Navigating the Future of AI: Trends and Insights – Shimmy Says EP2

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shival, CEO, founder at Techstrong. And you're watching Shimmy says, I apologize if you came on last week and we didn't get a chance to do this. You know, computers are what they are and technical difficulties, or tech technical difficulties.

The good news is we figured it out, ironed out a few bugs, iterate, reiterate, it's the DevOps way, and here we are today. I wanted to spend today though, talking a little bit about ai. Well, a little bit.

We're all talking a lot about ai, let's face it. Um, but a lot of people are now starting to say, you know, what are we, are we putting too much faith in ai? Is AI really gonna be as disruptive as we think it is?

Is AI living up to the hype? You know, I've been in the tech world for 30 plus years, and I've seen a lot of hype cycles play out. Everything from the commercial, the internet going commercial, the mid to late nineties, the cloud, the web, you know, so many other technologies, e-commerce, mobile phones, and they, they all have a similar pattern.

They never exceed their hype. I think there's like a, a, a rule of law there, sort of like a Newton's gravitational law. The the reality never exceeds the hype on these things.

And it's not because the reality isn't truly revolutionary, remarkable, amazing. It's because the hype, the level of hype to the level of reality, the hype is just exponentially, you know, two x three x what the reality is, it seems. So, if you wanna say that's a Shimmy's law, it's a Shimmy's law.

The hype always exceeds the reality, I'm afraid. But that doesn't mean something's a failure because it doesn't exceed the hype or live up to the hype. And I think that's certainly gonna be the case here with ai.

You know, as I said, I've seen this happen a lot of times, and there's always those people who are standing in the back of the, you know, theater with ready to throw tomatoes or stones at, at the speaker saying, I, it's not real. And, and, you know, in today's social media world, of course, we could say, oh, it's mainstream media hyping it, or we don't believe it's another case where we don't believe we're being lied to. My friend who has a a PhD in, in potato farming says that AI's not real.

So if you wanna believe the PhD potato Farmer about ai, be my guest. But I will tell you, don't shut the book on AI just yet. And here's why.

Number one, it's still so early in the game, you know, we forget Open ai Chachi PT Burst on the scene, what was it, November of 23? It wasn't more than a year, you know, two years ago, three years ago now. Well, two and a half years.

And look how far it's come. As a matter of fact, if you go back to the early models that chat, GPT had, let's say, in January of, of, uh, 24 or something like that, and then look at what it does now, you'll have to agree. It's amazing.

Look how far it's come. Look how far it's come. Um, is it everyone using it?

No. Is it being used by millions of people though? Yes.

And and it's not just chat GPTM, it's the poster child, whether you're a Gemini person or, or anthropic Claude, or using Lama for certain things, or perplexity or any of the different AI models out there. They've all come a really long way in a relatively short period of time, and we shouldn't forget that. But what can we do to kind of change this, this perception?

What can we do to try to, you know, where the reality starts catching up to the, to the hype? Well, first of all, I, I would, I would say this with everything with AI so far, remember that it's still probably the 15% of the early adopters. You know, I, I was always a big believer in the crossing the chasm model, and it's, it's proven again, just like the hype cycle has proven true all these years.

So is the crossing the chasm model, you got 15% of the market that are early adopters. They're the cool kids. They're the ones who like to, you know, say, oh, I used it already.

I am using it. I've got the latest, greatest thing. And I'll be honest with you, I've, I've always prided myself in trying to be one of the cool kids.

I like to be an early adopter. I like to play with new toys and new technologies, and I've been playing with AI pretty much since chat GPT launched. Um, but the re the Crossing the Chasm model stuff doesn't become real till it crosses that chasm.

And that chasm means that we jump from the 15% of the early adopters to the mainstream. And that mainstream market is broken into two early mainstream adopters, later mainstream adopters, and they each represent about 35% of that market. And it's pretty real people bling there, right?

During this, how do you like that? Anyway, um, excuse me for that. So 35% are early adopters, 35% are, are later mainstream adopters, but together, that's 70% of the market.

That's the main market, that's the mainstream. com days I go to pump my car and, and if you were in, in New Jersey, you know, you get a live guy pumping your car. And when I heard the kid pumping my car talking about buying Yahoo stocks and selling and trading, you know, some of the internet stocks of the day, I knew we were in a bubble in 2004 and five when, when real estate was going through the roof and I was sitting, you know, at a, a car tire place.

I remember the guys, some guys were getting, you know, working on changing the tires of my car, telling me that him and his friends were going in on some two and three bedroom or two and three family properties that they were gonna go and fix and flip. I knew we were in a bubble. Well, when I'm sitting in a local bagel store here in Boca Raton and I hear senior citizens talking about how they're using AI and, and doing things with it, I know we're in that bubble too.

And, and that's where we are with this. It's starting across the chasm. Mainstream people are talking about it.

What they haven't figured out yet though, is what's the killer app? What's gonna make us all adopt ai? And that, I think is what's missing and why people are quick to say, oh, it's not living up to the hype.

We don't yet have the killer app for ai. You know, mark Hugin, who I respect a lot, uh, he said something the other day, that the world is gonna have their first trillionaire, but that trillionaire won't be Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or one of the, you know, a hundred billion dollars plus people that we have out there today, these oligarchs, right? Billion multi, multi, multi billionaires.

He said the first trillionaire is gonna be the person who finds the killer app for ai, who thinks of a way to use AI that we haven't thought of yet, and it changes everything, right? Jeff Bezos did that with Amazon. It changed retail.

And then again, with AWS, Elon Musk had a series, him and his, the PayPal Mafia people in terms of payments. And then with Tesla, and then again with SpaceX, there's gonna be someone who develops that killer app for ai and he becomes the first trillionaire. However, further signs that we are crossing the can, uh, chasm is look, this Sunday's the Super Bowl count, how many commercials are going to be around ai, whether it's Google who's planning like 50 different commercials in 50 different states, highlighting how 50 different businesses use AI to, um, uh, open chat, GPT Open AI itself.

The companies who are gonna say that they use AI in the making of their commercial, you know, and they keep in mind they're paying $8 million for 30 seconds. It's because there's a land grab on. We all know that AI is going to be big, it's going to be disruptive, and it's not probably gonna be just one killer app.

To tell you the truth. I think AI will disrupt multiple industries across the board, but right now is that land grab face. It's like when a LL used to carpet bomb sending out their DVDs to get people on to the internet via a LL, right?

They, they, they took a big chunk of the early market by doing that. We're seeing the same thing today with people wanting to use chat GBT with Microsoft building copilot into office and Google building it in a workplaces and all of the other AI players out there. So we are definitely crossing the chasm to the mainstream, uh, of ai.

There's a couple of questions though that could really affect how fast or how deep this happens. The biggest one, I think, is government regulation. You know, last week towards the end, the week before that, at the end we saw deep seat the Chinese entran here into ai.

And man, it, it, it certainly set off some seismic activity from a government point of view. It was, you know, I don't think it was any coincidence that it was announced two days after the US government had a, uh, announced the Operation Stargate, the $500 billion ai, uh, program. Um, within the week though, the eu, which already had an AI law on the books, made it very clear that they were going to enforce against any AI that they felt posed a risk.

Now, one could say every AI composer risk, the EU was pretty clear about what they define as unacceptable risk. But I will tell you, it could just as easily be used as a political weapon saying they don't want a Chinese ai or they don't want a US-based ai. Depending what happens in our world economy with tariffs and wars and trade wars and everything else, government intervention in the, in the natural market, uh, evolution of AI could delay or accelerate this.

And, and that remains to be seen about what, what we, uh, what we'll see with that. So we need to watch, I mean, the, I understand two, two congressmen introduced a, uh, law and or a bill in Congress today to ban deep seek from all US government computers. I think Italy and other states and Europe have done the same.

You know, I'm not a big fan of, of censorship. I'm not a big fan of building walls and keeping out. I I think you gotta outcompete people.

You can't out legislate people or, or build a wall to keep them out. I think ultimately though, that what we're gonna see in AI is not all ais are the same. Some are just, just like cars.

You have Ferraris and you have Volkswagen, or used to be Volkswagens, Hugos Chevys. It's all about using the right tool for the job. And they'll all find a place if there's, if they clearly define what their market niche is.

Now, I know we had some questions out here. One was from John Boyle, our friend John. John, welcome.

And, and thanks for asking. Um, unfortunately I can't really read this from here, but we're almost outta time. But I, I did wanna bring, call your attention out too, and I appreciate you, you checking in and Kim Parker as well.

Kim, thank you for joining in. I'm gonna try to answer these questions in, in the comment section once we're off live here, because I try, do, try to keep these to 12 minutes or so, and I think we're right at 12 right now. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this.

Shimmy says, I'd love to hear what you'd like to talk about next week, and we're gonna do something better so I could see the questions better. But, um, until then though, this is Alan Shimmel for Techstrong. I hope you've enjoyed this.

Shimmy says Shimmy says shimmy. Says, shimmy says, as the AI strong tells us. And until then, man, take care, we're out.

Shimmy says, shimmy says Shimmy. Shimmy says.