SPEAKER_00: this is a company called dinner fly where you sign up and then you swipe left or right on the kind of meals you like and the dietary restrictions and whatnot and basically it creates like the meal plan for you for this week and then basically it says i want lasagna soup today and caprese salad on on wednesday and chicken pesto on friday i think this nailed it you're a carb guy you're

SPEAKER_01: an italian carb guy here we go yeah it's your favorite i think yeah i mean you know we like

SPEAKER_05: italian it's great and then you basically go here and you say okay add it to my shopping cart and

SPEAKER_06: you basically adjust whatever you want and it just basically orders it via instacart oh this is

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SPEAKER_12: welcome to this week in startups it's madra mondays every monday i like to have my bestie sandeep madra on the program to do ai demos and you know we talk about ai and we talk about you know what we're talking about in our group chat in our slack rooms and you had an interesting observation just about efficiency and what's happening in this back and forth between employees and employers

SPEAKER_13: back to work back to office ai outsourcing maybe you could just summarize that because it's

SPEAKER_14: very controversial but i think we should attack it head on here it kind of stems from kind of the end

SPEAKER_00: of the zerb era the move towards efficiency and then the rise of ai and you really have to kind of look at those things as all you know together right now because before you know in zerb we had a lot of excess right and now out of zerb companies are looking for efficiency and guess what pops up instead of humans is ai and we're starting to see companies do is use ai in and we're going to see some great demos today but we're starting to use ai in order to replace human operations customer support sdrs you know sort of all the low level operations are being replaced faster than people can imagine and even in our group chat today i think you know someone mentioned we won't mention the company but mentioned that they're using it in their tier one support and so this is it it's happening right now and for those folks that don't pick up and become you know masters of this technology in terms of implementing

SPEAKER_02: and using it there is a solid chance that the technology replaces you so we're going through

SPEAKER_12: a seismic change between employers and employees covid threw a huge wrench into the machinery people went home and that was during zerb this is when people were competing for employees here in america at least and you know globally to a lesser extent now uh you have all the major companies google facebook etc laying people off even to this day in 2024 we saw a bunch of layoffs happen at google these firms have unlimited capital sitting in their bank accounts they literally have tens of billions of dollars sitting there and they throw off tens of billions of dollars in profits a year so they don't need to lay people off they're choosing to do that to make earnings go up and

SPEAKER_13: because they think some people are dispensable now if you're an employee on the other side of this what a swing this has been sandeep they started having competition but three years ago for their

SPEAKER_12: services and the average tenure here in silicon valley was probably 18 to 24 months at a company yeah because you were getting outbid by uber by airbnb by google by microsoft and then a well-funded

SPEAKER_13: startup now it's the opposite people want to work from home they're being told come back to the office and if you don't want to come back to the office that's fine your your job's been eliminated it's it's not a choice it's a mandate and it might be a mandate for you know tuesday wednesday thursday

SPEAKER_24: it might be a mandate for two days a week whatever it is then the unexpected happened as you're saying sandeep ai came into that picture and then the bottom third let's not even say jobs but i think the

SPEAKER_21: bottom third of work we all do has been automated or semi-automated this year alone what that means

SPEAKER_13: is uh the employers having even more leverage over employees so this idea that an employee can complain uh about coming back to the office it's just ending and then this is the pendulum that goes back and forth but do you see the important question is is there a path to this going back

SPEAKER_28: to the employees having power again or is this a permanent shift well everything oscillates you know

SPEAKER_29: the power balance will you know go back in some direction but it's not going to go back for

SPEAKER_00: everyone i think the real you know sort of the real tragedy in something in in some ways during the zurp and covet era was people started taking advantage of companies right people started taking advantage of working hours and you know some people working multiple jobs and i think what we're not going to and then you know this expectation of not even working like the full time and i think now there's going to be a big jump in productivity and i do see there being competition for folks that are ai native you know paul graham had a tweet last week and he said a number of his companies you know in the y combinator cohorts have told him a 22 year old with ai is as good as a 28 year old with experience and so that just i think that's a really good lens to use as um a benchmark of where the value will happen so if you are a young engineer that's leveraging ai or not even an engineer but just you know someone within the team that's really using ai heavily you'll become really valuable

SPEAKER_30: and you will have all the you know perks and benefits of being courted all over but if you're

SPEAKER_33: not you're going to become irrelevant yeah and there's an incredibly well-known infamous subreddit

SPEAKER_34: called over employed and i just pulled it up while we're talking and this got posted over just five hours ago it was nice while it lasted for a brief period of time i had three jobs unfortunately i had to drop one due to some conflicts i woke up today to the last paycheck from them and you know the comments are great wipe your tears with hundred dollar bills um yeah had a third yeah i mean people

SPEAKER_12: are literally uh working multiple jobs and this has been why a lot of uh folks are in management are getting upset about this right and so if you just go there you'll see people abusing the system and you know in their minds they felt like employee employers were abusing them for many years and now i mean it's amazing when you read some of these somebody will be put in charge of some project and they're like i haven't worked on this project in four months i haven't worked on anything in three months and they're just collecting paychecks managers i think are learning how to look at activity

SPEAKER_24: and there's still some managers who i guess don't know how to manage remote workers but it's going

SPEAKER_40: to be chaos uh so well i also think just one last thing and let's jump into the demos is it's not

SPEAKER_29: about managing remote workers i think what happened was and you know we we've seen this in in you know different businesses that i'm involved in as investors as an investor or just kind of help as a mentor you know the time before covid if you had like an appointment you really wouldn't put your

SPEAKER_42: appointment in like the middle of the work day you would try to know maybe at the start of the day

SPEAKER_44: or at the end of the day yes this is why dentists would have nighttime appointments morning appointments

David Friedberg: and weekend appointments yeah they don't even have those anymore now exactly and so now it's very common

SPEAKER_00: for someone to just be gone for half the day because their appointments at yeah 11 30 or 1 p.m yes

SPEAKER_21: yeah and so it's kind of crazy i decided i was going to bring my venture firm back to in person two days a week here in silicon valley uh we're coming back because this founder university program this pre-accelerator we started um is going so well i just said let's start doing it twice a week in person i only have like two employees in the bay area now out of 20. and i have you know one or two

SPEAKER_22: in new york so we're going to do like one day in new york and two days here in the valley but

SPEAKER_13: i've got to get people back in the office because my competitors uh are starting to do other accelerators pre-accelerators etc they're starting to do things in person and then lps and vcs lps who invest in our fund and vcs who look at our companies they're all here they all want us to be back in person they want to meet the company's person because they want to decide who to invest in and so i think this is the end game and i think ai you're correct does push us towards the end game

SPEAKER_24: doesn't mean people still won't use remote workers of course they will they'll still use freelancers

SPEAKER_13: yeah but um i think the idea of just abusing the system the overworks trend that's ending and yeah i mean it's going to suck for some people to commute but i think there'll be a balance i think it'll be a tuesday wednesday thursday thing and i think that's kind of reasonable work tuesday wednesday thursday in the office monday friday get to work from home kind of dope actually when you think about it it's almost it's not a four-day weekend but it's kind of nice to not have to

SPEAKER_22: do that arduous commute whether it's using all the ai tools you can be very efficient too so the

SPEAKER_29: first one today is inspired by reid hoffman last week hosted this which was a short video i'm just

SPEAKER_59: going to play a few seconds of it right what defines humanity is not just our unusual level of intelligence but also how we capitalize on that intelligence by developing technologies that amplify

SPEAKER_30: and calm okay so one of the bets that we have is we will be able to do a jcal episode

SPEAKER_00: uh a segment a segment sorry segment we said and people will not be able to tell now this is pretty good i think you can tell it's it's generated but um you know so i wanted to test out hour one and so what i did was uh i went to their platform and i tried a couple things so the first is they have um you know these built-in avatars and i picked like a default one and i just had it do uh write a like a script on its own and do a quick little introduction for this weekend startup so i'm

SPEAKER_65: just going to play this really quickly okay let's see good day to all the innovators out there

SPEAKER_67: welcome to this week in startups where we bring light to the most groundbreaking stories from the startup world today we're diving into the remarkable realm of artificial intelligence from self-driving cars to predictive algorithms that can help doctors diagnose diseases better

SPEAKER_30: okay so this is you know let's kind of get your reaction to this and i'll kind of go a bit deeper

SPEAKER_33: this looks like uh because of the tone of the voice being a little bit like a robot

SPEAKER_12: it just takes you right out of it so it's not smooth enough in the case of the this weekend startups person or in the case of reid hoffman yeah it feels like it's 60 or 70 percent of the way

SPEAKER_44: there in terms of tone because it doesn't have the ums the ahs um thinking for a second here

SPEAKER_12: and i'm tilting my head it's a little bit too perfect of a performance and if you have too perfect of a performance and you're doing it in a monotone it looks like you're reading from a script and then

SPEAKER_13: it feels like a robot and i'm doing that with my voice right now that's what kills engagement you want to feel like you're talking to a human and humans have that sunny built into their you know emotional cortex their brain their emotions it's hardwired in us to interpret emotions like you're looking at me right now with a thoughtfulness and processing what i'm saying i'm talking to you with a little bit of passion here about the human species those are very non-obvious cues that are going to have to be learned by ai it feels like it's halfway there maybe it's 60 of the way there

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SPEAKER_13: today now the script and writing the script is one thing and then the performance of the script is the other and performance i would break down into two components the visual the auditory of the tone

SPEAKER_29: right well that's what makes a good actor amazing too right like the script of course you know thing and that's you know there's a difference between sort of like the the best hollywood actor and

SPEAKER_00: you know someone else right is their ability to i guess really exemplify what the original author

SPEAKER_33: was trying to put in the script anyway i give these both like a c plus b minus um they would be fine

SPEAKER_87: yeah i wanted to share one more and then before we grade it just okay before we grade it okay here

SPEAKER_00: we go here we go and so then what i did was i uh also created an avatar of myself and so it's a pretty easy process you just basically use your iphone they use the scanning features of it and then you don't even have to record a video like that visually looks like you and so i'm just going to play this and and i didn't use my voice i had to change my voice and so you'll just hear it so here we go and i did like a summary of yesterday's football games this week in startups is a news and information

SPEAKER_92: update featuring stories about the world of tech startups venture capital and more each episode is packed with insights from leading thought leaders investors innovators and entrepreneurs join us for entertaining conversations that dive deep into the yeah so this is again um you can

SPEAKER_30: you can obviously add your voice in as well and so they really have a really interesting platform i

SPEAKER_00: have to say it's difficult to use like i i had to you know spend like like only almost an hour just to kind of get all these things to work but end to end you can get your video and i think it would have taken a lot of work to get the read one to the quality it is so now that's great because i i think

SPEAKER_33: based on that i give it a c plus right now the potential is obviously there it does not cross the

SPEAKER_12: uncanny valley um and i think you know in a year we could be looking at it and it might fool some people if they weren't paying attention but i still don't think it would fool me um as a performer and as somebody who you know builds media products i don't think it's going to fool me just like i see ads for like crypto on tick tock sometimes where they obviously take elon or somebody else mark cubit and then they have them say they're doing some bitcoin giveaway or some token sale you know those fake

SPEAKER_99: ads those defects and they don't cross the valley for me either so it feels like we're i'm a c plus

SPEAKER_13: you can see all of our bets at this week in startups.com slash bets so i can't remember what our bets were

SPEAKER_24: for this but we said i think by june 1st it would be a segment so i think you're under and i took the

SPEAKER_00: over yeah i'm feeling good like if i were to say so i'm kind of in the same as you i think it was like they've done a really good job the tech is incredible the usability is is still hard and making it more real i think that you know what if i track the progress of what's happened with the image generators the image generators are real right we did the influencer a couple weeks ago i just think we have to get the video gen and the voice gen and that's just like the same thing that happened with the image ones the amount of fine tuning to make them perfect went in so i really feel as though

SPEAKER_107: we're going to see that like we're only in so you feel good in your bet you feel good about it i feel

SPEAKER_109: good i don't know i think i feel good about my buyout no early buyout okay no early buyout yeah

SPEAKER_34: okay this week in startups.com slash bets i give it c plus what did you give it is it great i

SPEAKER_30: get i give it as a c c c plus as well yeah i'm in the same area the usability was very very hard

SPEAKER_12: but like the potential is incredible and to just give people an idea i remember when we were using pcs then the internet and then smartphones we went through the same transition text easy images a little harder uh audio a little harder and video very hard so every time a new medium comes out like

SPEAKER_44: this smartphones when you had your blackberry like it took a really crummy picture somebody sent you a

SPEAKER_12: picture it was blurry you could barely take it now you take pictures on your iphone 15 years into this

SPEAKER_24: and they look better than a digital slr so here we are you know uh and i think this will happen in

SPEAKER_22: 15 months or 1.5 years or 15 quarters as opposed maybe 15 quarters four years this whole thing will

SPEAKER_29: occur as opposed to 15 years yeah still way under on you but let's keep let's keep going money on the line okay the next one i think you're really going to love this jaco because it's kind of been a part in and around your business in a different way shape and forms uh last couple years so this is called bland.ai okay and what they do is basically they give you ai phone agents and the ability to create

SPEAKER_00: an ai phone agent and you can use it for cold calling and surveys inbound sales customer support all right and so what i'm going to pull up here is i i just did a little demo i'm going to have it call my phone i've created an agent which is doing some inbound sales and so you're going to see the platform live and basically i've picked inbound sales and so i've told the agent that it's a part of the sales team for searchlight llc and it does you know all this kind of stuff so you gave it a prompt it's a robust prompt yeah yeah a pretty robust prompt and like a sample of a dialogue okay so i'm going to have it send me the call and let's kick this off it's making a phone call and it's

SPEAKER_125: transcribing the call we have a little uh heads up display here that will show us the call in real

SPEAKER_127: time wow this is potentially amazing hi max thanks for taking my call let's be confirmed

SPEAKER_130: that i've been speaking with yeah this is great thanks for confirming jump right into it could you provide a brief overview of the challenges you're facing with your current pricing and monetization

SPEAKER_30: approach yeah you know i'm finding uh my customers are really looking to get discounts on my pricing and

SPEAKER_132: i don't really know what i should do no problem discounts can definitely be a struggle in your

SPEAKER_130: experience what do you think is driving customers for lower prices but there's certain planning products for usage levels that seem to trigger those requests more than others i just think it's the end of the

SPEAKER_16: zerp era and everybody wants cheaper prices what can you offer me to help me here that's a great

SPEAKER_130: question focus specifically on helping companies like doors maximize revenue by ensuring the right customers on the right we analyze the usage patterns and purchasing behaviors okay i'm gonna end that

SPEAKER_24: there yeah wow i mean apologies because now that is no indication of their software just when you put a when you do a speaker phone call it can be you could sound a little uh not chris but that was on a headset

SPEAKER_29: yeah i tried to keep it close there but look that is less than five minutes of setup and you can give it uh let me let me put the share back up you can have it call multiple people um i guess i use their their

SPEAKER_00: default prompt and so you can have it do batch calling really and you're getting the full transcript of the conversation that your customer is having with uh you know your virtual sales associate really

SPEAKER_141: impressive like i can find a lot of use cases for this um and you know especially for enterprises this is

SPEAKER_32: amazing um wow i am blown away i'll tell you what's really compelling about this is i think i would

SPEAKER_21: prefer this to talking to a human sometimes i'll give you one example it's really annoying to get

SPEAKER_24: phone calls from a human confirming your reservation at a restaurant right nobody wants that it's annoying

SPEAKER_21: yes yes it is really nice i get um there's a restaurant i love up in tahoe called great gold

SPEAKER_12: really great pizza pasta joint amazing and uh you know when i it's a hot ticket in town and it's hard to get a reservation and so they will text you an hour before hey your reservations at an hour they

SPEAKER_24: just want to know if they they can release a table or not for planning purposes and they tell you in the

SPEAKER_12: afternoon hey your reservation is confirmed you know one to confirm nine to cancel super convenient um and i love that text string now if i were to get a phone call or i asked for a reservation and said

SPEAKER_24: hey what time would you like and you know we just talked about this on speakerphone or it asked me

SPEAKER_21: a couple questions i would be okay with that you know and and uh if i was calling about a product or service and i had questions or an airline this would be wonderful um and so i could see like you know that classic phone call to an airline for customer support classic uber i'm calling uber because my car didn't show up or my uber each showed up cold whatever it is like yeah i could see this

SPEAKER_24: working wonderful and it feels like it's so close to crossing the uncanny valley all right listen selling

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SPEAKER_00: a thousand dollars off your sock 2. and it adapts like the thing is compared to any of these before it can really interact and adapt with you because it's it has an llm behind it and so if you really push its boundaries and start asking it different things it'll really guide you and i i tested it a few different times now if you ask it for like a score to last these games it tells you it can't but it can it can really help you and and the experience is incredible like i i really was blown away they made it such that it's like drop in code super easy to use and you you can think about this for a number of use cases like collecting feedback from your customers example you talked about

SPEAKER_21: and even just like sdr type things feels like a great survey monkey type application here or type

SPEAKER_34: forum etc like you could have it ask a series of questions to somebody hey thanks for coming to our event wondering if you could you know answer five questions about the event and you can talk in your normal voice and the fact that it makes the transcript is super dope i love the fact that it does a transcript you think about this for political calls right hey i'm calling on behalf of you know president biden uh want to make sure you understand that your voting is happening on this day do you

SPEAKER_21: have any questions about our platform whatever and then ask questions but the idea of having that transcript watching it in real time is super cool yeah um and so i give this an a i think it's an a

SPEAKER_141: minus maybe a or a minus i think this is i give it an a too i'm an a this is like just really well done

SPEAKER_02: uh work super well um i think they charge like a you know really 12 cents a minute for a call which is you know think about that from a basically free yeah it's basically free i mean if you 12 let's

SPEAKER_21: see 10 cents a minute uh 10 minute call a dollar yeah yeah i mean if you compare that to an agent it would be you know five ten times that so you're saving somewhere between 80 and 90 percent on each of these calls imagine um i'm calling i'm a ups driver we're at your gate uh we have your package it needs to be signed for because you ordered an ipad or your ipad is on the way it's 10 minutes out would you be okay with us leaving it there since you're not there and signing it like think about that use case you ever have that happen when you order your iphone and they're like we don't want to leave your iphone and it's like yeah please just leave it there like they could actually have that conversation with you and then have a record of you saying hey i said okay the driver hears you say okay boom it goes in real time so yeah there's real time uh agents i could also see them being super annoying there's gonna have to be some there's already regulation about robocalls so i think this would all fall under the regulations about robocalls i find this great i think it's great

SPEAKER_30: yeah i think you you know like you said you opt into it with the service you're using you know many

SPEAKER_00: times um on airlines like there's some basic stuff you want to do which they don't allow you to do the online system but you call in i'd be okay with an agent where it's like i'm just trying to get an upgrade or something like that and it's nothing you know magical so i i do think there's a lot

SPEAKER_33: of use cases for that i guess the way support works these days is you have these different tiers as

SPEAKER_24: you were alluding to before some of them you know at faq a frequently asked questions will resolve

SPEAKER_21: it for you sometimes the app or text messaging resolves it for you sometimes talking to a live agent i guess is when you start to get really intense but building up the information so that you can get to a resolution is really what you're trying to go for here i love it for product feedback

SPEAKER_22: as well and then do people really want to be doing these phone calls like humans in a boiler room somewhere they don't so this is like uh human jobs that will go away um in india in manila in other places and then those people can move up the stack and work on higher level things that's my true belief

SPEAKER_176: yeah all right so we both gave this one an a that's good i mean we don't get a often here but

SPEAKER_21: this intelligent agent with the llm behind it is absolutely fantastic all right okay so the next one

SPEAKER_00: is super interesting you know we saw some of these very early on in the life cycle of kind of chat gpt powered use cases i think we even shared some where you know you were asking for meal plans and everything

SPEAKER_29: else and so this is a company called dinnerfly and what they do is uh you go through like a little bit

SPEAKER_00: of like a tinder like process where you sign up and then you swipe left or right on the kind of meals you like and the dietary restrictions and whatnot and uh you go through that process and basically it creates like the meal plan for you for this week you know so i i did that i just kind of pick some random things and then basically it says okay um and i think i messed it up but basically i want lasagna soup today and caprese salad on on wednesday and chicken pesto on uh friday i think it's nailed it

SPEAKER_01: you're a carb guy you're an italian carb guy here we go yeah is your favorite i think yeah yeah i mean

SPEAKER_05: you know we we like italians great and then you basically go here and you say okay add it to my shopping cart and you basically adjust whatever you want and it just basically orders it via instacart

SPEAKER_00: and then this is awesome for for tonight you click on it and basically this is the lasagna soup recipe and obviously the ingredients would have been ordered via instacart and it gives you the preparation and you're off to the races so fantastic all the they basically went end to end you know coming up with the meals to the ingredients to the process to the ordering you give it your

SPEAKER_123: preferences hey your keto your low carb etc it gives you a meal plan for the week it then gives you

SPEAKER_24: all the shopping you need and the recipe and uh this doesn't need to be three or four different

SPEAKER_13: services previously you you might look at a meal plan from like some health nut website or you might go to the new york times cooking app and pick some recipes then you gotta print each one out then you're going through shopping and you're like okay this one needs onions this one needs garlic oh wait a second how much garlic do i need for each recipe you know it's this is fantastic and if it makes a shopping list and then goes and orders it from instacart yes with an agent so right here

SPEAKER_00: it goes yeah and that's it and it just basically puts it in here you click quarter on instacart and drops it into your instacart you're off to the races now what would be really good is if i took a picture

SPEAKER_44: of my pantry in this app and it knew i already had olive oil and it would know that olive oil bottle is

SPEAKER_12: half full yeah and say we we know you have olive oil now you're getting into the realm of having a

SPEAKER_21: household assistant like a family assistant like uh you might call it a family assistant i think um who might do the shopping for you do the meal planning for you and then also see if you have to refresh the pantry so i love this refreshing of the pantry idea absolutely great i give this a b plus um only because i'm trying to give it some room to improve uh but this is fantastic uh if it took

SPEAKER_24: pictures uh take pictures of your food give you the calorie count whatever i mean it just got so i guess i would give it an a if it had that uh take a picture of your pantry and did pantry management pantry management there used to be this concept that you would have like an a smart egg holder and it would tell you when you have a certain number of eggs and when you get down to four eggs it would reorder your eggs automatically yeah yeah yeah remember that kind of silly stuff that existed i think

SPEAKER_12: actually we're going to get to that point where it knows from a barcode or from a camera in your refrigerator that your milk is at a certain uh weight because the shelf has a weight on it when

SPEAKER_24: the milk comes on and off the shelf it knows the delta in that oh you know when you took it out it had 16 ounces when you put it back it had eight ounces because the the shelf had a different weight and it knew your calendar and that you were going to be away next week so don't order more milk or it knows you're in town have more milk like this is actually going to happen folks this kind of weird stuff is

SPEAKER_30: going to happen you know so people were trying to do this with like refrigerators and smart

SPEAKER_29: refrigerators yeah the the real enabler would be ai because the the regular software to do image

SPEAKER_00: detection to figure all that out was just way too complex like you'd need a team of people that are you know and would work on it and they'd only get to like 55 accuracy now you can get to 90 plus percent accuracy with just an off-the-shelf api from pick your favorite llm provider i did this

SPEAKER_24: i took a picture of all of uh our spices i like the spice draw and the spice truck was organized nice

SPEAKER_13: and neat with the spices facing out it's like a slide out draw so i slid it out i took a picture said said what's in here to chat gpt for my app and it worked oh wow so okay that does work by the

SPEAKER_24: way um i just said what's in what's in this draw and i did it in my cabinets uh up at the ski house i took a picture of each cabinet said what's in here and obviously like there's things that are deep so you can't get them on camera but it did a reasonable job um of like knowing what's in there so that is really interesting where this could all go now you start thinking about well we're going to

SPEAKER_13: marry what's happening in my refrigerator and with my meal plan with my health with my doctor uh with my weight with my sleeping patterns and it's like hey by the way you're gaining weight too much pasta sunny gotta take it no more no no more lasagna soup for sunny yeah yeah it was it was it was

SPEAKER_44: keto it was a keto recipe yeah i don't know i don't buy it i heard lasagna i don't buy lasagna's keto under any circumstance but anyway it's fine uh maybe they had like a protein-based one

SPEAKER_208: all right listen i know i'm a founder just like you and there are things that i love doing i love working with my team to build great products and services that delight people you know what i hate i hate doing my chores what's on the top of my chore list payroll hr man it's so many details and it's not the details i want to spend my time on i hang out with my customers i want to hang out with my team so i use

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SPEAKER_79: 401k's time tracking commuter benefits offer letters all of it they even give you access to their hr experts and this is going to let you focus on the important stuff your product your team your customers

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SPEAKER_13: love them you must go to gusto again that's gusto.com twist that's my point is it might at some point have

SPEAKER_24: your smart scale data know your blood work know your weight and say hey listen you gained seven pounds this month you this is what you've been eating here's some changes you could make we should get you a salad in here and a caprese salad is not a salad a crazy salad is a pound of cheese with a

SPEAKER_80: couple tomatoes on it and some some vinegar it's delicious but yeah let's not call it a salad let's call it what it is a ball of cheese with some accoutrement uh well done i give this a b plus well done to the

SPEAKER_30: team over there yeah great job uh i think i'm similar with you i think they did a really good

SPEAKER_00: job maybe added some features that you can add in what your existing um ingredients are so it simplifies the ordering process and and go from there i'm waiting for this life assistant health

SPEAKER_12: assistant to just you know have my watch day and be like great job skiing this weekend yeah you know

SPEAKER_34: uh you probably could use it a little extra cardio we notice your heart rate blah blah blah you know here's some ideas for you uh would you like us to put a workout in your peloton for you it can't be

SPEAKER_00: apple right now because they're screwing over the company that did the heart rate stuff or the oxygen

SPEAKER_21: yeah that was lame i mean when i heard that report of how apple behaved there i think apple should just apologize settle this no no no and really on tim cook for those of you don't know the apple ultra watch

SPEAKER_12: the apple met with a team that makes some of that i believe it's the oxygen reporting of your blood or whatever and they basically according to this claim and i think the judgment because there was a judgment against them yeah they basically stole this content stole employees and just acted abhorrently i mean to anybody at apple you should be ashamed of yourselves and the corporate development team i mean do you want nobody to trust you apple and if you can you have all the money in the world you have all the distribution in the world why would you screw startups a shame shame on you tim cook for this horrible obnoxious predatory behavior and this is something where i think you know i'm not big on government intervention but when i see something as abhorrent as this and the legal stuff happening this is the kind of stuff that builds up to more government regulation and so i think it's very stupid by tim cook to allow the business development team that does m a to behave like this tim cook should get send this message to tim cook somebody you have their email to this deep link tim cook uh this is not what we expect from apple in the venture capital startup community you should make amends you should explain why you went wrong here and you should make specific changes to your business corporate

SPEAKER_13: development group fire whoever did this whoever acted this sharp elbowed and start over and start

SPEAKER_24: over knowing you have unlimited resources to treat the startup community well it's absolutely abhorrent the

SPEAKER_29: way you behaved or like you know if it's true classic the classic line from rounders paid that man

SPEAKER_227: paid that man pay him pay that man his money i mean what does it cost you i mean you're sitting on a

SPEAKER_12: hundred you they're the largest hedge fund in the world they have like yes is it up to 200 billion i mean they had so much cash they didn't know what to do with it yes and to to just nickel and dime

SPEAKER_33: companies where you could just paid the man paid the man his money paid the man his money his money

SPEAKER_233: yeah his money it's it's rounders everybody yes uh but i'm serious somebody who's got tim cook's

SPEAKER_12: secret email or text deep link to this i mean i'm looking at it as an investor in startups and now just tim cook and the corporate development group over there if if somebody in my group in my

SPEAKER_21: portfolio said hey apple's interested oh wow that's amazing what a great outcome for everybody involved and i have had companies sell to apple we had a podcast company that sold to them um and you know i just feel like i would tell them don't trust apple do not talk to their corporate development people you know if they sign up for your app you know track what they're doing in the app and and make

SPEAKER_34: sure you do some monitoring of them coming to your website you know like basically look at apple as

SPEAKER_24: the enemy and why would apple want to take that stance with startups i mean especially with small ones

SPEAKER_220: where it's like a small tuck in apple doesn't do big acquisitions the biggest one was beats probably like if you're doing tuck-ins anyway just come on i think the founder of that company like spent his

SPEAKER_00: life savings and everything fighting them so kudos to him to standing up to apple we're gonna keep going here we've got a couple more this one is is really neat and it just kind of like continues to build on open source models and fine tunes and so this is basically just on hugging comic factory and what it really allows you to do is you know i just gave it a short prompt which is a young boy is a superhero after school fighting bullies and the style was nerodu right and so that's it like uh and think about you know content and i want to you know you know give this these folks

SPEAKER_02: credit here they've created this wonderful model and uh um and you know this is it and basically

SPEAKER_29: you know he's got this ai comic factory and this is how we're seeing innovation happen right now

SPEAKER_34: amazing what was it trained on i guess is the question and then are those people being compensated would be my question on this in terms of fairness yeah if like i did this you know and it

SPEAKER_24: gave me you know frank miller whatever wolverine dark knight you know it's kind of unfair if i'm capitalizing on his work and trained on his data um so i think that would be my first question is what

SPEAKER_12: was this trained on and if it is trained on certain artists those artists should get a royalty um so this is a this is a perfect example of where you can take the new york times open ai lawsuit uh which we've discussed before and now you can see crystal clear that this is you know in all likelihood and again i don't know the training data maybe they have permission i doubt it um because it's an open

SPEAKER_249: source project what they say here they're saying like basically free and open source demo related capabilities you can generate your own comic panels and it shows code is public and can be deployed so

SPEAKER_251: maybe we just got to say anything on the training data so yeah you know that's where the that's where

SPEAKER_12: the rubber meets the road if this was trained on you know images of comic books that are you know um somebody else's ip you can really see how this infringes right and when you make it in a very narrow case like this that's where you really can see the unfairness of this if somebody spent their life 30 years making a certain style of comic book and a certain and put all their creativity into it

SPEAKER_44: and then you can just take it and have the ai make something in a couple of minutes and then you then go make a business out of it or work out of it would it kill you to give a couple shekels if you

SPEAKER_24: have a couple yeah what if you were just inspired by it if you were inspired by the art style of andy warhol and you started making art as an individual that would be okay if you confuse the audience or you're monetizing it or you're infringing upon that person's ability to take on the same economic opportunity with their work that's where you would be mistaken that's where you would be breaking

SPEAKER_13: the fair use doctrine and so let me just take that apart for a second yeah if it was non-commercial and i made something that's an homage to andy warhol and i put it right there or i made like actually that blade runner poster here is a piece of art that some fan made right and they sold it right and i bought it there's actually an argument here that the owner of blade runner or that gladiator

SPEAKER_12: poster here has a claim to that now if it was a one-off piece of art non-commercial maybe not but if blade runner was your ip or star wars and then you make a bunch of star wars posters and start selling you obviously know that's illegal right these are more bespoke artists doing interpretations of blade runner so it's just the dove from blade runner it's just the mass from there but they too are

SPEAKER_22: these ones are skirting uh uh copyright law because that should be the original ip owner's opportunity

SPEAKER_12: then if the training data makes this product and then i could make that product as the owner of these comic book characters and styles i should have that opportunity not somebody else so that's what people don't understand is when there is a new medium that emerges the it doesn't make it a free-for-all for copyright so when dvds came out or vhs tapes it wasn't like

SPEAKER_24: just because it's a new medium i can take star wars and start selling star wars vhs tapes

SPEAKER_169: which i did when i was 15 years old i was making bootleg copies of empire strikes back and selling

SPEAKER_21: them for 20 bucks a copy i shouldn't have been doing that that was a terrible thing for me to do i broke the law whatever um and so here yeah look at that spider-man uh holy cow so in this case

SPEAKER_00: same same prompt but now this is very clearly spider-man and this is you know kind of in your

SPEAKER_52: you can't do this on dolly if you try to do the same prompt on dolly it wouldn't work

SPEAKER_13: yeah yeah so i mean this is i know i know for some people this is triggering yeah we're holding back ai nobody's saying hold back ai we're just saying if you use somebody else's

SPEAKER_75: training data get their permission and or compensate and or compensate them if they want to be

SPEAKER_24: compensated it's very simple yeah it's not it's not yeah i don't know why people are so triggered by this concept of the original artist getting you know some fair shape you know i think there's just

SPEAKER_29: been a larger um trend in society of not wanting to pay people for stuff and like think about all the areas this links to netflix subscriptions like you know when when you're sharing that you're you're

SPEAKER_02: hurting netflix as a company right if you're sharing it and obviously they've done a bunch of stuff to

SPEAKER_00: make that harder now right um you know all the way to you know folks you know ripping off content in this way um and do you think it's because the ease isn't there or do you think it's like in from a societal standpoint people are just value um the creative less and less i think people don't like to pay for

SPEAKER_13: content and they expect they've been trained to think content is free that's one piece of it and then the second piece is i do think there are people who believe that we're holding back a technology that's going to happen anyway and i remember this argument with napster and you remember it too you know everybody wanted to just play have a what we would call a uh digital jukebox everybody wanted the concept of a digital jukebox that's what you used to call it in the 90s and the record labels wouldn't allow you to have a digital jukebox everybody wanted to have a video jukebox that's what they used to call it and in fact there were physical products that did this you could buy from sony we'll pull it up on the screen right now a device that held 50 or 100 cds in

SPEAKER_12: it and it was a carousel you remember the carousel yeah you would put every single one of your cds in there and you could stack them so you could have 50 50 50 50 i had one that you could put five the carousel

SPEAKER_44: you drop five in two c put all five shade albums in there you put it on random man you could be a it would be a great very romantic weekend yeah leave it at that now you also had the one where you could stack the sony 50 and you'd front load them and then you would turn the dial to name each one they're a little cartridges little cartridge you put all 50 in and then i was at um a friend

SPEAKER_24: of mine had rented this beautiful um house uh like a resort with you know 10 bedrooms in it for a birthday party or something in italy turned out it was george lucas's uh place it was a movie theater and we go to the movie there we're gonna watch a movie this is a long time ago over 10 years ago

SPEAKER_13: and they had a virtual jukebox and you started going through it and i was like oh it's all the spielberg movies all the george lucas movies everything and i guess this is before these things really existed and they had all this drm and crm on it to make a digital cloud this is before netflix was streaming this actually made 15 years ago and um you had to have a media server for this and it costed fifty thousand dollars everybody wanted that when napster got shut down and all these things happened people complained about it when a legal option is available then there's no restricting the technology it's just fairness so that's what i think uh chat gpt4 and open ai is trying to do right now and the new york times is like just doesn't like the price or the terms but they'll come to price and terms and the price and terms should be fair and it should be ongoing if that's what the ip people want if the people want just one time use that's fine if they want to be able to cancel it that's fine and if marvel came out with this and you could make marvel characters and marvel greeting cards with your disney plus subscription which i guarantee you will be able to do next year that solves the whole problem doesn't so why doesn't marvel have a subscription where you can make your own comic books they'll have that next year so then all this has to get

SPEAKER_12: shut down if marvel has that just like napster had to get shut down if sony records columbia records itunes spotify exist and once you shut down once you have an illegal option that's priced

SPEAKER_24: fairly piracy goes away this is piracy what we just saw there was piracy um now people don't want to call it piracy because it's new and it's different but it's piracy the same thing happened

SPEAKER_12: with napster people wouldn't call it piracy but it was piracy people were stealing stuff this is just stealing when you can generate spider-man and then sell it make t-shirts out of it you're just stealing

SPEAKER_30: so so the real opportunity is for these businesses to come together and embrace this and and and make

SPEAKER_00: it available and monetize it and basically allow their um fans their users their customers to really embrace it and i think that's what we should really maybe promote is that look the technology is there and it's good and what you know sort of like wap pad if you're marvell and you have you know all this great ip um you should allow your fans to create um comic books and you should have maybe a site or a web or mobile app or whatever it is where people can share them and and if if the story really takes off you can basically share in the revenue with your customer and you can also uh maybe even turn it into a movie

SPEAKER_22: in some ways right like what happened with wap pad any of those are possibilities and the rights owner

SPEAKER_13: at marvell marvel uh would get to choose um and they might say you can use this app for 20 bucks a month

SPEAKER_12: non-commercial and then but if you want to print it uh we will vet it and then we'll decide and maybe you made the character do something that's not something we want right you know you had spider-man

SPEAKER_34: you know uh kill somebody and strangled them you're like you know what spider-man doesn't kill people he

SPEAKER_169: he puts his web around them and that's that's the extent of his violence he doesn't actually kill

SPEAKER_12: people so fine um so yeah i i think this comic book thing is a b plus out of the gate it's extraordinary i would give it an a plus if you could you know do stuff with it and it was licensed properly it would

SPEAKER_13: be an a plus for me but i mean that's incredible what it can do and it's just kind of reminds you of programming where when you narrow the data set the output gets better correct yes and that's what's

SPEAKER_00: happening here people are taking these models and fine-tuning them and the output is getting better and better and better um you know as good as what you know humans would be able to create and so now i think the intersection of the business opportunity is where there's big opportunity what did you give

SPEAKER_40: it as a grant you know like i said if we're not looking at the the licensing stuff i give it an a

SPEAKER_00: i think it's like you know and i you know i would like to see content come out of that and i'd like to see people create you know the stories are getting weaker in my opinion with disney i know it's one of the the j trades but uh i think there's the the folks out there can create much more interesting

SPEAKER_29: storylines and give them the platform to do it we have one more which is not a demo but we're going to um this is also an update on one of our bets which is a short film and quality and um the interesting thing here is this one is generated using uh all the tools that we've demoed here so i'm going to just pull this up real quick and so this one used magnific runway pika and they've created this like sort of three minute short and so i'm going to play maybe 30 to 45 seconds of it all right here we go

SPEAKER_22: okay look closely whoa intense all of this is generated by ai the sounds voiceover images i wasn't there

SPEAKER_311: for my father mr anderson you have been found guilty of the charge of first degree murder i didn't

SPEAKER_315: protect my mother and now i heard my own legacy i believe my clown is innocent and i will do

SPEAKER_317: everything my god give the right to prove the severity of this crime is not lost on this time

SPEAKER_321: weaves as tapestry in silence a fabric so intricate this patterns repeat wow it feels like a student

SPEAKER_12: film artistic film it feels like an art film yeah but the cgi in it and the fact that there's like a

SPEAKER_34: burning building in it or some of this like high-end cgi means it couldn't be like a student film but it feels amateurish in like the dialogue and the editing it feels like it's just like slapping together a bunch of different weird scenes that don't make sense to me so it's either very avant-garde

SPEAKER_13: or whatever but on a production basis feels like a well-produced trailer of a real movie so

SPEAKER_24: while i don't understand what's going on it kind of feels like a challenging kind of sci-fi indie sci-fi intellectual sci-fi sundance film right if i was being honest which isn't everybody's cup of tea but

SPEAKER_30: uh that's pretty impressive yeah i think there's like a couple things happening here one you know

SPEAKER_29: the the the technology is still early but and it limits these clips to being relatively short and so what the person is doing is having to kind of stitch together these very short clips that are maybe at maximum 15 seconds long what i'm really bullish on our bet you know which is again before june 1st is i think all the elements are there and the right storyteller with this with you know

SPEAKER_00: those set of technologies and the voice was 11 labs as well so the whole thing is ai and the right storyteller can help me win my bet with jcow so please yeah i feel like this week in startups

SPEAKER_13: dot com slash bets you can see the different bets we've done hopefully they'll be up by the time you get there i think like for the short film this is you took the under july 1st i took the over i feel like i'm still 60 40 but i feel like you know if somebody put their nose to the grindstone here they you could win the bet i think this is a pick them i think this is going to be like down to the wire somebody could make a pixar film or in this case a sci-fi film that was indistinguishable

SPEAKER_24: if somebody does do this and they're doing it non-commercially i do suggest using uh like maybe

SPEAKER_21: the ip of some characters uh for people who allow that so i know star wars allows it you can look it up yourself i think star trek does not allow it so if you did a star wars one and it's non-commercial like i see them all the time and as long as they put it's non-commercial they don't put ads on it they don't monetize it on youtube i think it's okay so to do it with mandalorian as an example i don't know if pixar allows it or not because i had said do the rat tattoo one and somebody had sent me one directly where they just slapped together random rat tattoo stuff and it was you know terrible but it was a non-technical person who did it for two hours so i think you're gonna win this one i gotta be honest i feel like the audience could tip over and for the short film uh the pixar short i think is the way we said it like a pixar short that is indistinguishable to the average user i think you're gonna win it i'll be honest because we you got four months here february march april may june you

SPEAKER_233: got five months yeah five months i mean i think you're gonna win this one hands down i feel bad

David Friedberg: about this bet all right everybody this has been another amazing episode this week in startups.com

SPEAKER_21: ai this week in startups.com bets this week in startups.com you can see our ai powered website by podcast ai where it's got every transcript of all 1800 plus episodes and you can look at the transcript you can play it and you're going to be soon able to then um sunny with podcast ai is going to allow you to highlight a portion of this and create a clip automatically you know i was just

SPEAKER_29: having this conversation with someone and they were saying exactly this it's like why can't you clip

SPEAKER_00: and then retweet or whatever portions of a podcast and then have it linked back to it because there's

SPEAKER_189: a lot of sometimes great snippets which are very short and there should be a industry html like standard

SPEAKER_169: for this there isn't or if there is somebody can let us know i'm jason at calacanis.com for live you

SPEAKER_21: can tweet at me at jason and at sundip on twitter x and let us know about it what you can do is i have

SPEAKER_13: no problem with people doing short non-commercial clips from the podcast as long as they link back to the original so there's somebody who's doing like founder advice and they do it every day and like every fifth or sixth day they take paul graham or travis or whoever's been on the pod and then they write a little essay about it they put the clip and they link back to the original i'm fine with that as long as you're providing some value back to me and it's like a little bit of fair use now if you put an ad on it and you said brought to you by one of our sponsors i would be like no but not commercially take a clip from here you say something about it i feel like it's fair use it's fair it feels fair to me and that's always the thing to keep in mind with fair use does it feel fair yeah it doesn't feel fair then you probably got a problem right so like wholesale taking a show no bueno but yeah okay everybody thanks for tuning in you can follow at sandeep on twitter uh definitive.io is your website if you're interested in doing a giant project for your big company

SPEAKER_22: in the ii space sandeep has unlimited resources and knowledge okay we'll see you all next time bye

SPEAKER_339: bye