Where can we apply GenAI to our work to accelerate progress? We talk about this in conjunction with drugs! and marketing tools! and more! and also touch on the incredible progress in AI of the past few weeks. For our previous thinking on AI, check out ep 8, last season.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Combs_Through__Theme/.
Gen Z doesn't think you need to be drawing or making music to call yourself a creator. There's no imposter syndrome about it — of course this is part of who I am.
The tools don't have predictive equations for most things. They work within an error margin and double it so it doesn't fail. That's closer to engineering than magic.
Hi, I'm Kahran. Hi, I'm Deve. And this is the 20th episode of Thinking on Thinking. In this episode we talk about generative AI. We look at what's changed since we last spoke about it a couple of months ago, and we talk about some of the interesting use cases we're starting to see, whether it's music editing or music generation, or finding pathways for new kinds of drugs,
especially ones that don't have the potential market to attract pharmaceutical companies. This is also our last episode of season two. It's been a delight to be on this journey with you as we've made it from our initial missteps in season one and explored some deep topics in season two. We'll next be replaying one of our favorite episodes from season one before we kick off season three two weeks
after that. We had a lot of fun recording today's conversation and we hope you enjoy. On the weekend I was talking to a friend and she was feeling very grumpy about the fact that they have appraisals coming up and she has to write sort of by Monday. This was on Saturday night and she was like by Monday I have to write 25 different people's appraisal summaries and I was just like oh just ask
GPT to do it and her face went from oh my god what a drag to ooh that would be fun like a lot of these repetitive things which is it entertaining is it like gonna provide any value most of the times people are not even gonna read it right so like I feel like that part has been really fun to just think about oh you could just use GPT to write something or you could just use mid-journey to
write something here or like not write something mid-journey to make something it's like a uniquely human trait in some ways where like when confronted with limitations or certain kinds of like shapes of boxes that you know it feels like we're in finding just some path around it right so I think in a lot of countries bureaucratic hurdles have just become these big things you have to deal
with and in some countries right I think it's that there's some country in Eastern Europe I want to say that's like like has made everything online and all government services you can do online I mean India has also done a great job of that creating an AI agent that would be able to help you just like navigate these like bureaucratic hurdles that we have put in place in companies and in
society it just feels like that's what's going to happen like it just that is the way that we seem to approach things as like a species and as like a culture today it's like you know we could try and change the shape of the problem but we could just solve the problem in a crazy way and then people will not think about it anymore
yeah we could ask people to not write weird self-appraisal and other people appraisal forms or we could just ask an AI to write the forms and then we would have a lot of garbage being generated correct and it's like oh okay why solve the root of the problem we can just have an entertaining solution that will so it's very Twitter
have you seen that people who are selling courses about how they use GPT or mid-journey or Dalai or stable diffusion to get to hundred thousand followers on Twitter or hundred thousand followers on Instagram and stuff like that and it's just like this is an oddly specific solution to a problem that probably nobody wanted to solve yeah there's always gonna be what is it called snake oil
snake oil merchants salesman yeah you ever heard this expression yeah right I mean I'm sure whatever the new snake oil comes yeah it's interesting though because I remember in the podcast a while ago we were talking about how you felt like the hype around NFTs and like like crypto had made people kind of like not understand gen AI or really just kind of giving gen AI the like focus that
it really attention and deserved do you feel like that's shifted I think that like people who were crypto grows probably are people who are NFTs are still probably in that space it's also very interesting recently I found a couple of people for like oh yeah I'm building for that three I'm developing for that three I'm internally like having people moved on from that having
people like you know gotten over the blockchain already these are like people who are me oh is web 3 the blockchain yeah thanks which are built on top of black blockchain websites that would make your payments go through blockchain and games which use blockchain like NFTs and cryptocurrencies as their main trading currency it's just really interesting and strange that there are people who are
still stuck in that loop and I suppose there would always be with any technology there would be early adopters late adopters and all of that while it's also very interesting to see that most of my friends who are working in big companies like Google or Amazon or Facebook or wherever else they are seeing the massive amount of resources that are being devoted to the AI side of things
which is like definitely not what happened during NFT cycle I don't know if I answered your question but yeah like I think that no I think you did it at the end there but go on yeah like I think that like certain people are able to see that like this technology matters marketers I think are pretty excited about the potential for at least like generating marketing copy where like I
feel like there's constantly linked in post from like people in my extended network about like they're using I don't know some chat GPT like for something like that so my sister's partner is building a startup in the generative AI space they started in November last year and they've been trying to build this thing that would let you make comics using stable diffusion
so almost like whatever they talk did for people making short form videos they want to do that but for comics and storytelling and like it's also very interesting I was having this conversation with the team that works in CultureTech and they were talking about how Genziers generally look at themselves as creators and creative they do not think that I need to be drawing or making
music to look at myself as a creator. Oh that's interesting so like less of the the imposter syndrome around being an artist yeah and also just like almost this is a part of of course I do this of course this is a part of who I am there's nothing almost like there's nothing special or different about it of course I am I would more like I would be falling behind if I didn't do it kind of a
sentiment yeah but like in that space if you're making content making products that sort of let people generate content of a new variety that they didn't think was accessible to them before it's like a very interesting and exciting space to work in and because of him and his startup and a bunch of other generative AI people I guess I know a bunch of people who are working in this
space nobody's still doing it for sound right I feel like we might have talked about this on one of our early podcasts. No no no people are doing it for sound. So interestingly a lot of the sound models are that this was one of the critiques that people gave of stable diffusion and mid-journey initially that they have just taken stuff which is on the internet like the visual data is on
the other hand people who are building that for music like Google released this thing which made generative music stuff sound effects and music board they haven't generated yeah they haven't set like built an API for it so you can't use it yet it's still in the research phases but it's very interesting because those people have not been using copyrighted stuff they are not using
Katy Perry's music or Taylor Swift's music they are actually using open source stuff but now it's also happening for Adobe's visual AI is ethically sourced for the lack of a better term but yeah people are doing it for music. Yeah I saw those special forces have you used the Adobe one at all? Not yet no.
Is it similar? Not yet. Interesting. I'm also super curious to see it's sort of like alternate sources there was this podcast I think it was Radiolab or Endless Thread I'm unsure which one but
they were talking to this team who was working on pharma molecule production using AI processes and their software was basically they were trying to create molecules for medication or treatments for diseases that affect less than a thousand people every year so there would be no incentive for a pharma company to work on it but on the other hand if this AI can give you the process
you can actually find a bunch of different processes for it because you know that okay this is the protein and then you can use this protein to do things so I would also be excited to see the research in biomedical sciences and in astrophysics. Well that's actually feels like novel discovery in organic chemistry was
kind of what you were talking about there right because yeah they're always trying to come up with new compounds for different kinds of things. With process actually. I'm sorry. With process it wasn't just that you can use this molecule but this is how you
would get to this molecule was also what their system was returning. Oh that's very cool. That's interesting because that's a whole like line of work is coming up with different pathways to get to different molecules. Yeah.
That's interesting. At least from my understanding this is kind of the line of work my husband does. For some reason you're not able to predict well theoretically what is going to happen. Like they seem to do a lot of actual like like chemistry like physical chemistry in order to understand the you know what is the yield going to be what are the
substrates like what yeah which is interesting to me because I would imagine you should be able to predict it from like I don't know chemistry equations. You would not be able to. I think that like when people think about science kid this is like totally not
about there but I think when people think about science in the predictive part of things we often think about physics related systems like there has been philosophically a physics dominance in the scientific narrative. Yeah. So people understand Newtonian physics and they think if X happens then why
should happen. We just understand that cause and effect thing a little bit like that and that's why quantum mechanics is so complex for most people because quantum mechanics doesn't follow that rule. I don't think that chemistry really works like that.
One of my friends also works in organic chemistry. The same is true for them also. It's a chaotic system. Small things small changes would really impact a lot of different things like what is the temperature what is the pressure there was like you know what
were you using what we are using and it's just way too much to actually be able to like physically reproduce. Honestly like physics also doesn't work very predictably. If you were working in civil engineering or mechanical engineering they don't have like predictive equations for most things.
They work within an error margin and they're like okay things are probably not gonna fail if you work within this thing will double it so that it definitely doesn't fail. But like that I think that's more of a difference between like you know what we expect how difficult we expect things to be and how difficult they actually
are. So it makes sense that like even with these guys they are also okay so the episode was actually about these guys who were building the system so that they could find medicine. So generally they would think that here are XYZ factors but if it affects human
body in toxic ways it does not matter if like you know my sleep would be improved if it stops my heart from working right. So like right so now they reverse that variable that okay what could be toxic and he led the system run over right and they came up with an extremely high number of very potent toxins stuff that is way more powerful than anything in
existence right now because of course a lot of fringe chemicals would be like that right and then they sort of went into the space of oh my god international governments are gonna try and pay us for this information and we have to make sure that we don't they even told the CIA that no we are not going to give you our program we are not because of course governments would want to do that right
like they would want to use this as a bio weapon but this other person that they interviewed in the same in same episode she was talking about there is a great gap between knowing what molecule to produce and being able to actually produce it in any significant volume and that is not something that AI can it can get you to the point of okay we know what to make and these are five
potential ways that we could make it but that doesn't mean that any five of those parts are gonna be viable it can curate the knowledge that's available to you but it can't create new knowledge basically or even in this case I would say more like the system is quite chaotic you cannot predict it it is not predictable it's a little bit like regardless of the amount of data that
AI models have had for years on market they just can't predict how the market would work because market is an inherently unpredictable system it's the same as like how in quantum mechanics you have Heisenberg uncertainty principle regardless of how much information you know it doesn't matter yeah you just can't know the full state ever yeah okay what did you find
interesting about that I was actually kind of thinking about something else for a second which was like I was thinking about what we were talking about a little bit earlier yeah a lot of what happens in companies is people are helping figure out what information needs to be known at what level and they're helping bubble that information up right so sometimes that happens in a
top-down approach where you kind of have given these methods missives or like understanding of saying you know this is the kind of information we want bubbled up sometimes it happens in a bottom-up approach where you know people are telling their managers or whatever and saying you know here's something that's happened and so I was thinking about how there's a lot of curation that
happens at each point and I think at the earlier points a lot of what we're doing is there's a lot of noise inherent in the systems these days right like we have more analysts needed because we have so much noise coming out of all our data sources and I think that if you think about it kind of as a curation problem it just lets you think about where you might be able to slot your
kind of you know your AI agent into into your hierarchy yeah it's just kind of interesting I mean you can think about it from saying yes it's gonna eliminate maybe all these like low-level jobs but I think it's also interesting thing about like you know it's going to eliminate a lot of like maybe or just reduce or it's going to change the nature of some of the kind of work that's done at those
roles right like it'll it should at least make it easier to kind of a funny example but I was hanging out with a good friend yesterday who sews and so we were talking about how if you work in that profession if you you know work on costumes or something you have to carry your sewing machine and what we were talking about is how your sewing machine well all the sewing machines have
certain quirks to them right so it can be very difficult to use someone's sewing machine so at first when you hear about the industry and you find out that people are carrying your sewing machines to work every day it seems crazy but then when you understand a little bit more about how people might be becoming custom they know it stitches in a certain way and you have to watch out
for these certain things I think if we start to think about gen AI or AI agents in that way and saying you know we're gonna need to understand with the quirks of these tools where do they slot in and what are the things that we have to watch out for then I'll make more sense I'm just like where do you slot into that hierarchy and where to say add value without adding more confusion yeah that's
a very interesting example because there is that feeling of this is unique this is different and this is more like a collaborator with the mind of its own rather than something that I am just able to I don't know put a coin in and get a result out yeah exactly like it's interesting to me how much things have changed even since the last few times we've talked about it right when we
when we were talking about gen AI a few months ago right you were kind of raising where you felt like the hype cycle had passed it by and now you look around like the hype cycle is so much I wasn't saying that the hype cycle has passed it by no no let me correct it I was just saying that people who are into crypto are gonna be slightly more distrustful of the next thing that's
it not the hype cycle has passed it by yeah you were okay fine fine I think you were as I remember at least they were saying kind of in the context of venture capital that you were wondering about like where people are going to invest or did they feel like they got burnt in the next I was not talking about no no we were talking in we were talking in context to people who have invested money in
crypto as in people who are investing in crypto not venture capitalists who have invested in crypto but people who have purchased crypto off of their own money generally in the last session they would have or rather in the last cycle they would have seen as tech optimist and because of the burn they would have become tech pessimists yeah with the next time that's what I was trying to say
yeah yeah yeah interesting no I somehow slotted that into my memory as venture capitalists not not as in retail investors that makes sense anyway so I was getting at those I think it'll be interesting to see you know if we talk about another couple of months like where things are and what kind of new tools are on the market there's actually a bunch of really interesting I know
we unfortunately I'm remembering this all now but there's a bunch of really interesting tools that have started to come up just across the spectrum whether it's into like you're helping you know better like what sort of advertising copy and like imagery to use something called pencil my sister and I were texting about a few days ago that claims it's gonna help you figure out how to
optimize your copy just like it's one of those painful things where you've got to run through variations of copy and headline and add to figure out which one is optimal for this audience I think yeah right a lot of those kinds of like creation problems it feels to me should be able to be picked up across industries and I guess like at least my sort of intuition here is also that
people who are more in a position where they can figure out the good from the bad like marketers who can tell oh this is good copy and this is bad copy and who have more of a sharper sense of taste would be able to do very well in the current AI environment as it sort of proceeds compared to people who are generally relying on oh we will just test and see.
That's interesting because I was thinking about that in the context of like the how we used the Adobe AI mastering for one podcast episode and then you really felt like it took something away from it but I feel like people who are less skilled would perhaps not have you know they may have been willing to say you know even if this is 60% as good as we master ourselves be more willing to kind
of take that up because it wouldn't felt like as big of a gap to them so I wonder if there might be that kind of I don't know it might get to a certain group of people on that competence like a confidence curve that we were talking about I think a couple of weeks ago right where depending on how how inept versus how much aptitude you have for the task at hand but then also how much
confidence you have in yourself you know in your ability to perform the task at hand that there will be a certain group of people who will be like oh now that I have an AI agent I can predict the markets I can write poetry right like I can do all of these things because they're standards for for where they kind of need to be or not as developed. I mean there's also this factor so I was
talking to my sister and she was talking about how if chat GPT is at you know 20 out of 100 in proficiency of the artificial intelligence mid journey or stability are at like 4 out of 100 and there is like that major gap and she's talking about GPT-4 in this case that like you know GPT-4 is maybe at 20 out of 100 and it's just really interesting to think about it in that context that
maybe like maybe this adobe like audio thing was just like at 1 out of 100 and we could see that it's making the audio sound really bad. Yeah I mean you know you just if you just see the kind of progression in the last few weeks and months right it's so obvious that we're kind of in the early days. Super exciting times. Super exciting times. Okay maybe like we can talk about AI again in a
couple of months couple of yeah I mean that'd be very cool. I think it'd be very cool. Yeah. Good chat. Good chat. Bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of thinking on thinking. Our theme music is by Steve Gomes. If you found any of the topics we talked about interesting this week we'd invite you to get in touch with us we'd love to invite you on the
podcast or just have a conversation about how these topics applied in your business and in the decisions and problems that you're struggling with. You can get in touch with us on our website joyus.studio or by reaching out to Divya or me Kion directly.