Outsourcing Your Thinking to AI Makes You Dumber

0:00I I feel like we have to start with AI. Because it is front of mind for both I think my audience, but also for entrepreneurs that I speak to at every step in the journey, whether they are I was with Adora who's the CEO of Uber the other day in New York and he that's what the conversation was about AI. But then I speak to startup founders who are trying to build a software company and can't find a moat that is defensible, those conversations are about AI. What is your How are you approaching this as an entrepreneur?

0:27>> How can we use AI to do the things that are the or the normal functions of the business at a way better, way faster, etc. What I'm seeing a lot, especially with founders or people who are starting out is they're using AI to do a lot of dumb things really fast and they're trying to build companies that the models are going to swallow up pretty much immediately anyways or already have for super users and it's just going to like become easier. And the question that I would ask for the entrepreneurs who are, you know, AI maxing right now and again, I think it's very good to adopt new technology, is are you making more money?

0:59Just a very simple, are you making more money now? And even though you're token maxing, >> [laughter] >> you're spending all this money on tokens but like are you making more money? And I had a business I looked at the other day, they had 11 VAs that were doing, I can't remember, some sort of like data cleaning work. >> VAs? >> Yeah, virtual assistants. So, low-skilled labor overseas that was doing work and I think it was something in the neighborhood of like $11,000 a month is what they were paying for these 11 VAs and they were doing a good job and it all worked.

1:26And they then spent $350,000 to try and create an AI system that would replace what these 11 virtual assistants were doing. But that means they spent three plus years of costs on what these 11 virtual assistants were doing and it wasn't even the constraint of the business. It was just a process that they could automate, not that they should automate it because it's not the thing that's limiting their growth. And so they still need more customers and that wasn't the thing, this was like part of their their quote process or something, but that wasn't the limitation. They didn't have enough demand.

1:59>> Mhm. >> People are using AI in the wrong places. They're trying to start AI businesses when they shouldn't start AI businesses. They should use AI in their business. They're trying to advertise as AI businesses when you should just advertise the thing that your customer cares about, which is the solution to their problem, the outcome. None of that's changed, but because you got really excited about it, you think your customers are going to be excited about it, but most people are a lot of people are afraid of AI. Um so, it's not necessarily even a positive, and it's not making you more money, which is the final question.

2:26>> When you listen to someone like Elon Musk, he says that work will become optional in in the in the future. And I sat here with a couple of experts on AI. They They kind of explained to me what it is. And from a very simple simplified perspective, this machine that has these neural nets in it, which have lots of parameters, basically connections like the human brain does. And when they train it, the parameters become reinforced, the the ones that made the right decision, and the ones that made the wrong decision are like basically cut out. Again, I'm simplifying this.

2:52These brains, these digital brains are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Um it's it's like almost inconceivable to me, based on what they've said to me, these area experts, that at some point it isn't able to do a lot of the cognitive work that people are currently doing. My question really here is like, where does the value remain in a world where intelligence is cheap and abundant and um higher, one could say, and also in a world where robotics are coming over the horizon, too. Like, where is the value?

3:21>> I think stakes. For example, AI can give all of the recommendations in the world, but someone has to own the decision. >> Mhm. >> And so, as of [clears throat] right now, maybe it will in the future, AI isn't isn't a citizen of any, you know, any country. It doesn't pay taxes. And so, somebody has to be responsible. >> So, liability. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And upside on on on the flip side. And to take this into different domains, from the media perspective, imagine Jimmy, say Mr. Beast, has a video, and they're like, Mr. Beast is going to be replaced by AI. He's not going to be replaced by AI. Because if he had a video that said $5 million, and the $5 million wasn't real and the Lamborghini wasn't real.

3:55There'd be no stakes. >> Yeah. >> Like chess, right, has become more popular now than it's ever like than it's been in recent history, but robots can beat humans at chess. >> Mhm. >> But no one cares. >> I think about the F1 as well. You'd still want Lewis Hamilton in the car. You take him out of the car, you stop watching F1. >> Right. So humans want stakes. And so there's the compensation side of it, which is like somebody's going to be responsible. Someone has to risk the money. Someone paid for the tokens. Someone owns the LLC. Someone is owns this. And so there is value in the judgment and the assumption of risk and upside, which can be money or just the responsibility.

4:28From a media perspective, we still have to introduce stakes into the into the show. Now, of course, there's going to be the fiction world. They're going to be much harder hit. But if you're trying to do a reality TV show, the real part has to be there. >> One of the things that I find really interesting about you is you spend a lot of time thinking and in a world of artificial intelligence, a lot of people are now deferring their thinking to these frontier models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or whatever. And we've spoken about this before, but one of the things we both agree is that knowing the right questions to ask, clarity of thought, critical thinking, making the decision is going to be one of the things in a world of AI that's critically important. So my question to you is like, how are you having good ideas, cultivating good ideas, and giving your space your sort of mental space to be able to think about problems?

5:10>> Mhm. >> What's your practice? >> I'll I'll take this from two different angles. So the first is I think outsourcing thinking to AI as of right now is still a really bad decision. If you It's like I think anybody who's used AI for any period of time knows that you can get it to agree anything, and that's frightening when it comes to making decisions. And so every time I'm like, you know, I think it's gotten a little better. I'll just give it a like a really obvious decision to make. I'll go, "Okay, let's open up Claude. Let's open up OpenAI. Let's Let's open all of them up." And I'll ask the same question to all three, and they're just all over the place. And so I'm like, "Okay, this is still back to my judgment, right?"

5:44Number two is that if you do delegate your decision-making to it, you get dumber. Now, there's all this research from Shrewsberry that people in the podcast who talked about it, and it's like, I for sure like this is the best asset I've got for now. So, I want to keep it as sharp as I can. Do not delegate the hardest work you have the hardest thinking work you have because you will just get so weak so fast.