It's time for it's time for tech talk. The machines are getting smarter.
This is tech talk.
I will just say.
We look, Secretary of State is a full job.
Your plate is full.
Oh yeah, you don't have time to be interim director of the National Security Agency.
You'll see, okay. Mark Saltzman joins us.
We talk things technology, and we've talked many, many times, lots and lots of segments about artificial intelligence. And Meta has launched its standalone AI app that's out there that's supposed to be sort of a rival to chat GPT.
Yeah, it's available now for iPhone and Android. There's a web version as well, but the smartphone version allows you to converse with it very naturally. You sign in with your Instagram or Facebook info.
You know.
It's a similar experience actually to being able to access the Meta AI within Instagram.
And you may have already seen.
This or WhatsApp or Facebook if you dig a little deep. But this is a standalone app, and the idea is that, yeah, you can converse with it. It sounds very human and like other large language models as it's called, you can ask it to generate ideas. You could say, hey, I'm having ten people over for a dinner party this Friday. Three are vegetarian, three are going to be kids, and you know six are is my math off for our carnivores. What can I make or cocktail ideas, create images, create videos,
create itineraries for trips. But what's unique, I would argue is it's twofold. One is that there's a new discover section that shows what your friends on Instagram and Facebook have asked Meta Ai to do, and then you can remix that. Like if you have a friend that said show me, you know a picture of Gary and Shannon on the moon, I don't know holding an American flat, then you can take that and then tweak it some more, or take a recipe that one of your friends asked
it to create and then remix that. So that's kind of neat if with consent, you can opt to share what you're leveraging AI for with your friends on Facebook and Instagram through the Meta ai app. And then the other thing that makes it unique is that you're allowing the AI to comb through your social feed to get to better know you. So when I downloaded Meta AI and I installed it, it said, so, Mark, I see you
like music and you like festivals, music festivals. I see you were recently, you know, on a trip in Italy, Like, what did you like most about your trip? So it tries to get to know you in order to curate more personalized results. It's not for everyone. Some people may think it's creepy, but you know, AI is definitely here to stay. I know a lot of your listeners are probably rolling their eyes because they're sick of hearing about it.
But over a billion people have already tried the meta AI features baked into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and so the company Meta thinks that a standalone AI Meta AI by itself could be a really big player, and it's free.
Did they get some pushback? Did metiget pushback? I realize. I recognize that if you search for something on Instagram, for example, the search bar is it says either ask meta AI or search And I've always been I've always thought that that's kind of a dangerous thing to combine the two of them.
Yeah, it's not unlike Google.
I don't know when's the last time you Googled something, but if you ask a question, chances are Google Gemini is going to kick in. There is a way to go into the settings and separate this.
I first when Google did this, I said I hate this. I'm never clicking on this, and then the next day I loved it. And now I soak up all the AI responses. I find them to be well, well curated, yeah, well curated yeah.
For the user. But if you run a website.
Let's say I don't know, garn Channon, you guys have a digital magazine, then you publish content. If Google and Meta and other players are extracting your content and then delivering the answers to someone who's asking a question, they're not going to land on your website, and so that's going to hurt your traffic, which could hurt your ad sales.
So there is a domino effect here.
You got to look at it kind of holistically as a consumer, as a user.
I think it's pretty wild. But there's one thing AI.
Hasn't been able to do, and this is I think a good segue into the second part of our chat today. Something I was that I was in San Francisco yesterday at a Visa event and it's called Product Drop, and they unveiled something called Visa Intelligent Commerce as the name suggests your AI in the near future could actually transact for you with consent, of course, so the idea is this, right now, let's just stick with that itinerary example from earlier.
You want to go to Miami for three days, you can ask like chat ept to create a three day i itinerary for you, even recommend hotels and restaurants and flights and excursions, but it'll stop short from paying for them for you, right Like it'll say if you ask it to, okay, buy that hotel room that's perfect, it'll say, sorry, I can't do that, and it'll send you to some
websites where you can do it. But what Visa and other players are working on is the ability with consent and partners like open Ai who owns chat ept and others, to actually pull the trigger for you on those purchases. But it'll first send it to you to say is does this look good? And then you just give it a one time yeah, like you give it a once over. So that's going to save a lot of time. I think that's going to save people a lot of time. And if you're willing to trust Visa, I mean, look,
they've had what they've been around sixty years. They've processed over almost three and a half trillion transactions over the past quarter century alone. You know, if you're going to trust a company to do it, that's the company need to do it. So yeah, there's I think it's pretty cool.
Yeah, it could save time, but I mean there's got to be a someone's going to do the psychological study of it. Could cost more money because you believe the computer's doing it in your best interest or the computer's got your best choices, you know, based on whatever algorithm it's going to be using, and therefore you would be more free with the money. You say, Okay, they must know what they're talking about, and I must like this product or whatever that is that they're going to get me.
Yeah, I hear what you're saying. Gary.
There's obviously an element of trust here, and that's a hurdle that many any company that's going to do what's called agentic or agent based commerce is going to have to wrestle with.
But it's going to send you a push to say does this look good to you?
And so you it's if you didn't have that safeguard in there, then I would agree, Yeah, this can be a little bit of a slippery slope. But is it like tapping? Do you find you're spending more money because you can now tap your credit card rather then insert it and put in a pin? Are you do you do you find I'm just I'm just curious. Do you find your spending more because it's just so easy now to use your visa at retail by tapping or your watch or your phone.
You think it's translating to me spending more? It is definitely easier and quicker.
Right, And that's the idea, is that you want something convenient and with AI being like your assistant, like now being able to or soon within a couple of months, they're telling me be able to transact for you, and again you're still going to have to aokay it. I think that's a great time saver for me. I love
that idea. I'm busy. If you set those thresholds ahead of time, Like I want to stay in the hotel, but I don't want to spend more than four hundred to night, and I like that flight, but I don't want to stop over or a red eye. If you set those parameters in advance, and an AI can get to know you and remember things. Then I think it's just going to help us be a lot more efficient personally and professionally, So I'm all in on that.
But yeah, there'll be other players as well.
But you know, Visa was first out of the gate yesterday at this event, this product drop showcase, which was pretty cool.
Yeah, and then everybody's gotta you know now that the ones that come second have to try to find some way to improve upon what they what Visa has done.
All right, Mark, thank you so much.
Appreciate it me too. Cheers, guys, cheers.
Make sure you follow Mark on x M A r C Underscore Saltsman with a Z's got some great stuff up there, and you can also check out the tech it Out podcast on the iHeart app.
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