's under investigation.
Like, please, what you say matters. Yeah.
So I had really big expectations going through the weekend,
and then, um, he said something else on Sunday.
And I'm not a big fan of, like, putting Sam
or anybody, like Elon or anybody else on a pedestal,
but when you have that kind of command in the
markets, like, you should at least pay attention.
Anyway, he said something to the
tune of that, I'm testing her.
So her is a movie from a while back where this guy
interacts with sort of Agi, his day in and day out life.
And so everybody is getting wildly pumped
up about what is about to come.
I just had this gut feeling of
like, we're not there yet, man.
You know, he's like toying with people.
And maybe he can because he's a private
company and, you know, there aren't any laws
that regulate sort of that kind of speech.
But anyway, so by the time this comes
out, people have had, I don't know, a
week or two to digest the announcement. Yeah.
So for those who haven't or who aren't really familiar
with the why, why, this is a big deal from
your point of view, can you recap what was announced?
And then we can get into the why
it matters and for who it matters totally.
The big three things are there's now an
app on the computer that you can download,
and it has enhanced functionality where you can
just basically interact directly with the app.
Because presently, or up until now, we've been in
the web browser or an app on your phone. That's right.
Yeah.
So now you can do app in your
computer with app related things, which means it
can connect to your camera or other preferables.
Is this free or paid?
Well, that's the other big news is that
they've always had some level of free, but
it's always been to their older model, now
their latest model, they're giving away for free.
The overwhelming message was, we want to
put this in the hands of everybody.
Everybody.
Don't tie this behind any kind of dollar amount. Right.
Because I think, and I think this is genuinely an altruistic
approach where it's like, well, if we really want people to
benefit from this, then we really, truly need to give it
away, some capacity of it away for free.
So I really appreciate, I think that is a good thing.
People that don't have access to the Internet kind
of thing like this is be really good.
Because if you put it behind a paywall, even if
it's $20 a month, which it has been, you have
a lot of people in the world that they're not
going to see $20 for a year, you know, like,
they'll never pay for that, which means they're already getting
behind and like, all the things anyway.
So I really appreciated that.
And then they went on to do.
It's like.
I don't know a good way to say
it, but basically, like, it's a interactive agent
that responds nearly instantaneously to what you're saying.
And you can interrupt it almost.
It's like having a conversation right now, right
where they were asking on the live.
On a demo, which I don't know if they
practiced this, but it was kind of buggy.
It definitely was live.
But they said one of the takes
was, well, I'm going to speak.
The lady said, I'm really good at Italian.
I'm going to speak in Italian.
You're going to speak in English.
And then they prompted.
They prompted, Jackie, in a voice.
In the voice app on the phone. Right?
Hey, I'm cha chi pt.
I've got somebody here that speaks Italian.
Whenever I speak, I want you
to translate that to Italian.
And whenever she speaks, I want
you to translate that to English.
And, like, near instantaneously.
They had a interpreter that was interpreting on
the fly that is now crushing however many
apps that are out there on the App
Store that I think of, like Google Voice.
I'm sure there's some limitations of it, but
they basically, like, programmed an app, if you
will, almost instantaneously to do something that people
have, I'm sure, made really good money on.
Anyway, I thought that's the part that's probably the
most interesting, is what can you do with voice
and all of these capabilities that people have done
in the past and built whole ecosystems around, I
think, of Rosetta Stone now.
Was it translating it in text the way it does?
So I'm familiar with the voice in
the app where you can ask it.
You used the example last week of what's a recipe
for a mojito or whatever, and it spits out text.
Did this do the same?
It spit out the text in English and Italian,
or did it actually, like, was there an audio
pairing you see on the phone what they show?
But, I mean, there's just enough number of
hiccups where you're like, I don't know.
I think it really was live.
I don't know if what they
showed on screen was actually happening. I don't know.
But there wasn't, like, a voice coming out of
the app, quickly translating it was voice to text.
I think if they.
If I think it is what I think it
is, it's the same thing that you think of
when you're doing the text to voice deal.
It's just happening much faster directionally.
That seems pretty cool.
Even if the live demo you having done
a lot of live demos in your ten. Oh, yeah.
What is the 50 50?
This is gonna go right.
Okay.
This is going to get way too far in the weeds.
I also had Google stock up
real time, real time quotes rolling.
And what's really interesting is you can see an entire
people group that is judging what's happening live because they're
trying to, like, let me buy Google stock.
Because what if they announced
something search related, right?
Or what if this voice thing is, hey,
send me search results, or blah, blah, blah,
people are going up and down.
Anyway, I could tell that the demo wasn't
going well because Google stock was going up
by a decent amount of dollars.
But there was, I don't know if this was just my
computer, but when they started talking and chatgpt was responding, it's
like they took the audio, like, on your soundboard, and they
rerouted it so it would go through the, the stream, but
it was also talking live in the room.
So it was like the guy would say something like,
hey, chat chibti, and she almost over speak over him.
And I don't know if that was.
Anyway, I'm getting too far in the weeds
on whether it was pre recorded or not.
The long story is that these new
interactions, these new intermodal actions are like,
it's not just voiced into text.
You could type something and then you could switch
to audio, and then you could switch the video.
And none of that.
It's all seamless.
So the next demo that they did was he's literally
got the camera on his phone rolling inside the app.
He's writing down mathematical equations,
just very simple algebra.
Like three x plus one equals four. Right.
So what is x in that case?
It's technically one. Right. Three.
Three times one.
Okay, well, he's doing that live, and he's
asking her questions while the camera's rolling.
So not just pictures, right.
But streaming video with streaming audio and chat.
GPT is responding, like, instantaneously.
Anyway, I think all of those things are awesome.
They're going to be great.
They're going to do cool things.
I don't know how that's going to impact
your business, somebody else's Business, because a lot
of it's like, it's like a consumer app,
you know, it's not like a Business app.
I think taking a few steps back and just
kind of looking at the message that OpenAI is
sending to the market by doing this launch.
Like, this is kind of the first in the
way of them sort of doing a reveal. Right.
Kind of hyping, it tells me that they
are moving toward further legitimizing their spot.
This is lining up against a big Google conference. This.
Yeah, Google I O starts tomorrow.
So they're sort of saying to the world, because
up until now, there's been a lot of, like,
you know, Sam tweeting something and then, like, something
happens and there's a lot of speculation.
There's a lot of people on the, these
chat boards and they're using it and they're
sort of going into like, Reddit threads and
other forums to theorize what's coming next.
And by holding something like this, even if it
wasn't maybe a great user experience for you.
Cause it was, you know, and maybe
they're still working out some kinks.
It's like emulating the Steve Jobs iPhone reveal
type thing or like when Apple does.
Totally felt like that. Yeah.
So I think from a, this is their way of
saying we are going to further legitimize what we're doing.
And they're like, going from like, we're a
startup to like, you know, it's just kind
of something that more established technology companies are
doing, which is funny to say.
Cause we've talked so many times about how these
AI companies are, like, it's not like they've been
up and running for like 30 years. Yeah, right.
Like there's been data science and then there's been
new technology, and then there's kind of been like,
than Nvidia or companies that have been utilizing or
investing in AI, like, technology for maybe the last
five to ten years, but it's still very much
like the wild, Wild west.
So I feel like just in general, not
having seen it, you describing it, it's their
way of saying we're here to stay.
Like we're, you know, and offering
up their, their product for free.
Essentially, it's like the early days of google.
Like, you, anyone with a computer could
just, like, open a web browser.
I don't need to actually pay, uh, for advertising
or pay for a subscription to search the Internet. Right.
I never have.
Right, well, so what?
I shouldn't say never.
Well, I was going to just go a different route that
what was more interesting that probably most people didn't pick out
is that this new model is 50% of the cost of
the, of GPT for turbo, which was the most expensive, and
they've consistently brought down the cost by 50 plus percent every
time they do a new reveal.
Um, like, sure, there's the free aspect,
like, let's get everybody on board and
comfortable with the whole AI thing.
But in terms of solidifying their place,
like, you keep bringing down the cost
and nobody's going to catch you. I don't care.
Obviously, they got to keep up the tech, right?
But if you keep, keep increasing your costs, you
keep, you keep creating gaps in the marketplace where
other players are going to step in like Google.
Right, and offer something that's maybe not
as good, but half the price.
Well, and I, we've talked about they have onboarded
like, or large enterprise clients are using them.
Um, and they're sort of embedding themselves.
So they've got this app that
they're making readily available to individuals.
But what about when those individuals, if they're not already
in a buying position or buying power at a company,
like they could be part of that buying committee.
So, for example, canva.
Canva rolled out to all the schools.
They're just creating like this,
like immediate access to. For free to.
Yeah, to young students that are not in the workforce.
But guess what?
When they enter the workforce
and now what's Canva doing?
Canva's like enterprises are using canva.
And the cost, I'm still amazed to this day for like
a business license, five seats, it's like $12 a month.
I think our bill is like $112.95 a year.
I mean, it's like insanely cheap, expensive, right?
Wink, wink.
I mean, it's just one of those things.
Like, I get what you're saying.
It's like if you democratize it and make it essentially
free or accessible to, maybe that's not your buyer today,
but in three years or five years or ten years,
like, you've created this, everyone's going to be open AI.
Like, I'm going to chat youpt something
the way I would google something.
And that's just been over the course
of like the last couple of years.
So not knowing what their strategy,
I'm just kind of speculating here.
I think that that's another way of them, like
further legitimizing and like, we're going to make sure
that everybody gets, like, they're essentially dependent on this
tool so that when they enter into the workforce
and have buying power or they're more marketable, maybe
because they've been using it for however many years.
Well, I think there's also maybe something
they wouldn't talk about as much.
And that's the, like, there's a maybe almost like
a taboo associated with utilizing the technology to.
Did you just say taboo?
Taboo, yeah, taboo.
Yeah, taboo.
It's my Texas accent.
We need to ask Chacha pt
how you say that, phonetically? Yeah.
Taboo.
It's okay.
I still say baggage claim, so it's okay. What.
What is that?
It's a northerner thing.
Oh, yeah.
Close to the canadian border up there, you know?
Wait, are you, are you half canadian?
No, but I was pretty close. Okay.
Where are we going with that?
Well, something's very taboo.
What they don't want to talk about. Yeah, right.
There's this idea that if I utilize this technology to
replace any kind of job, I'm going to have a
level of backlash that I don't want to deal with.
Anyway, my first thought when I saw this was, we
talked about this last week when I call into 1800,
whatever, and you get an agent on the phone or
a chat, some kind of IVR deal.
Been reading through some threads on the interwebs and,
I don't know, take this with a grain of
salt, but some of these folks are saying that
they're involved in very large projects where they've been
doing this for a long time.
And the reason why the executives won't pull the
go or hit the go button is because they're
overly concerned about the backlash from the number of
people that they're going to end up letting go.
And then all of a sudden now there's a
negative sentiment with AI that, well, if we keep
embracing AI, your job's going to go away.
My job is going to go away.
So now we're anti AI, right?
It's like you're basically going to create a bifurcate
that population group now into two people, and now
there's going to be the mass protest. Anyway.
I don't know where all that's going, but I see
that roping that all the way back to what you
were saying is let's get everybody more comfortable with this
AI stuff and give it away for free.
Let them play with it, touch it and think through.
Oh, yeah, look at all the great things I could do.
And let's not really think about, you know,
like, the negative, like, well, and the more
people using it, the more they have data
to, like, reinforce and optimize the product. Right.
So they're not just, like, giving it away for
free so that we can all just, like, have,
like, they've got learnings on the back end. Totally.
Oh, no, you totally hit the buzzer because
you just made me think of, you know,
why they're giving away for free.
It's actually not any of the things we just said
it's because they're going to train their next models on.
On the data that people are putting in.
Like, they're just going to increase. Were you waiting?
Absolutely.
You know, I was waiting for, like, a
really bad joke where I can do.
Or you do, like, a womp womp.
Did you know that was the foghorn button? Yeah, I did.
You tested them all out? Oh, yeah.
We played around with it, the crickets and
stuff, while we were waiting for you.
I wish I would have known.
When you said taboo or whatever,
you said, yeah, next time.
I've been holding onto that one.
I was waiting for, like, a really lame
joke on your end, but it didn't come
because you're pretty good at making good jokes. Thanks.
Yeah, but the training data will be really.
I mean, if they.
They said on the.
On the stream that they had, like,
a 10 million or 100 million people.
Well, if they can increase that to 200
million, now they've got even more trading data.
Keep talking about Elon. I'm not a. I love my.
I have a Tesla.
I do love my Tesla. Have you.
I just saw the first, like,
super truck, or what's it called?
Yeah, yeah, a super truck. Sure. I don't know.
The Tesla.
Wait, the Cybertruck. Cyber truck. Cybertruck. Yeah.
I just saw the first one, like, in
real life, on the road, and I was.
Was like, what planet am I on? Mars. Yeah.
I mean, if that's what they were
going for, like, straight futuristic, apparently.
Also, it's, like, bulletproof, which is, like.
I don't know.
I just feel like you're.
That's a weird feature. It's a weird.
Well, there was a.
There was an onstage demo where Elon took a bat.
You didn't see this, but, like, why?
It just seems like such a weird flex.
Yeah, I didn't.
I think the Cybertruck has a lot of production issues,
and that's probably a story for another day, but.
Well, yes.
So you own a Tesla.
Where were you going with this?
Well, they got to FSD, right?
Full self driving by not coding.
They did that path.
They wrote it in c sharp.
And however many thousands or hundreds of thousands of
lines of code, they ended up replacing with something
that is, like, a large language model. It's.
Somebody's going to roast me.
We're going to get that first email from somebody.
You're definitely looking.
You want to get that first roast out of the way.
I can tell, like, every
episode, it's starting to build. Yeah.
Sam Altman's going to email me and be like, dude,
don't talk about, you don't know what you're talking about.
But they have a neural engine that is trained
off of video from other, the whole Tesla fleet.
So they're recording a bunch of video.
They anonymize it so you can't get tied to it,
and then they use that to train their latest model.
And the more cars they have driving, taking in
video, and the more training data they have.
So same story, right?
With this now most powerful free version, not locked
behind any dollars, they're going to have a lot
of folks typing in a bunch of questions, and
like, now I can interact with new ways.
They're going to increase their
training dataset by so much.
Then it really doesn't matter how much it costs
anymore because they're going to have all these free
users, and the real value isn't how many h
100s or h 200s you have.
At some point, those are going to be ubiquitous and
it's going to be, well, how good is your data
if you don't have quality data coming in? I don't care.
Nobody's going to care.
You got 10,000 h 200s, it's not going to matter.
So I think they saw that very quickly and they realized,
we got to open this up for everybody so they can
do the training for the next models to come.
So I'm listening to this on the other end.
Should I be afraid of that?
Should I go use it?
Are you going to equip, are you going
to put this technology in the hands of.
I know you still have very young children.
I don't know if they're using chat GPT yet.
I've talked to a couple people that are encouraging
their kids to use it, given this shift.
Yeah, I think it's too late to ask that question.
It's inevitable.
You know, I don't, I don't like doom and gloom.
Anybody that knows me, you know, really close, knows I'm
like, I'm the most optimistic guy in the room.
I think good things will come of that.
I, maybe, now that you mention it, question,
you know, the true purpose behind what Sam
and his team are trying to do.
But at the very least, there at least is an
altruistic path where they're trying to give it access to
everybody rather than say, just oddly, like, hey, only people
in the United States can use this. Sorry.
You know, and no other barriers.
I don't know if they could actually prevent that.
But, yeah, I don't, I think we're, I think it's
too late for that kind of questioning to happen.
I think our government is moving too
slow to make any substantial changes.
I think Europe is doing something about
it, but they don't understand it enough.
And I'm not saying we do either.
Um, but I think it's inevitable that our
kids are going to be driving or riding
in vehicles that they don't drive.
They will be doing a different type of work than
we're doing right now, and you're not going to do.
You can't do anything to change that.
Like, you could.
You could go.
You can go live on a country ranch somewhere, right?
And just live it up.
I'm here for that, you know?
No, I mean, that's the ethos of our show.
Maybe I've set you up there a
little bit with that one, but it's.
The more you know about this technology,
or at least start to just kick
it around, understand it, download the app. Okay.
Might take you three weeks to use it, maybe
ask it a really basic question, but it. I don't.
You're right.
It's, like, not going away.
And the more that we can better understand its application,
I think we have a responsibility for those of us
that are using it to then teach and impart what
we know onto those who are not.
So we've talked a lot about using it
in the business context, that is me, and
challenging myself to cross the line.
When I get home, I just, like, go
into, like, I'm home mode, and I go
back to, like, I google everything, right?
Lately, I've not been doing that. I just.
I think we have a responsibility, right?
Like, we need to be then equipping.
So I kind of asked the question about, you know, it's.
It's like, how do you have conversations
with your kids about the thing?
Like, there's things that.
On every parent's list and is like, AI is one of them.
Like, in the last couple of decades,
really, the last decade, it's been more
like responsible use of social media.
Like, social media and the way that it
exists today did not exist for us.
We had MySpace.
We had, like, a top eight
friends, you know, kind of function. Like, you get to.
You got to pick your own.
That's, like, the closest I got to, like,
my earliest days of, like, getting in the
HTML to change the colors of your page.
You know, you would have, like, you'd
pick, like, a song for the week.
I don't know that's how.
But, like, we didn't have phones, and we
weren't, like, had the ability to film things
that were happening all the time.
And that's been.
There's a lot of good that has come out of that.
It's created connection for people in ways that
they would never otherwise connect across the world.
But then a lot of bad has come out of
it or, like, negativity that then you're parenting against and
you're having to, in some ways, create barriers around.
Right.
And safeguards so that maybe they don't have.
Readily have access to.
Or there's, you know, so is AI going
to be another one of those things that's
on the list of, like, I'm parenting against?
Because now they can just jump on there and, you
know, it's surfacing just the way Google or YouTube.
YouTube is a similar kind of like, Pandora's box of.
That has been highly ridiculed
and criticized for the algorithm.
Kind of, you start typing something and
it's gonna take you down a path. Oh, for sure. Right.
I think they've got enough safeguards on that
front where they OpenAI last week came out
with a draft of a, like, this is
how it's like, what's the movie minority report?
Like, the robots should adhere to
these three basic human laws. Da da da da.
This draft that they came out as something like that.
I think there's enough going into that that we won't
have to worry as much as just totally unregulated, you
know, unfettered access to these large language models.
But I think what actually will end up being a thing more
likely is, like, when we learned how to do math and you,
like, divided a number, you did it a certain way.
Yeah, well, now they do it a different way.
And I'm like, no, that's wrong, man.
You got to do it like this.
And my wife is like, well, this is better, faster.
And I'm like, I'm on my lawn. Get off my lawn.
This is the way we do it.
But I think.
Cue the Allstate commercial. Yes.
I think this will be an opportunity to be
like, hey, have you thought about asking, I don't
know, chacha, bt how to solve this problem?
Or instead of just looking up the answer, asking.
And this is one of the videos that they
did, was basically like, okay, look at this math
equation and help me get to the answer rather
than just telling me the answer.
And this was the video. Like the.
That same video that I was talking about.
Um, but basically like, hey, there's a better way
to do this thing with AI that will help
you learn faster and help you do it faster.
But nobody is, like, grew up with that, right?
Like, our kids are growing up, or most
kids are growing up now with cell phones.
Like, for us, we had to learn,
like, oh, you can take a picture.
Oh, I can take a lot of pictures.
Because when we were growing up, it was
like, well, you have 24 pictures, right?
So you got to pick the best
moment to take the best picture.
And if you inadvertently take a picture of the
ground, like, oh, well, you got 23 left, you
know, so I think we're coming into, or we're
going to very quickly in the next few months,
maybe six months, get into that situation where all
of this freedom with free, bold, you know, like,
freedom to do things better, faster, stronger, because of
this, will then result in people doing things in
totally different ways than we've never even thought of.
And those people that embrace it now are going to be
the ones that end up coming ahead or being ahead of
everybody else for whatever reason other than to be.
They just do it faster, you know?
But if you saw the video, should go watch it.
It's very intriguing.
It makes you wonder.
The announcement, the OpenAI announcement, the demo.
Oh, the demo that they did on
their little stage with, like, the.
We can link out to it in the show.
Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah.
What do you think on that front?
Like, do you envision, you know, like,
just from, like, from a career standpoint,
as an individual, not as a business? Right.
From a marketing perspective, you know, I could
point the camera at something and say, hey,
give me some insight into the way this
picture, the way this website looks.
What should I do to change it?
Like, things like that.
Does that worry you?
Get you excited?
I'm not worried.
I'm optimistic. Yeah. Much like you.
I'm very much like, you know, I prefer the
glass half full or maybe that's my natural posture.
But it does cause me to think,
like, how will I continue to.
I feel like I still have so much to learn
in the way of, like, using it better, but it's
already made me kind of ask more the time that
it would take me to get to a conclusion, especially
on certainly the more repetitive things, but, like, it's, I
think, made me a better person, professional. Yeah.
The idea of being, like, skilled out of a
job because of AI, I do think I am
optimistic about people being judicious and creating.
For every job that it takes away,
there will be an opportunity to add.
It's kind of like that next industrial
revolution that we're going through and everybody's
work is gonna look different.
I'm always thinking about.
I'm watching a show right now.
I don't know if you watch Deadwood. Mm mm.
It's, like, all about kind of, like,
gold mining days in South Dakota. Okay.
And it's actually based on some true events.
And I spent every summer growing
up going to South Dakota.
I've got family from there, and I'm looking at,
like, the people's jobs back in the day.
So they established, like, a mining camp, right.
And they start to legitimize over time.
And they're like, oh, we should,
like, elect people to help run. You know?
Like, we should have a mayor and a
sheriff, and we should have a school and
a teacher because they don't have those.
And now they're teaching kids the things, and it's
like looking at what they were teaching them back
then compared to, like, how we learn today or
the jobs that existed back then.
And that's way far back.
But, like, people continued to be repurposed.
Like, we will continue to find ways to,
like, our levels of intelligence will just increase.
I think, like, long, long time ago, it was survival.
Right?
And we're living in this, like, remember we talked
about on one episode this, like, era of overabundance?
And now we're, like, manufacturing places
to create, like, the gym example. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, back in the day, we had to run
through the forest and, like, catch our food, right?
Yeah.
And the body was designed to move, but
now we sit in desks and, like, offices
and we commute and we don't move.
So we created these things called gyms so we can go.
So our.
We will continue to have, like, this.
Our innate desires.
But I'm not worried.
I'm feeling optimistic.
And I do think as long as really,
the really smart people and companies out there
are keeping that, like, you know, responsible stewardship
is one of our core values.
But, like, how do we responsibly
usher this technology into the.
I don't know, into our business, into the, you know,
the fabric of how we move forward as a population?
Yeah, this actually, not that I'd was well versed
in this space, but in the late 1990s, right,
the web became, like, a big deal, and the
people that were old enough to maybe have some
money or some intuition or could start a business,
you know, like, really made a ton of money.
But the people that were growing up, like, people
our age, were starting to fundamentally understand how do
I rope in the web to do things that
are greater than just, like, HTML and I sold
a domain for, you know, $3 million.
They turned it into things like Facebook. Right?
Like, I think Zuckerberg is slightly older than me.
I'm not going to name numbers because I
actually don't know how old he is.
But he was in that moment where he was in
that boom of, like, the.com deal, and then he fundamentally
understood, oh, here's how I could do this other thing.
Were you in college when Facebook came out? No.
Wait, maybe. Was I?
I was in, like, late high school.
I think it.
I think it came out my
sophomore or freshman year in college.
In college, yeah, a little. Sounds about right.
Yeah, you were probably not far off of him.
But that reminds me of what's happening right now.
Like, in our generation and maybe older, we're trying
to figure out how do we use this in
business to have the next.com web.com deal?
I think people that are in college now or maybe
in late high school or going to take what we
learn here in the next few years and they're going
to do, like, that next big thing. The next big thing.
Yeah, I think so, too.
When we were at stripe sessions, we were talking
to some really young folks that are already building
companies completely based off of AI agents.
And I was like, whoa, it'll be
interesting in the next few years. You know what?
I say this often, and I don't know whatever
else we have to talk about today, but what
I love about moments in time like this is
that nobody else has ever, like, done this before.
I'm going to nerd out here for a second.
Like, when a new mMORPG comes out. A what? A what?
A what?
Massive multiplayer online role playing game. Thank you.
The audience is thanking me. Yeah. Um.
It's where everybody is on a level playing field and
you all start at level one and nobody knows anything
about, like, oh, yeah, to get to level 20, you
do, like, everybody has to figure it out from scratch.
Well, you have people that play like 24 hours a day, and
you've got the people like me that play like once a week
for 2 hours because I can't find any other time.
But at that very beginning, nobody is better than you.
Like, you're all on the same level.
And I think that's where we're at right now.
Just maybe I'm like a global or a little
bit bigger scale than a video game, right?
But that's what I really love about this stuff,
is nobody can walk in and tell us that.
Actually, you're talking about it all wrong. Right?
You gotta. You gotta do this.
And just let me old man this.
You know, like, everybody's on the same, on the same
base, and we're all starting out from the same spot,
so it's your opportunity to go grab it.
Yeah, well, and what I would say on the heels
of, um, kind of another idea around this is there's
a lot of really great businesses out there that are,
like, owner operated, and they're ready to turn.
Maybe they don't have somebody in the
family to turn it over to.
They're looking to sell.
I just learned of this recently, um, from a
founder that was on Scott's podcast, in the thick
of it, and instead of launching fresh, new, his
own thing, he started kind of looking at existing
businesses that were looking to exit or sell, and
he found so many that just needed.
They were paper based.
Like, they were good. They were good. Kind of simple.
Like, this is what we do, businesses.
But everything lived on paper and off of
one, like, desktop computer and one cell phone.
And so what he did was he went in with
his business partner, and their goal was, okay, let's move
this business, this great business that's been around a long
time, but could be a whole lot more efficient.
And they went in with, let's get it to where
it can run off of a laptop, because he described
a work environment where there are cork boards all over
the office and the things are like.
And they were basically doing 18
to 20 work orders a week.
And think about all the paperwork that comes with that
when someone calls in and they were working with vendors
and homeowners in this case, and there's opportunity.
So where you think, if you are listening to this
and you think, gosh, I need to go start.
If I'm going to get ahead of this thing,
I got to go start a company utilizing AI.
Maybe it's taken existing business, take an
existing department or process and apply it. Yeah.
And then replicate that and see what maybe
incremental, but probably really large improvements and efficiencies
you can get out of that.
Um, because there are still a lot of businesses with
products and services that cannot be fully run by AI.
There are people that work on, like, home repair.
Like, there's.
There are actual, like, need. Yeah, yeah.
Homes being built, home repair offices
that need to be maintained.
But can you in some way, um, apply AI and
automation in this technology to make it more efficient?
Like, figure that out, and I think you'll be
a great asset to any company or even yourself.
Absolutely.
Utilize the latest up and coming technology or
you get on those platforms like canvas, where
it's going to be ubiquitous, right?
You learn the latest and greatest, and inevitably you're
going to end up as a professional, right?
You're going to be on the forefront
of those things compared to the people
that are still doing paperwork, right?
I do things in excel and we work,
we work with businesses that do, right?
We are, we are current.
We talk to people in positions all the
time that say, yep, we're doing this manually,
or if we don't integrate these two applications,
we will be perpetually doing this manually.
And my team is far too knowledgeable
and capable to be importing spreadsheets.
Yeah, well, that's, I mean, that's
the beauty of the podcast, right?
Is we're the junction where the people and the
technology and the process meet in the middle.
Where's the button that's like, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Not that one. No, not that one.
Well, there's like eight others.
I feel like my buttons are gonna be disabled
next time, but we're gonna child lock the child.
Yeah, but guys, if you have situations, right, or
things you want to talk about on the podcast,
or you've got a problem that you want solved,
definitely reach out to us, thejunctiontechnology.com.
We'd love to have you on the show.
Feel free to shoot me emails through there.
You're like, hey, man, you said this
and you really should have said that.
I'd love to read your email out loud if you
want to be an anonymous guest poster tipper or whatever.
Hot take. Love that.
I'll totally read it out loud.
And, you know, you can definitely humble me.
My wife tells me I'm wrong all the time.
So on that note, keep it automated.
