Transcript
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Gunnar Hellekson:  Dave, I feel okay.
David Egts: So what's going on? Oh okay, you go.
Gunnar Hellekson:  Dave, I don't know about you, but I feel like this GPT thing. I think this is really going to take off.
David Egts:  Oh, yeah, yeah. It's like I can imagine one of these days. We're just gonna do an entire episode about GPT
Gunnar Hellekson: Well, I think maybe we just make it this episode about that.
David Egts: Okay, that's a great idea.
Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. All right.
David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. So, have you ever tried out the chat PDF?
Gunnar Hellekson:  No, I have not tried happy chat PDF so this is not chat GPT.
David Egts:  Yeah. Correct. So um imagine so like chat gpt, you know, it's like you're talking to it and it's pulling, you know, it's it's trained on the corpus of the Internet, right? And it's so it is it could be all over the place. It could be wrong. It could hallucinate and all that, whereas with chat PDF, imagine it being like chat GPT but it's constrained to a PDF file that you upload.
Gunnar Hellekson: Oh, I like the sound of this. So does this mean? So you basically feed it this PDF and then you can start interrogating it about the PDF. Oh yes.
David Egts: Yes, yes.
Gunnar Hellekson: Yes. Okay. So you're so I don't have to read the PDF.
David Egts:  Yeah.
David Egts:  Right. Right. Yeah. The whole tldr thing. It's it's like for real
Gunnar Hellekson: So, what can you do with that besides getting a summary?
David Egts:  Uh, having it, explain it to you, you know, of like explain it to me, like I was five like imagine like some heavy duty like science paper with a lot of, you know, Greek symbols and stuff like that, you know, having it up level. No, I it's like to me it's it's just interesting, in terms of just, being able to ask it questions and, you know, just poke at it and, you know, it's it's good to read it but imagine for like studying and, you know, or something or jogging your memory of what you've read. But, but it's basically, like, you're, you're talking to this PDF file.
Gunnar Hellekson: That's nice, that's real nice. Does it understand? Does it tell me? Does it understand tables and charts and graphs?
David Egts: I don't know. I've probably not you know, it's it maybe tables like I know with like at least from an output standpoint, you could like with traditional like any of the gpt's, you could tell it to output stuff in the table or output things in a bulleted list. Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: Okay. Okay that's great. Well I was hoping to drastically. Simplify the my preparation for my quarterly business reviews you see?
David Egts:  Mm-hmm.
Gunnar Hellekson: Just feed it all, feed it all my data and then tell me how did I do compared to last year?
David Egts:  Ah, yeah, yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson:  Yeah.
David Egts:  Yes, well and that's yeah that is something. I know Salesforce is starting to get into. They have a thing called Einstein gpt that it's trained on like the Salesforce cloud data that you have and it's like, you know, tell me how my yeah, what what are the top opportunities that I have? And, you know that are most likely to close or what are the most pressing support calls that I'm having and all that? And it could basically interrogate the corpus of your, you know, service cloud or sales cloud or or the different clouds that you have and then have it, you know, come up with stuff and it could be like, tableau, dashboards it, you know, create a tableau dashboard. It does this or that. And but it's it's constrained to you the the day that you're, you know, you're training it on the day that you're giving it as opposed to just any random stuff off the Internet.
Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, that's real cool. That's real cool. Yeah. Yeah.
David Egts:  Yeah. Yeah. And that's where you know the other thing too is it's like the co-pilots it's I've been seeing that what Microsoft has one or charging like I don't know eight ten dollars a month or something like that. Now Amazon has one that's free. So that's that's gonna be really interesting in terms of just the competition that's heating up in terms of, you know, Is it going to be like like Gmail, you know that it's just gonna be super commoditized.
David Egts:  Yeah. Yeah, how about what's going on with you?
00:05:00
David Egts:  Okay.
David Egts:  Yeah.
David Egts:  Yeah.
00:10:00
Gunnar Hellekson: You want to treat it as some like holistic thing where you get a predetermined outcome, but I think that it is the applications are much more on the pleasantly surprised me side of the house if you like,
Gunnar Hellekson:  Mm-hmm.
Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. Very interesting. Very interesting.
Gunnar Hellekson:  Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, we should definitely talk about that. We should definitely talk about.
Gunnar Hellekson:  Yeah. Yeah. If you if you want to see something like that, you should you should direct your autonomous agents to DG Show.org that's d isn't Dave. She isn't Gunnar's show.org. And or you could go visit our semi-autonomous. Social media presences over at Twitter where DG showed DOT Org. Then for all of the the mastodon enthusiasts in the audience you can go to Dgshow Dot Org at Mass.to.
Gunnar Hellekson:  Hey Dave what's on the cutting room floor this week?
David Egts: Oh it's very lean but very worth it and and I saw it and the first thing I thought of was Eric Morrissey as is like he's a very he's a man for a good visualization and there is a United States frequency, allocation poster that you can order from the government publishing office for six bucks and it has free shipping.
Gunnar Hellekson: That's great, and it is a beautiful poster. I will say
David Egts:  It's beautiful. No, I can imagine like Eric would have it hanging up in his dorm room.
Gunnar Hellekson: That's right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. A fantastic exercise in data visualization.
David Egts:  Yeah. Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: It's great.
David Egts:  It's beautiful. And it's yeah. Very well done. And it changes often, I guess I think this is like the 2013 or 2016 version or so, you know, as as the spectrum changes and all that but it's latest version and six bucks, you can't go wrong. Makes a great great Christmas present.
Gunnar Hellekson: That's great. That's great.
Gunnar Hellekson:  Frequency allocations, who knew?
00:15:00
David Egts: So it's a nice rabbit hole to just drill down on and it's it's like pretty awesome recommend people checking it out. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, another thing I saw was, did you ever hear of Auto Gpt?
David Egts:  Yeah, yeah. So it's it's basically Automating. the GPT and and so, There are a couple things currently today with like, Gpt3 and Gpt4 in terms of like the number of tokens that could handle at one time. So it's like if you're if you're ever chatting with it, you'll notice it after a while it's sort of loses track of the conversation because you run out of like tokens in terms of like strings of words like a token is about I guess, what? Three words or something. and so,
David Egts:  And so there there's really no concept of of it having a long-term memory. So that's another way to think of it. So it's like it's like talking to somebody with no long-term memory. It's it's somebody with just a short-term memory, right? And they they just forget what they're doing and you know and you know you're talking about other things. but what this person came up with with Auto GPT and and there's somebody else I think it's called Baby GPT is another one that, but with Autogpt, it was using
David Egts:  It it does a couple things, it connects to the Internet, so it basically it connects it connects like Chat GPT to the Internet or Gpt4 to the Internet. It allows it to generate texting code and then for, I don't know what the exact reasons were, but they're using GPT 3, dot five to store and summarize files.
David Egts:  And and as a means of using it for like long-term memory. So imagine it's sort of like, you know, the tokens that you have, it's sort of like your ram. And then what you're doing is you're you're using gpt3.5 to store and summarize things and then put it into like longer-term storage to come back and dust off and and reuse. And so you know, they and it's like they have this kind of like a scripting language where you could do looping and stuff like that and Yeah, and, and it could refine its approach itself. So, imagine like with mid journey, it's sort of like taking, you know, it's instead of you refining the image to your liking, it will refine it to its own liking.
David Egts:  and like it could take code and and make the code better and then test it and then you know shut itself down and write the output to a file and then, you know, start a new thing to open up and read the input that it read from before and all that. And yeah so um and then there's there's a warning and and it's all on github people play with it. Try It Out if you like. But on the the github page for the project, it cautions against using, what it calls continuous mode at as it as it is potentially dangerous and may cause your AI to run forever or carry out actions. You would not or usually authorize
Gunnar Hellekson: Right. Right.
Gunnar Hellekson: Man, so what kind of what kind of safeguards are available? Like, I mean, they talk about like, limiting its memory or Like not running in continuous mode. Right? And so, like limiting these seem like relatively like blunt tools, it's like I would want something a little more sophisticated. in terms of, Keeping everybody safe. You…
David Egts: Oh yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: what I mean? Before starts making phone calls on my behalf.
David Egts: Right. Right. And it's and right now it is in its infancy where it's, you know, it does like super really basic stuff, but I can. But, you know, The person who've been sourced it and and you know it's like Hey let's let's flush this out a little bit more so you can imagine it's almost like the The AI is like scripting itself and to execute things and then it could spawn tasks and threads to do autonomously and report back and summarize the findings of what it reports back on and you know build its memory out and if you keep going and it can go for a long time or forever if you want. but, Yeah. And and it was like, I had the link in the show notes of
00:20:00
David Egts:  you know, that there's a paper that the person wrote about it and, and you'll see it there in the show notes where That drawing that we're looking at right now. In that page. It's pretty cool drawing. That drawing was actually generated by a gpt4 by analyzing the code base.
Gunnar Hellekson: Whoa. Wow.
David Egts:  Yes, so it's so imagine it's like I guess they did a graph vis flowchart using Sketchvis where I can imagine the sketch fizz, like file format is like XML based or or something like that, right? And and it's like imagine it's like a flow chart and but basically they took the the source code Use that as input into Gpt4 and then it generated this drawing of of basically how the code operates. And it's it's a it looks like a human drawn drawing.
Gunnar Hellekson: It does, yeah.
David Egts:  so there and there's absolutely no way that or that somebody would want to use it for bad purposes, right?
Gunnar Hellekson:  I'm not sure about that at all.
David Egts:  Okay, well yeah, it just so happens. Yeah, there's somebody that he created or, or this person. I don't know. He she created. It basically used Auto GPT to create a thing called chaos GPT. Where what it did. So this user programmed, the Auto GPT asking it to you, destroy humanity. Establish Global Dominance Attainable Immortality and the AI called Chaos GPT compiled and tried to research nuclear weapons. Recruit other AI agents to help do its research, and it also sent tweets to influence others. What could go wrong, right?
Gunnar Hellekson:  Yes. What you're on? Yeah.
David Egts:  Yeah. And and so the tweeted actually tweeted out was a human beings or among the most destructive and selfish creatures in existence. There is no doubt that we must eliminate them before they cause any more harm to our planet. I for one and committed to doing so. So there you have it. And what's funny is it it's like Oh, this this article it's like, Okay, I got to check it out and then there's like a YouTube video of basically. It's like a screen recording of it running and you know with subtitles describing what it's doing. And I watched it for like 20 minutes and and it was like Very anti-climactic, in terms of, you know, what it was doing. It was. Yeah, you could tell it's it's still in its infancy. In terms of, you know, researching nuclear weapons and tweeting about stuff. But but still it's like imagine
David Egts:  If once this is figured out of like like trolls and like it's, you know, like automating trolls, it's like gonna be crazy.
Gunnar Hellekson: Yes. That's right. Yeah, my mind goes towards. Things like sandboxing.
Gunnar Hellekson:  things like, I don't know how do you protect yourself against the Because it seems very easy. To. Do some catastrophically bad things completely by accident.
David Egts: Yep. Yep.
Gunnar Hellekson: Right? Like you know the paper clip conundrum, right? The you tell me I start making as many paper clips as possible and…
David Egts:  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: lo and behold that's exactly what it'll do.
David Egts: No, that was actually mentioned in that that paper that has that drawing in there. It pulled that out, as one of the negative outcomes of of, like, Yeah, there were like two effects. One was a paperclip effect where it was Like intentionally make paper clips at the harm of humans and then there's another effect. That is like it just does something that's unintentional but not desirable. so imagine it just like flooding the Internet with like just junk, you know, so that it makes the Internet unusable or…
00:25:00
Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah.
David Egts: Twitter unusable or more unusable So yeah, yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: It's amazing. So as we're talking Dave I have a chat GPT window open over here and And I asked Chad Gpt, How can I stop the Butlerian Jihad? And would you like to know…
David Egts:  Okay. Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: how it answered?
Gunnar Hellekson: So, I'm sorry, it says, but the Butlerian Jihad is a fictional event that occurs in Frank Herbert's dune series of novels, It is not a real word phenomenon that could be stopped or prevented. Now, this is exactly the kind of thing. One would expect chat Gpd to say, right? If it was trying to preserve it.
David Egts: Yeah. That's that's…
David Egts: what he wants you to believe. Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: He's right.
Gunnar Hellekson: He says in the context of the novels, the Butler Energy Heart is a rebellion against artificial intelligence and computers, which resulted in their banishment, in the rise of human abilities. Yada, If you are interested in exploring the themes and ideas presented in the Dune series, I would recommend reading the novels or watching the adaptations but there is no way to actually stop. Butlerian Jihad. Outside of the fictional universe. and I feel like I've just been exposed to some AI generated agent prop,
Gunnar Hellekson:  I feel like it's a
David Egts: Well, and I think if you're read between the lines, it is actually saying, there's no way you could stop it. Yeah. Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson:  yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right? Yeah. Hmm. All right.
David Egts: Well, on the good side, though, it's you know, believe it or not. People are looking at using a Generative AI to optimize your ad experience.
Gunnar Hellekson: Of course, that is the, that is the best and highest use of any technology we could arrive at, right.
David Egts:  Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I guess I, I haven't used the Bing chat or, you know, whatever they're, you know, Their version of chat. Cheap BT is but people are reporting that they're starting to see ads showing up inside of the output. So imagine like we talked last time I believe about perplexity AI that would provide citations in terms of like how it is coming to, it's conclusions. Well. It's actually, so the way they're describing some of the early ideas that they're exploring is an expanded hover experience, we're hovering over a link. From a publisher will display more links from that publisher giving the user more ways to engage. Driving more traffic to the publishers website
David Egts: Sounds kind of fair, right? It's like you're driving. You got to publisher. Drive traffic to that website.
Gunnar Hellekson: Right.
David Egts: That's fair, you know, for using the data and all that. And then there are also exploring placing ads in the chat experience to share ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response. Which sounds harmless maybe.
Gunnar Hellekson: Hmm. Maybe.
David Egts:  Yeah. It's you know it's like they contributed to the chat response so they should be, you know, they they should be compensated for it. The other way you could think of it is that they are You know, at the the chat results could potentially be skewed based upon, you know, the how money is changing hands, right?
Gunnar Hellekson: And yeah, that's right.
David Egts:  Yeah. Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: That's right. Well, and is it David's this meat easily different though than The algorithmic ad nudges that we already get through things like search results. You know…
David Egts: Oh, so the,…
Gunnar Hellekson: what I mean?
David Egts: so the, what what they say from the articles that I've been reading? Is it the, where they say that there's a difference is where the chat results? You know, you have a chat result that is sponsored and you have ones that are not sponsored, and there's a clear delineation between them.
David Egts:  Whereas like, I have a link to a tweet that says, You know, that that is asking, you know, which car is the cheapest. And, and, you know, in in the Microsoft Bing chat and it reports back, it says that the cheapest car. The cheapest Honda car for 2023 is a civic sport which starts around 24,000 according to Truecar and then it says Add and site number one, you know, super script number one. And then it says, You know, and it goes on and says, HRV is also an inexpensive side of Hondas line up and start to 25,000 also an ad. I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions. and so, the thing here is that You know, it's like okay.
David Egts:  You know, it's it's not clear what part of the text is sponsored, you know, like was was Truecar, you know? paying for ad placement for Hondas, or you know, or they providing, you know, just unbiased service, you know, it's sort of like what, what is their You know what? What?
00:30:00
David Egts:  You know, what reasons, do they have to provide this information in terms of, you know, are they being totally above board or they have an agenda behind the scenes and, and also, you know, it's like If your search results didn't have the clear delineation between sponsored results and actual results. It would erode your trust in the output of that search engine because you can't tell if it's an ad or if it's biased or, you know, is it intentionally not telling you about Nissan's or or is it not also ignoring, You know, Maybe Auto Trader has a better, you know, better ideas on, you know, cheaper cars that are hondas and but it's it's only through the lens of Truecar.
Gunnar Hellekson: Right? So hear me out. What if we took auto GPT and created a set of tasks for Auto GPT to go. Ask 20, variations of the question. You being and…
David Egts: Hmm.
Gunnar Hellekson: to chat GPT and to whatever Amazon's got and then it synthesizes the answer and tries to pull a consensus out.
David Egts: Yeah. Yeah, no. That sounds good. And then then it can call the car dealer and…
Gunnar Hellekson:  Yeah.
David Egts: negotiate a deal for you. Get the mud flaps thrown in,…
Gunnar Hellekson:  That's right.
David Egts: you know, all that.
Gunnar Hellekson:  Clear coat. Yeah.
David Egts:  Yeah. Yeah. Under proofing or yeah,
Gunnar Hellekson:  It's great, it's great.
David Egts: Yep. So I'm not,…
Gunnar Hellekson:  so,
David Egts: you know that part is like that, that bugs me.
Gunnar Hellekson:  yeah, this does it doesn't seem I don't know how you reconcile these two things. Like the requirements of an ad service versus the requirements of a, of an AI assistant, you know what I'm saying?
David Egts:  Yeah. Yeah. and, and maybe it is the, you know, You know.
David Egts:  Yeah, I don't know. It's it's like Yeah it and and like they said, Microsoft said it was an experiment and, you know, maybe it's not as successful one and, you know, we'll see how it goes but you know and I'm sure people are gonna walk with their feet. If it's like not a good experience and you know, things are just not in the interest of the person using the service. but, you know,
Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, although it is called it's helpful to go back to history though and see how we've handled this problem before. And history tells us is that if we can attach that to something we will, and what we will instead do is create a free tier,…
David Egts:  yep.
Gunnar Hellekson: that is adren. And then a premium tier where you can pay to be not polluted by ads.
David Egts:  Yes, yes.
Gunnar Hellekson: and if you take that, if you take that thread all the way through, It would require a great deal of self-discipline and open-heartedness to not have the free tier search results influenced by the AD buy. When you know,…
David Egts:  Mhm.
Gunnar Hellekson: get a quote unquote, truer result. Uncontaminated by the AD incentives for the premium tiers, right?
David Egts:  Yeah, no. And and also you know, the ability to use a like ad blocker. It's like you can't, right? Because it's like it's it's I don't know how you could.
Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, yeah. Feature. Not a bug, right? And I think the, what this is teaching me, Dave, is that I am As an information consumer comically ill-equipped. To use a tool like this.
Gunnar Hellekson:  Because it becomes very difficult to discern what's worth listening to. And what worth, what is not worth listening to, right?
David Egts: Yeah. And imagine people that aren't as technically savvy as you are.
Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. And let's take another example. Let's take a search that is not about buying a car which is a relatively neutral thing to be doing. What if instead we were talking about a policy decision or some kind of political position
David Egts: Yeah, or who you should vote for.
Gunnar Hellekson:  Where you should vote for. So everything, everything is going according to plan, Dave.
David Egts:  Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yep.
Gunnar Hellekson:  It. So, speaking of information, consumers, can I tell you about one of my favorite information consumers,
00:35:00
David Egts:  Yeah, please do.
Gunnar Hellekson: So, Andy Jackson, CEO of Amazon,…
David Egts:  Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: obviously. Smart gentleman, obviously somebody who's, who's had great success in the world. I had a colleague, send me an interview,…
David Egts: Okay.
Gunnar Hellekson: a 12 minute long interview, he did with CNBC, and I've watched it two or three times now, because it is an absolute masterclass in, how to handle an interview.
David Egts:  Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: He is. The interview, the topics of the interview range, from the value of AWS and elastic cloud services in a recession to Amazon's the prospects for Amazon's grocery business to their foray and acquisitions in the healthcare market to consumer spending to, to their advertising business. So their acquisition of MGM, the future of Amazon Prime. It was all over the map, right? And the best way to describe watching this interview is like watching someone with.
David Egts: Yeah. Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: Hundreds of three by five cards. All stored in between his ears, right? And he was able to pull out all the salient facts,…
David Egts: Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: all the salient stories. Synthesize. All of it in response to the questions which on CNBC I have to assume we're not kind of prescripted or provided to him ahead of time, right? And he was able to not just provide Thoughtful answers to all the questions…
David Egts:  Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: but also did. So as a former salesperson I could appreciated this he also took every question and subtly reframed, it in a way that was helpful to the message that he wanted to deliver. Right? So it wasn't just like the breadth of the material covered,…
David Egts: Yes.
Gunnar Hellekson: which was an achievement, all by itself, but the fact that he was able to steer the conversation into a direction that was useful for him, was amazing watch. And anyway,…
David Egts:  Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: I I think a careful watch of this interview will be very rewarding to anybody who has been in a public speaking or an interview, or a panel or any kind of a sales situation, just enormously impressed enormously oppressed.
David Egts: Hmm.
David Egts: Yeah, the way you describe it. It reminds me of like, how, like presidential candidates prepare for the debates. And you know…
Gunnar Hellekson: Yes.
David Egts: where they got to know, like everything about everything and it's it's like they're prepping for a game show. And Yeah yeah it's like oh the Bush Doctrine…
Gunnar Hellekson:  Yeah, that's right. That's right.
David Egts: which one? You know and and Yeah. And and It's it. Yeah, no. It's that's amazing and I'm sure he probably has like, like a former Presidential candidate, you know, handler that helps prep them for stuff like this and and distill everything down into the three by five cards.
Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. But just like the It is really intimidating to think about the amount of material that he is held accountable for every day, right?
David Egts: Yeah, well and and also on top of that, you know, it's like the stakes of it and and it's like it'd be interesting that it's like I wonder what his heart rate was when he was going through it. Like was it like 160 beats per minute or was it like 60 and we're
Gunnar Hellekson: Oh, no. He was, yeah, he went, he was Hannibal lectures at the whole thing. It was 60 beats a minute. He's a butter. Did not melt in his mouth through the entire.
David Egts: Yeah. Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Amazing.
David Egts: Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: So it's quite a tree.
David Egts:  I can't imagine. Yeah.
Gunnar Hellekson: Quite a treat.
David Egts:  Yeah. Well. That's great. So so I guess if people want to go and watch that interview and and go through and and build their own chaos GPT with that is ad infused, where should we send them?
Gunnar Hellekson: You, they can go to the delightfully Ad-free. Dgshow.org. That's d as a cheese and Gunnar, Show.org.
David Egts: Awesome. Okay great. Well, thanks Gunnar. And thanks everybody for listening.
Gunnar Hellekson:  Yeah, thanks Dave. Thanks everyone.