Transcript
Transcription of the Video Excerpts
Hey, hey, hey. Hello everyone. It’s Friday, it is very nearly 11:00, which means it must be time for the flow state podcast and I must be Stuart P Turner, the host and founder of businesses and doer of things. So welcome to the show. It’s just me today. So that’s either great news or terrible news depending on your preference and whether you have joined me before with some of my guests. So what I thought I would do today is you know, just just take it take it down a notch, you know, have a little retrospective on the past few conversations which have been incredibly interesting. Excuse me. Um, and I’ve covered a wide array of different areas. But what I thought it’d be helpful to do today is just kind of bring all that back to what does that mean for work? You know, that’s predominantly this is a work oriented podcast with, you know, links into how that impacts on our day-to-day lives. Uh, and also hopefully leave you with a few things to think about with the, uh, you know, with the next conversations in mind. So without further ado, I’m going to run through some more of the news what’s been happening in AI over the last week or so. Uh, just how that relates back to our previous conversations and then um a few bits that we’ve been doing.
So before I even get into that I had on a more positive note like I do a fair bit of winging about stuff on on here in a hopefully constructive way. Um, but I had a great reminder this week of why AI tools are actually pretty awesome because Claude, um, an Anthropic, decided that because some developers are basically taking the piss and, you know, running always on stuff to their models which is costing them a ton of money, they were going to throttle everybody’s usage. Which effectively means it’s not really worth the money now because the way that we’ve been using I’m hitting the limit all the time and then, you know, have to wait for three hours to do anything which is not particularly helpful. So there’s plenty more AI fish in the sea, Anthropic, at the moment, know what I mean.
So, um, the upshot of this was that I had to um basically rebuild one of our internal reporting tools because we’d been using Claude to uh to power that which was great. Um, it wasn’t it wasn’t amazing but it was an easy process and I couldn’t really be bothered to to update him but I was forced into an update. Um, but look it was a useful exercise because in the old world that would have meant that I would have had to, you know, brief one of our developers. We would have had to go through like a fair bit of back and forth to make sure that I was explaining myself clearly which I often don’t do to the level of uh, you know, sort of detail required to build something the first time. Um, you know, probably would have taken a week or two of actually putting it together. Whereas this time I probably spent I don’t know a day, day and a half um, you know, hack together a functional version that does what it needs to using one of the um, you know, the sort of language based um code models. Um, and look like obviously it requires a bit. I’m not a developer by the way so, you know, I know broadly how to do it. I don’t do it day-to-day. Um, but you know, it was a it was a fast job. It got the job done way quicker than it would have been done previously and because it’s not going anywhere external It doesn’t need to be all sort of up to up to the usual standards of a, you know, a proper tool that people are going to use. It’s something we just use internally. So that exercise was actually very useful. Um, I thought, you know, it it just really demonstrates like the, you know, the practical power of having these tools in your hands with the caveat of if you know what you’re doing because this is a tool that analyzes data um and provides a fair bit of commentary that’s bespoke to Flow State. However, there are a load of ways that that can go wrong. So you know, it’s still trying to make stuff up. It was still introducing errors and breaking stuff and there was a lot of like, you know, back and forth on why that was happening and how it was happening which is where these things kind of fall over. But I just wanted to use that example as as a more positive, you know, spin on on what’s happening with the tools because they are they are good. They’re good for work. Let’s not pretend that they’re not but there are some more serious concerns that we need to think about.
So, um, getting into the news there’s some fun stuff that’s been happening over the last week. Obviously the the AI space moves, she moves pretty quickly. So there’s a few fun things that have been going on. This first story I thought was great, right? So if you if you follow the news like a hawk like I do, um, you may have seen that ChatGPT somewhat radically decided they were going to index people’s public chats um in the search results. Now if like me you have not even half a brain, let’s even say 10% of a brain, you would immediately think “Oh my god what have I been putting into public chats in ChatGPT that perhaps I don’t want the entire world to be able to find just, you know, off the cuff”. Um, so as you can see from this article I’ll show all the links to these um after the show, this change was very rapidly rolled back as AI OpenAI um realized that this was obviously an incredible and terrible decision. Um, and the company claims it was a short-lived experiment um that ultimately introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to. Now I’m imagining anyone who’s ever worked in IT just being colored dramatically unsurprised by this revelation considering people can’t even manage files and access to their own devices correctly. Imagine all the stuff that people are chucking into like the free version of ChatGPT. They might even not, they might not even know it’s public. They might not even know that that seg and then Google was just like “Hey we just index all that”. So not surprising that this got rolled back.
Where I think this is interesting though and I do think that there will be um a version of conversations that will be indexable because it feels like that’s inevitable because to, you know, complete the sort of snake eating itself, a robberous circle here. Um, obviously all the chat models um and all the AI models have scraped everything that Google’s previously scraped. They’re probably scraping Google results as well. Um, so that’s where they pull a ton of their data from. And now Google’s going to index a load of the stuff that’s been scraped from Google and various other places in the past. So the potential danger here which you would assume somebody is thinking about is that this is starting to introduce an incredibly regressive way of gathering information. Um, you know, like just keeping filtering the same garbage until you’ve got a really distilled amazing version of garbage. Like there’s a real danger there that that’s just going to turn into a complete race to the bottom and that that information all becomes completely useless. Um, the other interesting thing for me here is that this is a bit of a world’s colliding moment for me because being an ex SS SEO guy, as you know, an SEO survivor in recovery. Um, this the immediate thought to me was that before they rolled this change back every SEO or search agency in the world would be scrabbling around desperately trying to get an email out to all their clients to either pitch their new conversation optimization service or claim that nothing was changing and that they were still totally valid and that all was like all that was going to happen here right is that anyone who works in SEO is just going to suddenly start, you know, mashing out tons of optimized conversations everywhere. So again that’s not useful for anyone right? That’s just going to ruin the utility of this information being public. So this is really interesting to me from a just purely, you know, digital marketing and sort of revenue generation perspective because these kinds of changes are having a much bigger impact on our ability to actually communicate with our audiences than than they used to. Right? So like back in the day when Google used to roll out an algorithm update There was always a bit of a panic about, you know, the the change in the ranking tables and the visibility of people but there was always a way like a quick way back from that that you could just kind of jump on and, you know, and deal with in practical terms. But just the pure like the sheer volume of information that you’re able to just spew out now just has totally changed the game. And like these kinds of decisions are not just an issue personally but are a massive issue for brands where and and everyone’s talking about this at the moment already right with um with the drops in referral traffic from social and from uh from AI sort of starting to to bite out of that pie as well. Like how are you going to drive customers to your brand now and that’s where all this, you know, zero click chat has come from with thanks to Spark Toro there and Amanda who I believe is coin coined that term. Um, but this stuff, you know, this is close to what we’re doing right? Because we we operate in in social. We do a lot of work with content and this is where people, you know, research things and where you find out if something’s good or bad right? So um yeah it was it was just really interesting. I thought this is quite quite funny. I also thought this very amusing rapid fire roll back there before the entire digital marketing world burned down which is quite amusing.
Um, the next thing that I found in the news which is interesting following on from the conversation with my very good friends Jen and Ashton from last week, “what is the real cost of chasing AGI”. Now this podcast is awesome. Um, Equity, which is really worth listening to from TechCrunch. Um, this conversation quite fascinating. I’m going to talk a little bit about the big Trump’s AI action plan as well. But um this one in particular was a really interesting discussion just um talking about the social implications of AI, the consolidation of power in the tech industry, um artificial power. Love that. Um, there’s loads of really cool stuff in here. So have a listen. Super interesting. In particular the myth about being too big to fail in the discussion around that I thought was particularly interesting. So look this is really cool. This is one of the ones that I listen to to inform uh what I you know say doing. So I’ll drop a link in here, subscribe to it. Awesome conversations on here. Very worth listening.
But look like the um the way this relates back to our conversations obviously is like there are a lot of hidden costs to this mad rush towards AI and they’re not just like practical stuff. It’s not just like the environmental impact or the physical monetary cost. There is a potential like IP and brand equity cost to all of us here because all these companies are trying to chip away at like our ability to control what we do and how we do it and what we say and where we say it. So, you know, the sort of um the soapbox uh ethical battle that we all fight I guess as, you know, particularly marketers but business owners, anyone anyone working in these companies, right? Is like we we want to have our own defensible, you know, area, our brand, our little mini empires, right? Um, and you know, as they say in in Silicon Valley, you know, you need to build your moat, right? How do you defend that against other people? Um, but all these companies are, you know, smashing their way way into our own, you know, our own towns, cities, castles. I don’t know where I’m going with this medieval analogy by the way as you can see. It’s falling apart as I use it. But look like the moats have been breached, I guess is the simple way. These people are in our houses. They’re sitting in our furniture. They’re eating dinner at our table. Like we should be thinking about how we kick them all back out where they belong because we didn’t invite them in in the first place. Um, so look that’s my, you know, my sort of uh moral stand on this is like these people, these these people, these tech people of which I am sort of one but not a big tech guy, right? They don’t ask permission, they just do stuff whereas often as a brand or as a, you know, particularly as a marketer you are forced to ask permission before you do things and that power imbalance is very dangerous for all of us. So I don’t want to get too distracted but look going to come out in an upcoming conversation just a bit food for thought there. Um, and look, well, I suppose the final point there is look if you’re if you’re in a marketing role or you’re in a sales role like you’re running these revenue generation teams like you shouldn’t be afraid of going into the boardroom and just being like look what are we doing at a business strategy level to defend our IP and defend our territory? Like what is going on there? Because that goes beyond uh revenue generation functions. That is like a business strategy level discussion and decisions need to be made about how and who you work with and what we’re doing. So I just think that that’s really interesting. I don’t know how much of that conversation is going on at the C-suite level. I feel like everyone gets pushed around a lot still by the the big tech agenda um or they’re very excited about leveraging new technologies as we’ve spoken about before. Um, and that that excitement needs to be tempered with awareness of the risk um and risk mitigation strategy. Uh, and look I think a lot of that can come from the coalface which is your, you know, interface with your customers and your potential customers. Um, so there you go.
Uh, next one on the list. So should Silicon Valley celebrate Trump’s AI plans? Now again if you’re a bit of a political nerd um as I am, um it’s been it’s been an interesting ride the old Trump administration so far. Um, I’m still on the fence as to whether he actually knows what he’s doing on the tech front or if he is just some sort of idiot savant who’s who’s sort of, you know, got an intuitive knack for knowing what the next move should be. But um obviously he and Elon had their alleged falling out. Like, you know, I’ve got I’ve got theories about how that all that all shaked out. But um again this is from Equity. Another really interesting discussion. Um, Trump has unveiled a plan for AI, an AI action plan. Um, it’s an interesting plan. And the reason I’m talking about this, if you’re like Steu, you’re clearly not in America, you sound I’m British and I live in Australia. Um, but look America still leads the way and dictates a lot of what happens globally here. A lot of these big businesses are based out of the states and whether we like it or not. You know, the the way the wind’s blowing over there is often a good indication of the way it’s going to blow for us down here in Australia and across APAC. So it’s always worth keeping an eye on what is happening. Um, again I won’t run through what’s in here in a ton of detail but this was another really interesting discussion. Um, so well worth listening to. I’ll share the link to this one. Um, and I just want to move on to the link to the next story.
So part of Trump’s action plan or what is, you know, what’s fallen out from it now is that um all our mates in big tech are basically trying to loosen yet another act that is looking after our physical health and attempting to protect the environment. So um there’s been some new regulation sort of floating around to loosen environmental regulations. Now on the surface obviously that sounds bad right? Because we need to protect the environment and we don’t want to be drinking disgusting water full of filthy chemicals and we also don’t want to allow huge technology businesses to steal all of our water to cool data centers that we um we may not want on our doorstep. Um, there is a positive side to this obviously that we do need to support and enable technology. Um, and I think the increased attention on things like how we’re managing the water supply is important but we don’t just want to let you know Silicon Valley rush in dictate how that should happen because their agenda is not my individual citizen agenda. And unfortunately a lot of these people are so rich that they, you know, they’re probably getting sort of wellsprings installed in their bloody properties or building houses on, you know, the side of a cliff where they can drink straight out of a mountain side right? But unfortunately for you and I we’re like how much chlorine’s in my water today? You know, why is there all this weird brown stuff in my water filter? And what is that doing to me? I mean like I know we’re all full of microplastics already but I’d rather minimize getting full of any other crap if I could avoid it. Um, so this, you know, obviously ties back to my last conversation on last week’s episode just around um our environmental responsibilities and the governance of that. And like I feel like there is a continued rush to just do stuff here without significant consideration around the bigger picture about how this affects the, you know, the environment.
And like we touched on this last week where, you know, I’m all for the push for moving to renewables. Electrification is great. Like, you know, we need to be more serious about doing all this stuff but you can’t just pretend that it’s all rosy. You know, like there’s a big conversation to be had about what we do with all these batteries that we’re making and where they go because They’re incredibly toxic and full of horrible stuff. Um, and we’re kind of operating on a bit of wing of prayer like we’ll be able to do something with them in the future at this point. Um, and as my, uh, you know, as my brother’s constantly reminding me he works on on the ocean. You know, lithium oriented fires are a very serious issue. Like they don’t go out. Um, and he’s, you know, obviously understandably very concerned about them all the time because it’s part of safety procedures when you work on any kind of boat. But like they they’re literally the policy on most boats is like if you have a serious fire like a battery fire you just literally wrap the thing if you can in a big fireproof cloth and you just chuck it over the side because there’s nothing you can do. You leave it where it is. It’s just going to burn everything down. So obviously, you know, I’m not panicking about my battery setting on fire everywhere. But look it’s just a good illustration of the issue, right? So where this um I think is an interesting point is as we were saying last time look water we need it. We need to drink it, we needed to do stuff. Do we want the technology industry dictating our environmental policies around water management? No would be my answer. Um, and I feel like a lot of these things are just sort of slipping through without huge amount of scrutiny. Um, and obviously going back to what I was saying about, you know, how Trump’s running his administration, you’ve got to question whether there really is the sort of level of due diligence that should be required around these things. And it’s our responsibility I think as uh as citizens and well mainly our our friends in the US, right? Whether you voted for him or not like you can still have a voice on these things and you can still lobby and you can still um, you know, to advocate for your perspective. I don’t think you should just give up just because someone that you you don’t like is in government. Um, I think it’s more important than ever now that we all just remember that, you know, the sort of the social contract is is still there. It might be pretty stretched and, you know, it’s been stomped on a bit and had some wine spilled on it but we all still like living in societies together so let’s just sort of, you know, try and try and positively engage and do what we can I guess. Um, so look that’s what’s going on. Watch out American friends for your drinking water.
Um, on a more positive note though and related, Google have released a new AI model that is trying to track climate change and help us to do more things about it. So uh in the old, you know, measure it then manage it sort of fashion this is actually really cool. So again I will share the link to um this article. Oh no, I’ve read my last free article. There’s there’s ways around it. Um, which I’ll I won’t share publicly here but I’m sure you know him. Um, but look this is awesome. I’ll find a publicly available version of this. Um, or if if you subscribe to W you can obviously read it if you have not used all your free free articles. Um, but look this is really awesome because this is where I think we can be deploying the power of AI to much greater effect and like the power of huge computation, right? Which is let’s like try and solve some of these big problems. So going back to what I was saying about, you know, like batteries in the battery issue like we need to be directing um our, you know, now computationally enhanced thinking towards these issues, right? So like how do we address these things, how do we start to track these massive macro trends that we couldn’t track before? Like what do we do with the more useful data that we have um and how do we leverage that? Like this is the much more exciting side of what’s happening at the moment for me so I’m super keen to see where this goes. Google, you, They’re not all bad are they? They’re not as great as they used to be but they’re doing what they can in some areas. So this is really awesome. And I thought this was a great update from from last week’s discussion which I feel like did get who’s, you know, there’s a bit of doomsday going on. We were trying our best the three of us. But yeah I think um this stuff is cool and I’m keen to see more.
Uh, and look finally in the news, this is the most concerning one for me and and should be for you if you work in any kind of computer type job that involves numbers right: AI there’s an AI company that’s coming for Excel. Now I am a firm believer that Excel will never be unseated by AI because Excel is the best thing that Microsoft have ever done and I will fight anyone who dares to challenge me on that that view. Excel is behind every single piece of software you’ve ever used. They all started as a spreadsheet somewhere or a table in a spreadsheet. Um, it is probably one of the most used pieces of software ever right? And I don’t want to see rubbish AI stuff just getting shoehorned in there because there is a beautiful simplicity in the use of a spreadsheet and that should remain as it is pure and untouched. So we can just dump stuff into them and do what we need to do, not be prompted to do something else and not like, you know, try and change him and make him look different or whatever. So um I thought this was particularly interesting because from a purely commercial perspective I would not dare come at Excel because it’s just, you know, as I said it is what it is. It’s amazing. Um, but look I’m keen to see where these guys are going. It’s an interesting approach. I’ll fire this article over. There’s um, you know, some actually some quite cool stuff in what they’re what they’re proposing. Um, but you know, like I just wanted to throw it out there. I want to want to defend my my boy Excel. It’s it should not be going anywhere. It’s great.
Um, so look that is that is the AI news in brief this week. As usual many changes occurring, many things are happening. Um, it’s been, you know, the usual wildest ride. Now what I wanted to do just given it’s just me, I’m not going to ramble on for like a full hour which I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear. Um, I’ve also been playing around with another model that I really like from Google, Notebook. Right? So Notebook is a bit more of an academically oriented um LLM. And what I’ve been doing with the podcasts is uh uploading the audio versions or linking the YouTube videos. Um, and then you can interrogate the discussions uh and be like look if you if you didn’t agree with my perspective you can ask it for your own perspective. If you wanted to just extract a few key points around a specific question you have you can interrogate it that way. So if you’re keen to get access to one of the notebooks of the previous episodes um let me know because I’ll have to add you uh via email to the ones that are in our workspace. If um I can shift them over to my personal account the sharing is a bit more um free and easy there because there’s less um there’s less legal requirements because we’re not we’re not paying for Google on that front. But I found it really useful just in going back through conversations and actually sort of reinterpreting what we’ve been doing particularly the last few when we’ve been covering a lot of ground. Um, we’ve talked about, you know, environmental impacts, the social impact, our own personal responsibilities, the impact of AI on your brand position um and your own ESG policies. There’s loads of stuff we’ve covered. Um, and there’s a lot of threads from those conversations that all, you know, they’re all coming together quite nicely but sometimes it’s hard to uh to sort of extrapolate them in the moment. So that’s been really useful. If you’re not using um the notebook stuff and you are a Google Workspace user it’s really good. It is available in free Google accounts as well. Um, but yeah look if you want to interrogate information um particularly like documentation um, you know, shows, podcast, whatever. If you can get hold of the files you can just upload them and then you can have a little chat about what’s in there. So I found that very helpful. Um, and I’m happy to share our previous conversations if you would like to interrogate those in your own way. So let me know if you’re keen and I’ll share them around.
Um, so look really that’s it from me this week. Um, keep it a bit shorter and sweeter. We’re carrying on with this series through to the end of the year. So as usual the door is open. If you would like to join me for a conversation on the implications of AI 2 then please reach out. You can hit me on LinkedIn. Um, you can get me um where else can you get me? On um Insta, Facebook messages, via any any place you can find. Basically I’m always happy to have a chat. Um, we’re running weekly as you know. And over the next few shows I’m going to get Jen’s coming back on. We’re going to be digging more into um some interesting topics with her. Ashton is rejoining. I think Sarah will rejoin as well. Um, and we’re also toying with the idea of potentially doing some uh some live versions in and around Sydney. So I’ll keep you posted on all that stuff. If you’ve got any interesting stories of your own from the last couple of weeks feel free to share those as well. Um, and look that I still don’t have a I still don’t have a sign off. I need to think of a good sign off. You got good ideas for sign offs?
But look that was the that was the news in AI this week and also some practical stuff hopefully in there. Um, I will hope to have you back to listen or watch again. We’ll be covering what have we got on next week? We are covering uh personalization and how to personalize leveraging AI tools. That’s coming up in the next couple of weeks. We’re also talking about the uh inherent contradictions and challenges in running digital across social channels which is also coming up in the next couple of weeks. And we are also talking again about how to build a brand in this new world of walled gardens um and, you know, digital land grabbing. So I can’t remember what order those are in but those are the uh those are the topics that coming up on the next few shows. So look thanks for joining me. It’s always a pleasure. Um, and I will hopefully see you again soon. Thank you.