AI - This time its different

Midjourney-”AI-this time its different”

So anyone who knows me well will tell you that I always jump on the latest technological fad. Name it and at some point I have sworn it was the next big thing. Metaverse ✔️ web3 ✔️ NFTs? Been there and got all manner of ridiculous ‘works of art’ AND all the .eth addresses for my unborn grandchildren. I was still nursing my wounds at the denouement of our prophet, Sam Bankman Fried, when my wife helpfully pointed out “It seems like you get hit by all these crypto scams”. Only shame prevented me from telling her and my cofounder that I was just relieved that the spell had been broken - and I would longer continue plans to put together a Carbon play2Earn collective for Axie-Infinity.

I mention this all dear reader as I know my detractors are out there waiting to jump on me with a litany of ‘I told you so’. But this time IT really is different. Generative AI is the real deal and you ignore it at your peril. There is definitely some mania around AI but a revolution in the way we work has begun.

The TLDR is

1. Generative AI touches every industry and will affect you - resistance is futile

2. Low barriers to entry from a simple chat interface and seductive price (FREE!) allows for broad distribution

3. You can derive value extremely quickly and cheaply and most importantly..

4. The tool itself helps to reduce adoption barriers that you envisage

Now you can memorise these four points and sound semi-intelligent at your next dinner party. Or you can read on.

Like a bad rash, AI is going to get everywhere.

Let’s face it - to many, crypto/web3 was a solution looking for problems beyond payments. We all tried to jump on the hype sarcastically echoing Silicon Valley VCs with “probably nothing'“ at various new chains launched (that we didn’t’ understand). But in our hearts, many of us were just happy using crypto to buy FX or speculate on different currencies. Watching otherwise intelligent grown men waxing lyrical about why their picture of a monkey in a sailor’s cap was worth >$100k was just added entertainment. Truly the mind is a powerful thing when you let it loose.

But with a promise of increasing efficiency, AI touches everything. And like the Force, it can either be used for Light or Dark. Whether you're in media teaching, finance, movie making, there is a use case that is relevant to you. Relevant in the sense that you can actually benefit from it, or that you will be a victim to it because of its disruptive power.

So easy to start

The chat interface of the leading platforms ChatGPT or Bard of OpenAI Microsoft and Google reduce the mental load of trialling AI. Its just like sending and receiving messages from that your very sharp Auntie who normally gives you sage advice but every now and then just starts spouting information that you know is wrong. When she is telling you about the benefits conservative spending habits you are taking notes - when she start talking about that boyfriend you should have married you stop listening and end the chat. You don’t say you are never going to call her again; you just remember that when she starts hallucinating you hang up. That is the current AI experience with the added benefit that you don’t pay for the messages as both platforms have free packages.

Compare this to crypto where you had to save 16 word phrases in your underpants to find a balance between your laptop getting hacked, and your 1 year old using your notebook for paper aeroplanes. And even when you surmount the security challenge, you now have to justify spending $700 worth of gas to send $24. NGMI

Value and benefits come quickly.

Ok let’s stop joking - because I don’t want to downplay the potential of AI. Because I have been wowed by the benefits you can derive when you start putting money to work. And not mad money - a $20 monthly fee for ChatGPT or dollars & cents to connect APIs.

At Carbon we were looking for images for a a campaign “Real men rock pink”. I did the above images in Midjourney in less than 5 minutes. I swear down! I literally put in a descriptor like “Man in pink T-shirt helping elderly woman across the street in Lagos.”

I hear the detractors screaming “Its always these example we hear about - where is the beef?”. In the last 10 days I have used ChatGPT to :

• analyze Carbon’s financial projections and get me benchmarks to global best companies.

• create an MVP chatbot for our customer service reps to respond to queries using an FAQ document and historic interactions

• put together a simple tool to analyze a folder of resumes for vacancies at Carbon and score applicants based on a set criteria.

These are all simple examples and I am only just scratching the surface and, the benefits that I am getting right now far exceed, in my case, the $20 a month that I'm paying for ChatGPT.

I wrote in an earlier essay about the dangers of African countries and startups being left behind in adopting AI and nothing has changed since then. But there's definitely an opportunity to improve your business/self by jumping on what is a very low cost efficiency tool. It feels like I have a personal assistant that can be called upon at a moment’s notice to help on everything apart from making coffee.

The real magic

And this brings me to the last and final point, which is the most interesting powerful. For perhaps the first time in our history, the product itself helps to reduce the barrier in getting full value. What do I mean by that?

I mean that if you are unsure about how to use AI, you can ask him/her/they for help. A simple example - I am not a coder but wanted to test if I could build a tool to reconcile three different files from Carbon’s core banking application, our payment processor and customer’s accounts. Its something we have to do every day and its a simple but tedious task.

I literally started by describing to ChatGPT what I wanted to do and in the end ended up with code that is saving us 1.5 hours a day. Now, it took me about four days whereas a proper engineer might have taken half a day, maybe a day at worst. So you might say well, you're not that great, but the point is, I'm not an engineer, I'm not a coder, and yet I was able to do something that will save one person's life at least an hour and a half every single day. And this is me coming from zero and basically telling ChatGPT, here's what I want to do. And through a process of iteration, getting there slowly but surely.

Its mind blowing when you think about it. If you don’t please leave and hug a transformer. Just kidding. But leave please, we don’t want your negative energy 😀.

Importantly, there is a whole industry and ecosystem building things to make adoption easier. As an example, I wanted to build a chatbot and found this sorcerers’ den call Langchain which makes it easy to leverage AI. This allowed me to to write the script below which creates a chatbot based off Carbon’s 100 page customer service bible (yeah, retail is difficult!!).

import os
import sys
import pandas as pd
import openai
import chromadb
import constants

from langchain.document_loaders import TextLoader
from langchain.indexes import VectorstoreIndexCreator



OPENAI_API_KEY = constants.APIKEY
query = sys.argv[1]

loader = TextLoader('/Users/ngozidozie/anaconda3/embeddings/cswiki.txt')
index = VectorstoreIndexCreator().from_loaders([loader])

print(index.query(query))

My brothers and sisters, is this not magic?Imagine!!!

This is at best 15 lines of code that you can run on your computer in a Terminal window.

I did this and I began cackling for minutes. I am still laughing now.

To the curious, the spoils

People, we are in a brave new world right now and the winners are those that are curious and willing to ‘play’ with this new toy. But the ramifications are huge.

The likes of Stripe, AWS, YC’s SAFE structure have been instrumental in the democratisation of opportunity in founding startups. Add these three and more together, multiply by 10 (not in ChatGPT as despite all my praises AI not great at Maths) and you start to get to the scale of what AI will do.

If I were to start a company today, I’d be looking at only a third of the people I would normally hire; maybe 20% max of the fundraise I would be looking for.

I know founders currently raising are shouting at me to shut up but I expect that investors will be pushing back on large raises now. The genie has left the bottle folks but for those who are not looking to do Founder-As-A-Lifestyle, these are exciting times.

I listened to a talk by a Wharton professor Ethan Molick (follow his blog & thank me later) and he made an interesting point relevant to all employers. His view is that most people are using AI at work but are not being open about it. They believe that if they tell their bosses there is a risk of losing their job (as they are replaceable) or being given more work (because they have a lot more time). Either way, this thing is here to stay and you have a choice of embracing it or letting it steamroll over you.

I would love to write more but my beloved, ChatGPT is calling me. They want to show me more magic and you dear reader, are just getting in the way of our love affair. Don’t be annoyed, but I bid you adieu!