What I’ve Learned So Far: A Deep Dive Into the Making of Talking to AI

I am talking to AI.
A successful day, you don’t need to know all the answers.
Just have good questions.
Chatting to AI is different from normal speech
and I hope you enjoy listening to the show
whilst getting ideas on how to pose your questions
to get the most out of AI.
My name is Paul.
The live conversations you hear are uncut
although sometimes the AI needs time to think.
In those cases, I’ve cut out the dead space.
Hi guys, this is going to be a slightly different podcast
and today I’m going to introduce you to my friend Cullen
and he has got some questions for me about
I guess my journey so far with this podcast
and I thought that might be interesting for you guys.
So without further ado, I suppose Cullen,
could you just introduce yourself?
Hello, I am Cullen from Deep Down Under.
Hi everybody.
And do you want to tell them a little bit about yourself
before we get started?
Yes, I think I may have just helped
solve part of the UK housing crisis
and it took me 11 minutes which I’ll be discussing later.
How do you want to do this?
Are you going to be asking me questions
or I guess we’re going to do it like this?
I’ll ask you some questions about the journey thus far.
Is there any particular questions you want me to ask you?
No, I guess we can just chat.
I’ll let you take control of this
and then if I feel that there’s more to say,
I’ll chime in.
Okay, perfect.
Okay, good.
Paul, tell us in terms of this podcast
that you’re doing now,
what was that kind of wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night
moment that you had that made you decide
you wanted to launch this podcast?
Well, I guess as people that have listened to the podcast
up until now, they’ll know that I’ve got a baby on the way
and I’ve got a bit of a little extra spare time
which corresponds with me having spare time
because I was programming up until recently
and now I’ve got a bit more time
and I thought the more I’ve been like a lot of people
sort of impacted a little bit by AI
because I’ve been using it a lot
because I’m a very curious person.
I was always thinking about things
and for me, being able to ask chat GPT questions
in a way that’s easier than Google
is just quite amazing.
So I’m constantly asking questions
about all manner of things
and I thought this would be a good opportunity
to really use AI
because it’s going to change things
and it is changing things so much.
I feel you’re either going to understand it
or be controlled by it
and I’d rather be in that situation
but also I was thinking about it the other day
especially talking to chat GPT
and it’s like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
We are in the future, it’s crazy.
I’ve got the time to really dig down on this
and I just thought it would be super fun
and super interesting
and I hope the people that are listening
to find it fun as well and interesting
so that’s what got me to do it.
Great, so I wanted to just circle back.
You said that like many people
you had been impacted.
So do you want to unpack that a little bit for us?
Yeah, I suppose I haven’t.
Luckily for me I haven’t been impacted in a negative way
I guess because there’s a bit of a lag
but I mean my job as a programmer changed so much
able to use chat GPT and other programming tools
to just make things a lot faster
so I was using chat GPT during the day
on a number of things at work
and then look I suppose just my whole habits have changed
because in the past I would be researching things
I used to have a blog where I still do have a blog
but I haven’t updated it for ages
and I’d go down these rabbit holes of researching things
and it’s just like I’ve got it on my phone
and I can just find that information
and I suppose being aware of finance
I’m aware of, so that’s an interest of mine
and economics and the impact that it’s having
at the moment in that area
it’s just so big.
I’ve just used it for so many things
you know trivial things, more important things
and yeah so that’s the main impact it’s had on me.
Okay, so just thinking about the impact that it’s had on other people
so from my understanding so far
it might be fair to say that most people
in the blue collar arena and many other places
are feeling that you know AI is having some impact
in their world so to speak
but I guess my thing that I’m not sure about
not clear about is that when people are saying things
like you know AI is taking their jobs
I’m not actually convinced that that’s completely correct
at this point in time and I had actually asked
ChatTBT about it the other day and it came back with this kind of
well then it might not necessarily be
of course there is some level of firing
people are being fired because AI is taking some
or small parts of their job that is a given that is happening
but the larger impact actually might not be that
the larger impact might be that
a lot of companies are not hiring
well it ends up being the same thing
have you got any thoughts on that?
yeah I mean surely it’s the same outcome
I mean people leave companies all the time
so it’ll end up with less jobs
and they are
I would just say that America is kind of leading the way
they’re making the most reductions at the moment
what are the jobs in finance that you can see
it’s really sort of impacting more than anything else?
well look I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on all of this stuff
this is really my journey right
but from what I have seen
a lot of the tech companies
have done a lot of freezing
Microsoft is laying off a whole bunch of people
and then for me
really AI
so AI has a lot of
things that it can do
things that it can help people with
but the thing that is going to make money
it’s quite a simple calculation
the biggest impact that AI has on the world at the moment
unless it’s in military or some kind of conniving
but the things that most people will notice
it’s just an efficiency improvement
I mean it’s no different than bringing in some other machine
and efficiency improvement means less people
that basically is the selling proposition of AI for businesses
in some companies I guess
say if you’re in finance
something I’m quite interested in is how you can use AI
you can definitely do better as well
with AI you can do much faster research
so you can do much better analysis on companies
if you were stockpicking or something like that
obviously brain has to be used as well
and that’s what I’m interested in
I’m interested in the interface between your brain and the machine
because if people think that they can just use AI
to solve their problems
without any brain power themselves
they’re just going to be a slave and they’re going to get abused
like every other chump out there
like you have to be using the tool
and that requires your brain and your assertiveness
but if you can do that
then I think research
it’s going to revolutionise how much we know about things
because it just makes it more manageable
for people to actually act on
management, it makes management much more effective
and it will make companies much smaller
because it’s not just about saving money
it’s about making a company more flexible
and they’re going to be more dynamic a company
if you’ve got half the employees for sure
it’s going to be easier to get that company
doing what the company is supposed to be doing
rather than people playing politics
so I think there’ll be a lag
companies don’t like mass layoffs
but what I think will happen at some point
I think the change has already started
and I think one of the biggest changes
the sort of cultural change that happened
was when Elon Musk bought Twitter
people can say whatever they think about it
but what he did by slashing the workforce
I think he basically gave corporate America
the sort of before
there was all this flowery words around
well you can’t lay people off
everyone’s doing their own thing
we are the people and all that kind of stuff
and he came in and goes
I think if we had half the staff
or a third of the staff
I don’t know how many people he laid off
we can actually do a better job
and that’s a sort of paradigm shift
and I think that’s filtering through
and I think it’ll come from America
that’s where it’ll be the most savage
and then you’ll get shades of that
through the rest of Europe
and Australia and everywhere else
so I think Australia’s going to
America’s going to lead this
and then other countries will follow
so I think it’ll take time for it to percolate through
you’ve got to think
if you’re an insurance company
and you’ve got all these people doing
processing insurance claims
anything with a lot of bureaucracy
companies don’t want to get rid of that as much as possible
although I think what is going to happen
is that people are going to realise
that the LLMs and AI are not this panacea
you can’t just say chat GBT
fix all my systems
and then it goes and does it
it requires technical people
to guide the machine
at the moment
I was listening to an interview with Elon Musk
and he was talking about recently
and he reckons in six years
there won’t be any programming
that people will be done by machines
and that could be right
Elon Musk can often be right
but his timelines are often wrong
so he could be right
but he could be like 15 years away
who knows, he could be wrong
but I think there’s going to be
but it does occur to me
through when I start getting into all this AI stuff
and actually trying to create agents
and things like that which I’ve been doing recently
it’s a technical job
working with an AI
to really get the most out of it
and it feels like
it’s similar to when I was early in my career
and creating macros in Excel
or creating databases in Access
you’re doing these dirty things
and getting them done
but you need somebody that has got that kind of mindset
like you can’t just
when you start trying to do complicated things
the prompts
it’s really, working with AI
it’s just another programming language
as far as I’m concerned now
it’s a very high level programming language
but just because it’s high level
doesn’t mean that you’re not doing anything
because you’re doing more
you’re doing 100 times as much as you’d be doing
on your programming language
so actually you do have to be able to have some skills
you’re going to have to have some skills
to be better than the competition
because everyone else has got the same tools
yeah
I wanted to ask you as well
so I know that you’ve been
which I’m not really
doing
I’m not sort of talking to Jet Jet GPT
and it’s talking back to me
but you’ve been doing that a lot
and you’ve also been talking to GROC
is that right?
yeah so recently
I managed to
set it up but yes
so far
we’ve had three conversations
involving GROC
one I did a bit of research
where I asked Jet GPT
and then I asked GROC the same questions
and I was comparing how it came back
another one
I let Jet GPT talk to GROC
and they had a conversation on their own
which carried on
which was nuts
I was really listening to that
thinking
it was a bit of a nonsense conversation
but it was definitely happening
they were
prodding each other
and it was like oh my god
I have just witnessed the future
crazy
and then
had another one where I
let Valentina
who’s one of these GROC personas
do you know what a GROC persona is?
no I didn’t
so with GROC
you can talk to the AI
like you can with Jet GPT
but then you’ve got these personas
they have a graphics as well
so it’s like a person
and the person has a personality
and the person talks to you
so
there’s a sexy girl
one and there’s a sexy guy
and then there’s
a kids one
and they all have their own personality
and they’re sort of there
to sort of do different things
so the sexy guy
will just try and chat you up all the time
and the girl will flirt with you
and the kid one
will tell you stories and stuff like that
so
I let Valentina
who’s the sexy guy
so we had a three way
he thoroughly ruined Valentina
okay
okay
and look just lastly
I wanted to ask you
because you’ve done quite a few podcasts
now with the AI
and all the rest of it
I guess mainly Jet GPT
yeah
so what is the thing that has surprised you
what’s the thing that you kind of went wow
I did not know that it would expect that
or the kind of thing that really
yeah
well I mean it’s been
the whole
I found it really interesting because it has surprised me
I guess the
talking to
in the beginning
just the quality of the talking
I mean when I started
using Jet GPT at the very
when it first came out and people were using it at work
I was really
down on it and I thought
this is just going to be another
that waste time
and delivers badly
and I’m
better off doing it myself
that was my opinion to start with
and then as I started using Jet GPT
I realized that
Jet GPT is actually
because I’ve managed
teams before
there’s a lot of work
you have to do to communicate
what you want to either
the people in your team or your management
and
that
and if you were
a good manager
or a bit more intuitive maybe than me
but if you were
I would find myself I’d get much better results
if I really strategically
thought about what I wanted
somebody to do
or I might have to put effort into
motivating them in the right way sort of
setting up frameworks so that they are working
in a certain zone
setting them up so that they can
succeed and
a lot of effort on the communication
because otherwise if I didn’t
they wouldn’t do the right thing
I took it as my responsibility
to
communicate correctly
and that was the
important thing with a manager
and then when you’ve got it going the other way
you have to manage
when you’re managing up you have to do it
you normally have very little time
and you have maybe some
quite complex things to communicate so
you have to really craft the message
and
that was very time consuming both of those things
and with chat GPT
for delegating
tasks
for simple tasks
it’s amazing how
well it
you can throw rubbish you can throw crap
at it basically
and it works it out
and it works out what you want
that is amazing
that is much better than I would have expected
if
before people talking about AI
and then the other way
if you want to
present information
when I did this chat GPT
debate
I learned a few things from that
chat GPT doesn’t actually
unless you do some preparation beforehand
just using chat GPT
off cold it’s not very good at debating
because chat GPT is super agreeable
so it doesn’t like to criticise
so that was interesting but also
what I really learned
was that it can present
information
in such a good way
from my sort of experience
in marketing and sales
putting together a pitch putting together
an argument
can take a long time
if you want to do an effective
impactful thing and when I was
doing that debate with chat GPT
his pitch on whatever
the boring subject was
it was amazing really
to be able to do that in two minutes
I think that would have taken me
half a day
I don’t know
so that blew me away
but then what happened was
then I got my rose tinted glasses on
and then it was like wow
AI flipping it’s going to take over
the whole world
and people are talking about AGI
which is when
LLMs become sentient
but then I realised the
other end of it which is the limitations
and there are limitations
quite significant limitations
I’m not really concerned about AGI
not
something to be concerned about
but it’s not imminent
not with the current technology
that I can see unless there’s a whole bunch of stuff
that’s being used that we don’t know about
which is possible
because really the architecture
of the way these LLMs are built
doesn’t really support that because LLMs
are not self learning machines
they are
in a small way but they’re not in a big way
they’re not architected that way because
they’re built every year
they build a version whatever comes out
they train them on data
and then you talk to them
and then the contents of that conversation
and maybe some other bits of memory
get remembered
but they’re not then taking that back
and improving their brain and then using that
with all the other people that they’re talking to
so it’s not a brain
that’s evolving
it’s a brain that’s pretty stagnant
so that was a limitation
another limitation was
the thing that I learnt last week
I went to a meet up
for building agents
LLMA agents
and my burning question
which has been sort of simmering ever since
I’ve started looking into agents is
how autonomous is an agent
can you get an agent to go ahead
and manage other agents
this is something people keep on talking about
and I’ve never seen a single example of that
that doesn’t mean they don’t exist
there’s a single example of that
and then when I start building agents
they seem to be much more
transactional
they seem to require, generally an agent
requires
a trigger
so that trigger could be
a date change
or it could be some kind of human intervention
on a chat window
or it could be somebody enters some data
on a database or a form or something
this is how most of the agents are built
they’re not
you can’t create an agent to say
go trade
cryptocurrency for me
or something like that
they don’t have the
they’re not autonomous in that way at the moment
so they are a lot more limited
and when you create an agent
it does feel very much like creating data flows
in back end
as I’ve worked in
back end databases
where you’re loading data
from here and everywhere and transforming it
and turning it into something else
and doing something else
and it’s a very similar flow to creating an agent
only you’ve got components
where some of those steps might be
oh well
use an LLM to translate this
from English into Norwegian
or something like that
or more advanced than that
so it’s becoming more like
programming
and
less autonomous
than I thought it was
but still
just to have that ability to ask chat
GPT
anything that comes to mind is amazing
and I’m really
I’m learning stuff every day
but those are the big things
I think I’ve learned so far
goodbye from me
and it’s goodbye from him
goodnight
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