#190: ChatGPT Health, Audience Reactions to AGI, Claude Code Use Cases, xAI Raises $20B & Big Gmail AI Updates

We don't need to reach AGI, however you define it, to completely transform business, the future of work, and your own work. We're at the point where the models are so good, and if you know how to use them and you find the right use cases in your work, cross your team, across your department, across your organization, it can fundamentally transform everything. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Show, the podcast that's a good idea. and actionable. My name is Paul Ratzer.

Smarter X and Marketing AI Institute and I've been in the first time. Each week I'm joined by my co-host and SmarterX Chief Content Officer. As we break down the water. your career. Join us as we accelerate and Welcome to episode 190 of the Artificial Intelligence Show. I'm your host, Paul Retzer, along with my co host Mike Kaput. Um We are recording this on Monday, january twelfth, nine forty five. Last week was weird, Mike. Like it wasn't like a ton of

crazy news, but it was one of those where I was like, wow, that was a slow week and then as I started looking through the outline today, like, oh no, okay, plenty happened last week. Just wasn't as many links as normal. Yeah. In the sandbox. So we've got some good topics to to talk about. We're gonna kick off with a topic related to AI and health.

So uh today's episode is brought to us by AI for Agencies Summit, presented by Screen Dragon. This is our third annual AI for agency summit that we're hosting through Smart Rec and Marketing AI Institute. It is taking place 12 to 5 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, February 12th. There is a free registration option, which is new to this event this year. The first two years this was a paid event only. And we've uh changed up the model so that it's free. We want as many people as possible.

experience this virtual summit. It is designed for marketing agency practitioners and leaders ready to reinvent what's possible in their business and embrace smarter technologies to accelerate transformation and value creation. During the event, you'll join other forward thinking AI uh or agency professionals to see how agency leaders are using AI to drive innovation and efficiency. Learn AI workflows uh you can launch immediately.

uh understand what AI agents actually look like inside agencies today. We're gonna have a talk a lot about legal and IP, we're gonna have a session dedicated to that. And evaluate how AI is reshaping uh agent brand and agency relationships and what clients expect next. And it's all presented by a group of world-class agency leaders and experts. For AI uh the AI for agencies summit for free pass, uh you can go to register at ai4Agencies.com.

So AI4Agencies.com. You can check out the full agenda, which is live there now. Um, and also, like I said, you can do the free registration. There's also a private registration option and an on-demand option. to do that. So get get yourself and your team ready. If you are on the brand side and you work with agencies, share it with them. It's uh we all kind of benefit from a more informed, uh AI competent

agency ecosystem. So you know definitely pass And then one other free event we have kind of through our uh AI literacy project where we're trying to put out as much information and education as possible. Is the two thousand twenty six Marketing Talent AI Impact Report webinar? We're really excited about this. We've been working on this one for probably about six months, Mike, I would say.

Uh, we're gonna be releasing a new report that we've done in partnership with Google Cloud and our marketing AI Industry Council. So AI is reshaping marketing roles, teams, and the future of work much faster than most organizations are ready for. So on January twenty seventh at twenty seventh at noon Eastern, we're hosting a live free webinar to break down the most important findings.

From our inaugural report presented by Google Cloud in collaboration with that marketing industry council that we launched last April. We'll cover how AI is changing hiring, training, workflows, governance, and what skills will matter most in the next one to two years.

If you're a marketing leader, people manager, or practitioner looking to future proof your career or team, we'd love to see you. And if you're not in those roles, we uh ask you sh pass it along to the team members who could benefit. So you can visit smarterx.ai forward slash webinars to register for the january twenty seventh event or to receive the recording. We will share that recording out after the event. All registrations also receive a copy of the talent report which is dropping that.

So again, as always, the links to these uh events are in the show notes, so you can go there and check All right, Mike, uh AI pulse survey.

So last week let's see, we had uh to what extent are people problems fear, resistance to change, lack of buy in hindering your organization's adoption? So Uh these are informal polls again. These are asking our audience to uh provide their feedback. So this week we had 74 responses to this question. Forty-four percent said it is a major challenge alongside technical.

Which was the dominant answer. 23% said it's a minor issue. Uh 20% said is our it is our single biggest barrier. Wow. Okay. So if you combine the major challenge and single biggest barrier, that is uh 45%. Or sixty five percent, sorry, of answers. So People problems are definitely impacting AI adoption based on the informal poll of our listeners. Uh the second question, how concerned are you about a fast takeoff in which AI begins to significantly impact jobs before society and the economy

To adapt. Forty seven percent said somewhat, forty three percent said extremely. Uh only nine percent said not at all. Wow. Okay. So yeah. Extremely uh forty-three percent. All right. Um so you can as always you can go check out the AI pulse surveys. You can participate in this week's pulse at smarterx.ai forward slash

Pulse. This week's questions, which again, we're going to talk about these topics during today's episode. So we'll remind you of this link again at the end. How likely are you to connect your medical records? to open AI's new ChatGPT health interface. So that's gonna be our first topic today is talk about Chat GPT health.

As well as anthropics getting in that game and Google Gemini is certainly going to be in that game. So that's the first question. And then the second is how you personally used have you personally used Claude Code? Just curious to see of our listeners who is experimenting with claud code. So again, you can go to smarterex.ai forward slash pulse.

And participate in this week's survey, it takes about 30 seconds. You just answer those couple questions and that's it. It's all anonymous. We are not collecting this data for anything other than the informal poll purposes. Uh you are not entering any kind of marketing funnel. This is purely just Uh. Okay, Mike, um kicking off with Chat GPT helps.

Yes, Paul. So OpenAI is launching something called ChatGPT Health. This is a dedicated experience that grounds the platform's AI in a user's personal medical information. So using this feature, Users can securely connect medical records. uh through something called the B Well network, which is a very popular network uh that connects medical records to different tools.

Or they can sync data from wellness apps like Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, Function, et cetera. And this data then allows Chat GPT to help users. Now OpenAI has built this very heavily with privacy in mind, given the first time. Data. So to ensure privacy, conversations in Chat GPT health. are protected by purpose-built encryption. They're not used to train open AI's models.

This experience is basically designed based on the announcement and the screenshots they showed as this secure compartmentalized space within the app. So you go into a separate health tab, that's where all this stuff lives. It's not cross-pollinated. So OpenAI actually developed this over about two years of collaboration with more than 260 physicians.

They said these experts provided over 600,000 pieces of feedback to shape a clinical assessment framework they're calling Health Bench, which basically ensures the responses prioritize safety and the appropriate Now this is designed pretty specifically to help people take away. role in their wellness, but OpenAI is emphasizing that ChatGPD Health is intended to support, not replace care from medical professionals. So to begin with, OpenAI is providing access only to a small group

early users. They say they are expanding access to all users in the coming weeks. So Paul, one thing that jumped out to me here personally in this announcement, OpenAI said they have this anonymized data that they're using to see how many people use Chat GPT for health and wellness.

And the number is 230 million people every single week. Now that is a huge number. And it feels like if you can get People to rely on Chat GPT for these types of health conversations, it seems like you've created a really sticky product. Like if ChatGPT has all my health records that I use all the time, I don't know. I feel like the chances go down that I'm gonna switch to something else. Like, how are you looking?

Yeah, this is an example of the data telling a company where to go with their product. I think if you rewind, you know, three years ago even They wouldn't this wouldn't have been the market they were going to be. But you mentioned the tw was it two hundred and thirty million. The the Fiji, the CEO of applications, uh did a personal Substack post on this and she said forty million a day are asking these questions.

And I I believe it. Like I um I don't I think I might have alluded to the this last year, but it wasn't it wasn't something I was like talking about. And in February of last year, I found myself in in the hospital, um, kind of randomly on a Sunday. And um what had happened was I had I I started having like some irregularities. the heart and I was actually on my way to a basketball game with some friends that night, a Cavs game.

And and things just weren't right. And I have an Apple Watch, so I had been I'd known like there was some irregularities for a little while, but I hadn't really known what to do about it. I didn't really think too much of it.

And so then, you know, we were lucky enough to have an another friend who's a doctor and we kinda like on the way down to the game sent some information and he's like, Dude, you gotta you gotta get to the hospital. I'm like, like right now hospital or tomorrow morning hospital, like what And so he's like telling me all this stuff and he's texting information and like it's just like overload. So that night I get you know, I did go to the game, um and and I came home

And um, you know, I I was a little afraid to go to sleep, honestly. Like I I wasn't really exactly sure what I was dealing with, but it sounded like I was okay until the next morning. And so I took all of my heart rate data from six months uh of past and I put it into Chet.

And so I was just like, listen, here's what I'm going through. Here's what I was advised by a doctor. Um, here's the data. Like, what is going on? Can you explain this condition? I don't understand even what he was saying. I d I don't know what these terms are. And so I just kinda laid in bed and I I developed some peace of mind because I started to better understand what was going

And I was like, Okay, no, I I I can go to sleep tonight. Like I think I'm okay. Um and so then I got up the next morning and I didn't I think I mean my wife. going, but I didn't really like share it more broadly with the family. Um, but I had now a summary I could share with my wife. It's like, listen, here's what's going on. And I basically had Chat GPT write me a simple analysis of what was happening. And it's like not a big deal, but I just got to go to the emergency.

And then I I remember laying in the emergency room and um if you have a heart problem you get in pretty quickly to a bed. Um so I I remember laying there, it was a Sunday and I'm thinking, how am I gonna do the podcast from the hospital bed? Like oddly enough, like that was one of my first thoughts that day. Um, but then like the doctors would come and go and and you're just like on a bunch of uh

y you know, like a a bunch of equipment and and testing. And so I'm I like took pictures of what was going on. I I as the doctors were telling me that I was putting it into Chat GBT saying, Okay, here's what the doctors are saying, here's what the readings are showing now on the heart rate monitor. And so it was like a collaborator for me. And and I would actually say, like, okay, here's what I don't understand, what the doctor said. What questions should I ask?

So what what happened for me is it became this very collaborative thing where like we democratized access to information and understanding on a metaphor. Now we are privileged, Mike. Like you and I have come up in a in a privileged part of society where we have access to the best medical care. We have family and friends who are doctors or know people. Like we can get to this information. And even in that environment, this is wildly helpful. Now imagine parts of society that don't have

Yeah. The ability to be able to go in and have that conversation and say, Should I get to a doctor or should I not? Am I okay? Now, obviously, and open AI does a good job of explaining this like this is not You can't replace medical recommendations with this. This does not replace your doctor. Google says the same thing if you go into Gemini and ask questions. So that to me became this like

a functional part of how I deal with anything, whether it's me, a family member who's dealing with something. A uh we had an issue recently with a family member where the family wasn't really sure what's happening and we had very little information and nobody really understand the condition. So I went in, I was like, okay

A family member, please explain this condition to us, make it very simple in a non-medical way, what is actually going on, what's the prognosis, things like that. And then I can share that information. out with like close family members say, okay, here's what I have learned. And what I'll often actually do is I will send that to our medical family.

And say, here's a quick summary for non-medical people. Does this sound correct? Like I'm still vetting things, but we get to answers so fast and we get that information so fast. And so for me, that's become critical. And I guess to close the loop on this again.

Personal information job. I'm fine. Like the the medical thing with me worked out. It was It was great and um and so everything was resolved, but I I did spend, you know, six to eight hours in a hospital being pretty unsure what what was uh what the future was gonna be looking like, um, which isn't fun for anybody who's been through.

So and I think Fiji shared her a a similar story. She in her post said uh uh she's been dealing with a chronic illness for years. Um she'd already uploaded a lot of her medical records to Chad GPT. uh asked whether she should take an antibiotic, given a medical history. So she's actually explaining a situation where like she was prescribed a medicine and she's like, I don't know if that's what I should take given my medical history.

And it actually came back and said, absolutely not. And she was in a hospital and told the nurse practitioner, hey, I don't think I should probably take this antibiotic and here's why. And the nurse said, You're you're a hundred percent right. You that would have actually caused some major problems. And so there's all these examples and then she shared some data around three in five US adults used AI tools for their health or healthcare in the past three months based on a survey OpenAI did.

And then they explain like the bigger picture here around healthcare. Like she highlighted a few things. Doctors don't have enough bandwidth. The healthcare system is fragmented. while health requires looking at a full picture. I deal with this all the time. Like I don't know, you might, but I have um like one doctor for like orthopedic stuff. I have a doctor for heart stuff. I have a doctor for other stuff. And like it's different health systems.

And so like I don't even have a unified records when I go to like my general practitioner, he doesn't even get the full visibility into what's going on in my life. So the idea of being able to have all of that unified and then have a proactive assistant that's like watching that stuff and having access to the data. So like if something triggers again on my Apple Watch that something weird is going out with the heart again.

that there's like a preemptive reach out and say, Hey, based on what happened last year, here's probably what All of that sounds amazing. Like, and so I do think that we're entering this world where we can have this. It is this, are you willing to give up the data to get the benefit becomes one of the key questions. And then when you know everyone is gonna be racing to do this, who do you trust with that data? Right. And I don't know about you, but the first thing I thought of is.

I'm probably gonna wait for Apple to solve this before I connect all of my apps because Apple is the place where I trust the most that the data actually stays safe and private and secure. Um, so I don't I I I I you have to join a wait list right now to get access to Chat GPTL. So I can't just like flip it on today. So right now I've been very selective in what I would share. I'll anonymize things when I put it up there, even though it's supposed to be walled off and secured and anonymized. Um

But if this function lived in Surrey, for example, like we fast forward to March and Surrey comes with a health function, I already it already has Apple Watch. I already have dietary, um, strength training. All of those apps are already living in my phone. It it would not be a hard decision for me to turn on access for all of that to Apple. I I don't know if I'm personally recognized.

Um, I I would maybe do it with Google. So I don't know. That's kind of where I'm at with this stuff, Mike. It's it's fascinating. I think it's a really positive thing to where these models are going and where the companies are going. It makes a ton of sense. And I think it could be a a net positive for society. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it's funny going through the things that Fiji mentioned in her substack about this.

that are chronic problems with the healthcare system. I'm like nodding along because these are the exact things we diagnosed in her AI for healthcare course too. Yep. Because we were talking about the fact physicians are burnt out. AI presents this huge opportunity to cut down on a huge amount of the work physicians have to do that frankly take

You know, related to that anthropic just released Claude for Helicarry. That was on a Sunday. Right, right. Yeah. So not only some of the similar stuff to ChatGPT Health, but also Claude. understand information. It's just there's a lot of encourage people if you are a little skeptical about this, and that's fair, to go a little deeper on like seeing how some of this stuff can be just total net positive for how chaotic

Like you said, Mike, they they understand and want the help. Like I play basketball on Thursdays with a couple of doctors and like every week it's we th another you know, it comes up again, like another way they're using AI and and loving it. Like yeah I don't have to write the summaries anymore. It's like doing it for me. It saved me five hours in in the evenings each week.

And and then we've had exposure like I did for some work for a major hospital system going back to 2018-19. Like Mike, you remember we were in those meetings and we were talking about AI being infused into the operations. of that hospital system back in 2018 and 19. So three years before ChatGPT, we were looking more at like recommendation engines and predictive models using machine learning and things like that. And then some early stuff around language generation.

And then uh i in recent years, um, we've done some more public work with like Cleveland Clinic on their marketing front. You know, and that's public knowledge that we've done some things with with them. Um uh Amanda Todorovich actually has spoken on stage at MAKON and shared some of what Cleveland Clinic is doing, but that's more on the the uh marketing side. But then I also had a chance to present to uh a a big uh

group of their operations leaders a year ago and you get to hear these like first hand conversations with people. Yeah. So yeah, we get we get some interesting insights into the the medical world and the healthcare industry and as you mentioned, Mike the Eye for Healthcare. Uh course that we taught. So yeah, it's a it's a massive opportunity and it's a needed thing, honestly, because it can level up.

And in an equ equitable way, not not just the privileged people, but this can actually democratize access to a lot of other people. who who really need more insights and need more training and hopefully, you know, OpenAI and others invest in the education and awareness side as well to make sure that people are aware of these things and that they can trust

Because again, like we live in this bubble. We think everyone knows this. And that you know, forty million is a big number, but there's eight billion people in the world. There's a whole bunch of people not in that forty million a day number. So yeah, it's uh it's a cool opportunity and I hope a lot of good can come from it.

Our next big topic this week is kind of related to our last episode, because in our last episode, episode 189, we took a deep dive into the recent performance of anthropics Claude Opus 4.5.

Claude Code. And we actually had explored why it seemed like over holiday break it was those tools were going viral among some leading researchers and engineers, specifically because a lot of people started saying the performance that these things were capable of was showing that we were approaching true AGI or R.

intelligence. So in that episode, you know, you and I discussed Paul how we felt something had kind of shifted, how something was different. And it felt like we'd reached some sort of tipping point. in terms of AI capabilities. Now, the reason we're talking about this again is because it seems like our audience agreed, because the audience response to that segment since it came out last year. I would say uncommonly vocal. We had a ton of listeners reach out privately and publicly across

LinkedIn and YouTube. A lot of them were largely letting us know they were feeling and seeing the same type of tipping point that we were discussing. Some of them even described the episode as a turning point for themselves and their own career. And businesses. For instance, one on LinkedIn, an executive at a global B2B uh ad agency, shared that the episode created such a sense of urgency that she paused the show to alert her head of AI, who agreed with our assessment.

On YouTube, a bunch of commenters seem to agree that these tools were exhibited what may as well be considered AGI uh in terms of capabilities. One of our listeners called the episode an insane wake-up call for those still on the sidelines. Um, some people even compared this current phase to like an alpha

for knowledge work. So something's fundamentally altering how we're looking at doing work across different industries. So Paul, I don't know about you, but it's honestly like kind of heartening to see that so many people agreed with our take. Like I don't Agree with us, but it was just felt like, yeah, wow. Okay. It wasn't just us saying something had shifted. Um, what do you think? Like, have you heard from people?

I had to I had a laugh. Uh so again I if people are new to the podcast, kinda how we prep for this is um throughout the week I'll I'll add like thirty to fifty links into a sandbox. Mike goes through on Sunday. And then I'll sign off on that on on Sunday. And Monday.

And so he for the second topic, he's like, I think we should like cover this again and like this feedback. There's even actually some usable YouTube comments. So I laugh because we did if you don't know, we we published The podcast on Podcast Networks, but we also publish full episode as well as excerpts and shorts on our YouTube. And Mike and I, as a general rule of practice, do not look at YouTube comments.

It's just better for your sanity to not go down that path usually. But Claire on our team takes one for the team and she she does read the YouTube comments. And so that actually surfaced some like really good things. It it's nice to see, I guess. Um so yeah, I you know, I think I don't I don't know if I said it like honestly last week, but sometimes like topics just feel different. Like you just

It and it often is like this organic thing where you're like getting ready for something like wow this like this seems important. Um maybe more so than I even appreciated as I was like prepping. And I I did that morning, I went back, looked at last Tuesday. And I when the podcast came out, I shared on our team chat. I said in retrospect, maybe six to twelve months down the road, I think episode what eighty nine.

Specifically the first 30 minutes will be very important. So it was one of those things, like we recorded it and it just like, hmm, like that that I'm not sure even what I said, but like it just felt like this is gonna be relevant at some point here. Yeah. So to the point that I actually went back and watched the first thirty minutes. I don't know that I have ever done well with our episodes. So I know there's some podcasters who are like methodical about

They record it, then they go through it, they'll listen to it a few times, they'll make edit. That is not how we do this. Like Mike and I do this podcast every week on one take. The only time we ever pause is if one of us has a coughing fit. We Mike and I have no involvement in the the post editing. Like we turn over to Claire, Claire does her thing, the episode goes And then we've moved on and we're doing the next thing. So I often actually don't even know what I said enough.

It's like I I usually have like some notes, some outlines of things to say and like key takeaways, but I'll just talk and then like, what did I even say? So when we started getting the feedback from people, I was like, Oh wow, okay, this one definitely hit different. Like I I wonder what we said that resonated with people. So yeah, I think it's it's a good one to go back to. Like if you did if you missed that episode, definitely go back and listen to the first thirty or forty minutes.

Um, the feedback has been incredible. A lot of people just shared it. Like by Tuesday evening, I think I'd seen like a half a dozen LinkedIn posts where people were just like, Hey, you gotta listen to this episode. And so like for me, Mike, just a high level takeaway. I think the main theme was We don't need to reach AGI, however you define it, to completely transform business, the future of work and your own Um so we talked about like is Claude code age AGI, is Opus for five?

The whole point was it doesn't even matter. Like we're at the point where the models are so good. And if you know how to use them and you find the right use cases in your work, across your team, across your department, across your organization, it can fundamentally transform everything. And so For me, the use case I shared that I think a lot of people found valuable was using my co CEO as a strategic planning. Where it has expertise in legal and finance and HR and operations and

sales and customer success, things I don't have deep expertise in, um, that I can use it do that. So I think a lot of people just kind of found that to be a very practical example. Yeah. And a lot of people echoing like, yes, that's exactly how I use it. I wasn't sure how to explain it, but like The way you just said that, that's how I do it. And other people who are like, I hadn't really thought about it that way. I'm going to go back in and I'm going to start experimenting.

So I think that was the key for me is as a as a manager, as an executive. To leverage AI to accelerate planning, getting more strategic insights, problem solving faster, more intelligently, better decision making, those are invaluable to organizations. And then the professionals who understand, embrace AI, find innovative ways to use it, which we're going to talk about in the next main topic. Mike is some more real-world examples of how you and I are doing it.

Those are the people that are going to 10x their productivity and their impact on a business. They have tremendous career opportunities, regardless of what happens. in the broader economy and how jobs are impacted, like the people who go figure this stuff out and do the kinds of things we were talking about, they have enormous potential.

and and value creation or spinning off and doing their own thing if it doesn't work out at the corporation they're at now. If there is downsizing regardless, like you're gonna be in a position to go do So I think that was the main thing for me is this idea of always experiment, find other people who are experimenting, share those things, whether it's internal teams or peers in the industry or Wherever you can find it, in person events where there's other people like that, like

Find those people and inspire each other. to do it. And and Mike, I I know you've been doing a lot of this. Like you and I are on these conversations every day. Right. Like Mike messaged me Sundays like, Hey man, I did this thing and like check this out. This is crazy. Yeah. And I feel like it it's to the point now where that's happening with us all the time. Um where we're just constantly finding new uses. Yeah. And the only thing I would add to that is you don't need perfect.

Obviously you need permission of what you can use AI for in your job or your company, but it is sometimes almost scary and thrilling to be like, well, yeah, there's tons of education, tons of commentary, tons of people to follow, like that's all amazing. You just need to fire up a keyboard for two minutes and if you have no idea where to start, ask AI. That's I'll talk about this in the next bit, but that's exactly what I did with Claude Code. I was like

bookmarked. I don't have time to go through like I'm just gonna ask. You can just go pick a random thing. It's really, really fun. All right. So our third big topic, like we've alluded to, as kind of a follow-up to that discussion.

Uh about this tipping. We just thought it'd be valuable to illustrate a few things that are now possible for knowledge workers. Paul, like you mentioned, your co-CEO example really resonated with people. So we wanted to spend a few minutes just talking through. a handful of use cases that have been creating some real value and some real eye-opening moments for us in the past week alone. So we're specifically gonna look at

two tools here. Paul, I there may be some others you're using as well, but I'll let you kind of speak to that. But two big ones are lovable and quad code. So lovable is an AI powered full stack app builder. Basically you just Describe what you want to code in plain English, describe an app you want to create and you get In minutes. Claude Code, meanwhile, is Anthropic's command line AI tool. It's technically an AI pair programmer that.

A lot more for non technical knowledge workers as well. So, Paul, you've been using lovable and maybe some other tools on. I've been experimenting with Claude Code a bit. Maybe share what you've been working on. I could detail my own experiment after that. Yeah. I and again, maybe I don't know, we'll do more of this in in the podcast. Like I've always thought about more building in public and being

sh share more of what we're doing as like I think of kind of an AI native company and trying to figure all this out. Yeah. Um and then again based on last week's feedback, we know these practical use cases are super

or helpful for for people. So we'll do our best to just kind of like share it. And then we've got an AI transformation series. We're gonna have other perspectives coming and we're gonna do interviews with other company leaders and practitioners who are doing really cool things. So we're gonna try to do a lot more. So I don't know about you, Mike, but I like I find myself um like driven and anxious, like more m probably more than ever, because there's so many things that um

Like as as a CEO and I would say like as as a manager, as a leader of any kind, there's always more to do than you have time in the day. There's always problems to be solved that you don't have time to work through. There's products and ideas and like things you want to bring to life, but maybe you just you're you're capacity limited by time or resources or whatever. And I feel like in the last six months those obstacles have just Fallen down.

th it's like anything you can think to build, you can go get an MVP built of it. Or any problem you have to solve, you you can all of a sudden just solve way more efficiently than you used to. So I I'll I'll I'll set this up with like my weekend. So um

The the way my life works is I I have a 14 year old now and a th a 13 year old or 12, uh be thirteen soon. Um and so like I've gotten to the point in my life, and I'll I'll preface this as kind of where I'm at in this stage of my life. My kids have become more self-sufficient.

So five years ago, six years ago, this this couldn't function the way it does because I was way more like they they needed me way more during the days and they they didn't have So I've reached a point in my life where I have more in-between. where they're doing something or they've got something going on. So as a as a father, as a husband, I have more room to experiment than I did before while still being as present as humanly. So I'll preface it with that.

You know not everybody's able to kind of commit the time. My life has gotten to the point where I have a lot of that in-between time where I love what I do and my brain doesn't shut off. Like I I cannot, unless I'm like. Truly in the moment with my family. I put my phone aside and we're gonna play a game together. We're gonna do something together. If there's quiet moments, even if there's like a like a football game on TV, my brain is like thinking about things to solve or projects.

And I used to think that was a flaw. Um,'cause I I couldn't turn it off, but I I kind of have come to realize like it's just um For me it's a very good thing for where I'm at in my life to to have that inspiration and that drive to like wanna keep doing these things. And so

My weekends usually like um by nine PM, ten PM at night, I usually have like an hour or two. I'll I'll work on something. And then I get up at like six a.m. Saturday mornings, I do the newsletter, the exec AI newsletter first thing Saturday mornings.

And then I'll usually um shut off for Saturdays and then um Saturday evenings I'll do a little bit and then Sundays, same deal. I'll get up, I'll work, you know, a few hours in the morning before the kids are moving and then Sunday nights is now when I do the podcast. So in between that, I'm the CEO. I also wear like five other hats in our organization at the moment. And like there's a lot going on. And so I went into this weekend and I had a list of like six major things that need to be.

One of them was to design a channel partner program for our AI Academy. And so I'll set this one up because this is really interesting. So We uh through A Academy, um, the plan is to launch a partner program where agencies and consultants and associations and other people who want to offer RAI Academy courses and certificates to their stakeholders can do that through a structured

Now, the reason we want to explore this is one, we have a lot of interest from agencies and consultants in particular. Two, my former agency was HubSpot's first partner back in two thousand. So we were the origin of the HubSpot partner ecosystem.

that at some point, I don't know where it's at today, had four thousand plus partners and accounted for over forty percent of HubSpot's rep. So I had a front row seat from two thousand and and seven until the time I sold that agency in two thousand and twenty one. to the impact and um compounding value that could be created through a And so this is something that we

Wanted to focus on. It was a major strategic initiative. We actually have a new employee that was starting today to focus on this. And we have one of our other longtime leaders who's been working on this model for the last like three to six months, kind of playing around with different directions. So that's the the premise is like, okay, I I I have a forcing function, like by Monday I have to have made some decisions around this, but I was in no place to make those decisions.

So Saturday night I go to local restaurant and I'm like do my takeout. And I don't I I don't know if the only parent that does this, but like if you Don't order in advance and you actually like go there and order, you can have a drink or two while you're waiting for your food. So I'm waiting for my takeout. Um and I I'm like, oh shit, like I should I should solve something on my list this weekend because Sunday's crazy.

So I'm like, all right, let's say we can do the channel program. So I go in my co CEO GPT and I type here's the actual prompt. We're going to launch a channel partner program for AI Cat. The primary initial partners will be agencies and consultants or value added resellers. Um, they would provide referrals for a commission. Can you help me think through the design of the program? I want to keep it simple to start. Let's take it one question step at a time to plan the program.

So anyone who listened to episode one hundred eighty nine, this sounds real familiar. This idea of one step at a time, one question at a time, like let's let's do this. So now again, that prompt, anyone could give that prompt. Very few people had sixteen years In the HubSpot ecosystem.

going through all the pains they went through, sitting in many of the early meetings as they were constructing and architecting that program, all the pricing models, all the the features and benefits, like everything for 15, 16 years, I experienced. So I come into this prompt with the context of what a great partner ecosystem looks like because I live So I took that prompt and then we started going step by step. And it would literally say, okay, step one, let's solve this.

Now what I do when I'm working with it as a strategic planner is I keep a separate note because I don't want to like break the chain of thought too often in the chat thread. So I will keep an open item so questions I want to ask, things I want to do, things like that. So it between the twenty five minutes I waited for my food Saturday night and then Sunday morning for a few hours. I made it through over fifty of those step by step things and decisions.

And so the whole chain of thought, it would say, okay, here's what I think we should do on pricing or commission model. Here's option A, B, C. I recommend option A. What do you think? And so every step, I, the human, with the context of a great Partner program made the decision. And then at the end, I said, okay, this is as far as we need to go. I've got everything I need. Write me a strategy brief that I can now share with my team.

Then Mike, you and what you and I like to do, we're gonna launch something, write a press release announcing the launch of the program. Now that press release may never go out publicly, but it forces us to like tell the story in four hundred words and see how tight. And so that's a thing Mike and I have done for years when we're launching.

I had it create a game plan. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to share the entire thread with the team internally, the whole chat within ChatGPT, because I want our team to see the chain of thought and I want them to see the decision making.

And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna have a meeting next week where we're gonna go through that whole thread. We're gonna talk about each key decision that was made. We'll debate anything that people want to debate if people have different opinions on it. And then we will lock in next steps and we will

If I had not had that co-CO conversation and if I didn't start it in those 25 minutes I had waiting for my food Saturday night, I probably wouldn't have had time to do it. And I would be here on Monday with no plan, with a new employee starting, without clarity of our direction. And instead, in a thirty-six hour period, I have clarity and I have tens of thousands of words that were like exchanged back and forth and I have a plan.

So that that is like a practical example. The other one you mentioned, Mike, was lovable. I I was aware of lovable for a long time, never tested it. I went in Thursday, and again, this is like in those quiet moments. It was my wife's birthday. We were going out for dinner. We were waiting for everyone to get ready. I had about seven minutes sitting on the couch waiting for everyone. So I wasn't taking away from family time. I'm just I'm in in the quiet moments.

And so I was like, uh, I gotta figure this out. So I go in, I create account. All this is in seven. Create an account. Um, I say, hey, I want to build an assessment tool that does X, Y, and Z. I kind of explain the concept.

It's like, okay, great. And it walks me through decisions. Who's the audience for? How are you going to structure? What access do they need? Do you want to collect emails? And I'm like, oh, this is interesting. I'm just watching this like step by step how it's going to build. Yeah. And then it's like, do you want to connect to their cloud? It's like, yeah.

Boom, I do it. In that seven minute time period, I build a functioning assessment tool with 26 questions and the ability to get a PDF report with visualizations. I have built those kinds of tools before. I did it a decade ago for a major tool we used at my agents. That process, and I'm just ballparking here because it was a decade ago, five months and at least$50,000 to develop an MVP with outside development. In seven minutes, I built a better functioning model, MVP, than I did 10 years prior.

Now, to do that MVP I did, it wouldn't have even been possible twelve months ago. Like you didn't you didn't have access to these kinds So I think that's where I'm at, Mike, is like we've entered this realm. There was a great tweet I saw from the co founder and CTO of Hyperbolic Labs, who's a former uh Octoai, which got acquired by NVIDIA.

He tweeted last week, we're entering software three point zero, a world where everyone can build personalized software and ship new features in minutes, and the cost is zero. Software used to be built by companies with lots of engine engineers, now it's built by individuals.

And I think Mike, that's the key for me is like, um, we've entered this phase where we can just build things. Now, if I want to turn that assessment into something we actually launched on our website, I will absolutely bring in a developer and say, Hey, here's the MVP, like go make this thing function.

But just to get ideas out of our heads and like so that's why I said like I'm It's like I can't get enough hours in the day to build the things that are in my head and like solve the problems I couldn't solve twelve months ago, two years ago. And I'm like constantly inspired by what's becoming possible. And I like I want other people to experience it because

It just changes everything in business when you realize what you have the power to build and do. Um, and like you said, Mike, I love that. Like you don't need permission. So g you've done some cool stuff with Claude, so why don't you share what you've you've Yeah, sure. So Paul, I've had on my list for longer than I am uh care to admit to like finally dive into clawed code. And you know, I am not a developer. I barely know anything about how to code.

So I was kind of struggling to connect dots of like why everyone was hyping this up outside of coding or development. So I was like, okay, I want to explore how it could maybe help with other types of knowledge work. Now, just I'll kind of really quickly preface this. That might seem a little counterintuitive. It took me a while to figure this out. We'll actually drop a link.

In the show notes of a really helpful post, but you might be wondering, you know, it's called clawed code. It's being used by developers, like why. Well it matters because Claude Code is really and this is explained in the um by someone who I believe works at Google who is very good at explaining this. It's really just a tool calling agent. So it's a large language model with access to external tools. So you prompt it like you would a chatbot. It doesn't just respond to you. It also can go do

etc. So with that context, I'll share a really quick early experiment. It's very, very early for me experimenting. I think the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper here. But um there's some interesting implications here for knowledge work and where So I started by downloading the Claude app for Mac OS. This is one of the easier ways to access and get started. Specifically. So you open that app up. There's a chat history on the left hand side, very familiar.

Yeah, but But there's a tab that says chat, which is your normal history and your chat window. Then a tab that says code. So if you click on code, it then opens up Claude code. And from here you basically then select what areas of your computer is Claude allowed to access, which is very important. And then you can chat with it to have it do things.

So for my initial test, pick something just like off the top of my head, pretty simple. I exported a year's worth of our YouTube data to a folder on my desktop. I pointed clawed code at that, and I basically asked, it was a pretty extensive prompt. I literally had clawed. You know, not Claude code, just Claude write for me. Um it basically asked it to go analyze everything and specifically produce for me a comprehensive analysis brief in a document and produce a strategy to grow our audience.

I also then told it to do anything else and produce any other documents needed to get to those two main things. So what it did is it goes off and works in the background for probably about 15 minutes, I think it was. At times it like flashes green or something where it says, you have to give me permission to do

So you can set it so that it asks you every single time, or you can allow it to have a little more free reign. So what Claude Code does is it goes through tons of different steps. It might ask you follow-up questions, it may go write code, may go browse the internet and all sorts of. Other stuff. So I kind of basically just kept an eye on it while it worked. I granted a few approvals, but largely I basically just

While it was working. And when it was done, it summarized what it had done for me. So I knew everything that had been created. And it the end result was just really cool, Paul. Like it did all the analysis, all the research and all the work. to actually produce five HTML files. And so when I clicked on each one of these, it opened in my browser and displayed a fully designed dashboard or report.

Displaying or analyzing all this YouTube data. So I got those two things I asked for, which was that comprehensive analysis. That growth strategy. It also made a quick reference dashboard, which I didn't ask for explicitly. It thought it was a good idea. It had supplementary data on monthly trends and supplementary data on video chart.

So I'm still actually going through all this material because there's so much of it, but I thought it did just incredible work. Like this analysis is good or better than anything I could possibly do. The fact it visualized it and polished it up in HTML, I found actually really impressive. And not only impressive, but I'm like, oh, I should do this all the time. It's way easier for me to read through than a doc. Overall, it was just like pretty incredible stuff. So I'll stop there, but like.

It created all these documents, did all this stuff on its own. And I'm starting to be like, well, how can we what are all the other Yeah. I think what it surfaces for me is what we keep talking about. It's like you could shut off the model. Like j just assume they never get any better than what we already have.

And the future is basically just cleaning up the user interfaces so it's not having to go to this term like doing these things that some people might have just heard you explain that might be like, Oh, that's like pretty I don't wanna do that. Again, even though you're not a developer, you're not an engineer, like you did it. Um

But like we'll get there, like six months, like whatever. Someone'll solve the the the even easier user interface. You're gonna have these capabilities in Gemini and Chat GPT. Like everybody's working on the same stuff. Yep. And the only problem I see here is like

prioritizing what to do. Like again, everything becomes solvable. And now you need just mechanisms to say, all right, well Sit around and brainstorm for an hour of what are all the problems we could solve now, all the products we could build now, all the ideas we can bring to life now that we couldn't six months ago.

That include the ability for an agent to go off and work for fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, an hour. Like just think about the amount of data we have that just sits there and never gets anything, never turns into intelligence, actions. And say okay, let's turn it loose on like media buy data from last year, let's turn it loose on this and just go build these dashboards.

Like, yeah, I mean, we're just entering this world where anything becomes possible. And it's like whatever you can imagine you can do or will be able to do in the near future. And to go back to one of the key takeaways from episode one eighty nine is like How how does anyone comp? stuff. Right. Really, like if if you think about leaders or practitioners who who become adept at doing this stuff, the idea of a ten X professional becomes laughably

Underselling what you can be. Like it it really becomes your ability to make a compounding impact on a business. is so great, it becomes hard to even measure. It's actually one of the things we addressed in the talent um A AI report that we're going to have on January twenty seventh. I remember that came up in one of the council meetings. It's like, how do you even compensate? Like how how do you determine the pay scale for someone

who you know is having a ten X thing. Like maybe it's like Mike comes up with some idea and that idea triggers like a whole new product line or a whole new way of doing things where we can get rid of the software we used to have to use and like

Now we have all this actual data like in real time and that creates millions of dollars in impact. Like, how do you even factor that in? Right. And so I think we're just at this this like surface level beginning stage where we're starting to realize what this tech can do. And the practical implications of it. And then like, how does that now change the structure of everything and the hiring?

I and then again, like this is why I'm so excited and I'm like I wake up every day just wanting to explore and and do more and like I don't even feel burnt out. It's weird. Like my brain doesn't shut off and yet like I can't get enough Like I I just wanna do more and solve more and experience more and like I feel like I'm like living through this privileged period of human history where we get to like just reimagine everything.

And I I just wanna do it and I wanna like inspire other people to go reimagine stuff because I think it's become reality now that we can actually do that. We've talked about it for years, but now it's Yeah, for anyone, myself included, sometimes in this bucket, who gets a little overwhelmed and down a bit about some of the negative sides of AI and all the Big weighty stuff going on, go rewind and just listen to that last thirty seconds because that is the fun. That is the excitement.

That's the thing. suck and um I think that's it it and that doesn't diminish that stuff. It's like when I you know when we get into like the political stuff, it's like we're not glossing over the bad stuff. Like we're not trying to pretend but it's just that's not like we're trying to like present information And in the case of AI, we're trying to drive optimism because we believe there can be incredible things on the other side.

We gotta deal with messy stuff just like when the internet was created. Like it's all kinds of horrible things that came from the internet. But at the end of the day, you'd create the internet again, like you'd still do it, even though there's the back. Because the the net good is there. And I think that's what happens with AI and for people who kind of choose to use it for good in their careers, you you just have a amazing runway ahead of you. Like most people have no clue of the stuff. Yeah.

All right, let's dive into this week's rapid fire poll. So, first up, Elon Musk's AI company, XAI, has just completed a Series E funding round. They raised$20 billion. They were initially

15 billion, so they far surpassed that. This funding round includes partition participation from several sovereign wealth funds and investment firms such as the Cutter Investment Authority, Valor Equity Partners. And others. They also listed Chipmaker NVIDIA and Cisco Investments as strategic investors in this round. At the same time, XAI has reported a net loss. billion dollars for Q three of twenty twenty five, according to some internal documents.

Bloomberg. In the first nine months of 2025, XAI spent$7.8 billion in cash. primarily to build data centers and develop software intended to eventually power humanoid robots. Now, despite these losses, the company's revenue nearly doubled quarter over quarter, reaching$107 million for the period. So Paul, the sheer speed at which XAI has accumulated compute is pretty breathtaking. Like if we recall, they were founded in twenty twenty.

They now have over one million H one hundred GPU equivalents. They have some of the world's largest supercomputers. They're expanding their Memphis data center complex to two gigawatts of capacity. It's just insane. And We aren't even really talking yet about the robotics piece of this because they are seemingly trying to build the brain for humanoid robots that are going to be everywhere. How are you looking at XAI's growth, investment, far?

So in recent interview, Elon Musk said when all uh when everything's said and done, it's XAI and Google that are that are left. I don't know that I disagree. Like I I I like the You you can just never uh bet against Elon Musk, especially when he has um a vendetta like angry Elon Musk or like slighted Elon Musk is not a guy you want to go up against.

And I mean, just as an example, I'm like w I mean, one, he he's kinda funny sometimes when he's not uh when he's staying out of the political stuff and he's just doing his thing. Um, like they call their their data center the one is macro hard. They have it literally on top of the data center. They're building another one that has macro harder on it. And it's it's a play on Microsoft. So they're basically like, you know, so um

I don't know, it's it's funny, like th they they do like silly things. Um So I don't know. I mean, they're a major player. They're they're obviously gonna pour this money into the infrastructure build out. They talk about uh development and deployment of transformative AI products reaching billions of users, groundbreaking research. They say it in in their post they have six hundred million monthly active users across X and the Brock app.

So like in Teslas, Grok is in Teslas now and you can actually interact with it. Like I'd said a few um months back that I was waiting for the moment when Grok could actually do things in your car, not just talk to it like a chat bot. It's there now. So you can actually talk to Grok and have it affect the operations of your car um, which is an interesting Uh yeah, and I I think that um Elon, we talked about it a few episodes ago. He'll be the world's first trillionaire, probably

And by the middle of this year, if if not sooner, I would guess. Um, he he owns large stakes in XAI, SpaceX, Tesla, Neurolink, the boring company. He honestly would have owned a massive stake in open AI. He put the first forty million into open AI. He would have owned probably half the company.

that it was a nonprofit, so that wasn't a thing. And there was a there was a stat that came out uh a couple days ago that Ilya Sutzkova uh who who left um open AI in the in the Sam Altman uh issues in fall of twenty three. He had four billion invested. Like vested, it was like uh open AI stock in November of 2023. This came out in like text message and and some court findings from last week in the Elon Musk lawsuit. So four billion vested. So they're estimating his current

stock in open ai is like 60 billion. That's Sutzkeva who who only had like 10% of the company. Like if if Elon Musk maintained equity based on his original investment, he would probably have like two to three hundred billion of open AI stock right now. He would already be worth over a trillion. So The world has to come to grips with like w whether you like Elon Musk or not, he runs some of the most influential companies in the world that are only gonna become more uh

influential. I saw something over the weekend about the possibility that XAI actually reverse merges into Tesla and goes public via Tesla rather than themselves, which is a crazy idea. Um He's going to be the richest person in the world for probably your lifetime. Like which whatever age you are right now. He he's going to be worth trillions, not not a single trillion, trillions. Like larger than than f the top five, um other than the top five GDPs in the world. He Celon Musk. So

It's crazy, like the whole thing. But XAI, yeah, two years old and they are a major, major player and they're not going anywhere. All right. Our next topic, some other fundraising news in the works. Anthropic is reportedly in talks to raise ten billion dollars in a new funding round that would value them.

So that nearly doubles their valuation that was at set at$183 billion during a previous investment round only four months ago. This financing is a Expected to be led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund and COTU management. These funds are intended to support the company's heavy infrastructure needs. So as part of separate agreements with Microsoft and NVIDIA, Anthropic is committed to purchasing$30 billion.

Now, while the company is not yet profitable, actually, some reports say that internal projections suggest it could break even by twenty twenty eight, which is not something you often hear about AI companies. So, Paul, we have known Anthropic is going to continue to raise lots of money. It seems like they're on track to IPO this year as well.

Looking at all that, one stat did jump out at me in the reporting. C N B C in one report said that 85% of anthropic's revenue comes from business customers. Whereas OpenAI gets 60% of its revenue from consumers. And that is a very distinct split as you start to look at who's gonna win which.

Yeah. You know, again, I we talk a lot about anthropic. Uh I was pushing last year like somebody needed to buy them. Like I thought, you know, Apple was a logical one. I I think they've hit escape velocity. I d I don't know that I mean Apple could still do the deal. Um I don't I I don't know. I think anthropics hit to the point where it's like why would we

Take an acquisition at this point. Like now, yeah. I mean they're faster to profit most likely. They're seeing exponential growth in revenue and user base. They've obviously got a hit on their hands with with Opus four point five and claud code and other stuff that's coming. Um I think they're differentiated from open AI for sure as well So yeah, I don't know.

Um, but keep in mind Google owns fourteen percent of anthropic. Amazon's got a stake in them. I fun side, no, I don't know if we've ever talked about this on the show, but I I I think this it's just like interesting trivia. So Sam Bankman Fried, the disgraced leader of FTX, um Hi he invested uh five hundred million through FTX in Anthropic in two thousand and twenty two, acquiring about eight percent equity in Anthropic. But then in the bankruptcy.

Uh they had to sell it for one point three billion in two thousand twenty four. Wow. Crazy. That that would be a very valuable investment in this one. Unreal. Yeah, the numbers we're talking about with any of these are just insane when you look at past cycles and past company.

All right. So next up, robotics company Boston Dynamics has partnered with Google DeepMind to integrate AI foundation models into its next generation humanoid robot called Atlas. This was announced at CES 2026 and the collaboration aims to move Atlas beyond predefined robotic movements towards what they call physical intelligence.

Which allows the robot to perceive, reason, and learn from its environment in real time. So the partnership utilizes Google's Gemini Robotics model, which is a multimodal generative AI model designed to help hardware. Generalize behavior across

Situations. So Atlas is already known for its kind of athletic capabilities. There's a lot of these videos running around of Boston dynamics that go viral about how fast it can move. But this integration focuses on natural human interaction and the ability to perform. Complex manual labor. The goal is for the robot to understand the physical world similarly to humans, learning to manipulate unfamiliar objects or assemble parts from just a

Atlas is already in production and is scheduled for deployment at a Hyundai factory, the car maker, in Savannah, Georgia. Hyundai is the majority owner of Boston Dynamics and plans to use the robot. for tasks like part sequencing by 2028. So Paul, it seems like this is just another signal that humanoid robots are

a thing. It did jump out to me here that according to some of this reporting, the whole idea is basically the data collected by robots will be fed back into the Gemini robotics model, which basically I don't know about you. Do you think that seems like it could dramatically accelerate how quickly humanoids are able to suddenly do a bunch of things they weren't able to do?

Yeah, like the network effect learning is the the key, the distributed learning across the system. This is how Tesla thinks about full self driving. So they think about each car in the fleet is a is a learning node basically. And everything that one car experiences and sees and learns from, it goes back into the training and and then it goes out. So you have this compound learning, which is why robotics, humanoid robots can take off faster

than humans. It's it's this once you hit that threshold of like escape velocity with the data and the ability for continual learning of the models. So you know basically imagine like let's say there's You know, fast forward five years from now and you've got a hundred thousand humanoid robots out out in society in different functions, like in retail environments and senior care living. uh manufacturing plants, whatever, and let's say they're all optimus roles.

Just say as an argument. Um, and every night the experiences of that fleet gets uploaded to a macro hard data center or macro hardist, whatever their number they're at at that point. Um And then that learning from that day gets pushed back out and now the fleet experienced what a half a million robots experienced in a day, not what one robot experienced in a day. That's that's the premise here and that's why

Yeah, this continues on. I in the AI trends episode, which was our last episode of uh 2025, one of the ones I mentioned was humanoid robot advancements. I said the convergence of advanced computer vision and specialized world models. Is accelerating the deployment of general purpose humanoid robots. We're moving towards robots being able to navigate real-world environments, perform complex manual labor in industries such as manual.

retail and healthcare. And then in the uh AGI and Beyond, um road AGI and Beyond episode I did episode one forty one last year, uh talked about the robotic Explosion in two thousand twenty six to two thousand thirty realm about the investments that were going in, not just

Um Boston Dynamics, but Google, NVIDIA, Figure, Tesla Optimus, OpenAI, everybody's playing in this. And the key on lock was that the language models became the brains that are embodied in the robots. And if those language models have continual learning capability, which we've been talking about. Then you get to a fashion. They're solving a lot of the you know the hardware components. Like that was the the big thing that I've been working on for the last

You know, 10 years motors, batteries, sensors, com different components um in the hands. Like that's the stuff that's kind of getting to be solved now. And then you mix it with the brain. Interesting again, fun piece of trivia for people who aren't aware. Um, so Boston Dynamics started as an MIT spinoff in nineteen ninety-two, um, focusing on animal-like dynamic robots like big dogs. They were actually acquired by Google. Um, they bought'em in two thousand and thirteen.

Then Google divested from it, sold it to Softbank in twenty seventeen, which is interesting interestingly enough is the year the Transformer was invented. So you almost wonder like, wow, did Google not realize what their own technology was gonna be? didn't align at that time and then Hyundai took the majority stake, eighty percent.

of um of Boston Dynamics in two thousand and twenty, which is why Hyundai manufacturing plants is why where they're gonna be first distributed. So as I was looking at it I was like, ah damn, I wonder if huh if uh Google would reacquire Boston Dynamics now that it's like an interesting fit. But there was a quote in Wired magazine from um

Uh Demis Asabas. So it's like Google DeepMind actually last year hired the former CTO of Boston Dynamics in November of twenty five. Rather than building its own robots, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Asabas said he envisions Gemini being used by many different robot makers. Similar to how Android runs on a wide range of smartphones. So that that'll be something interesting to watch is Google's increasing play there and they're competing.

Yeah, it's super exciting. It's one of those things that makes me think it could kind of be something that happens very, very gradually, then kind of all at once suddenly we're seeing robots. And totally totally random, but like last weekend, uh my favorite movie growing up as a kid was Rocky Four. Like I I must have watched that movie like a hundred times.

And there's a scene in Rocky Four where Polly gets a gift of a robot for his birthday and the robot comes out and it's like singing to him and talking to him. I'm like, Man, that was About thirty years too early, but that's basically what we're looking at. That's awesome. All right. Some more Google news. Google has officially launched what it calls the Gemini era for Gmail. They are introducing a suite of AI tools designed Gmail.

So Gmail, if you want to recall some history, was launched in 2004. It now serves over 3 billion users. And this update, powered by the Gemini 3 model. Shifts Gmail's focus from manual search and organization to automated synthesis and priority. So key to this overhaul is AI overviews, which automatically summarize lengthy email threads into concise bullet points.

For Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, the feature includes a natural language search bar that allows users to ask specific questions of their inbox. You could go find a specific thing or a quote or a conversation from the past year. Additionally, Google has updated its writing tools. The tool help me write and suggested replies are now available to all users for free. So they offer context-aware drafts that mimic your

Now this update also is going to be introducing AI inbox, which is currently in testing with a select group of users. This feature replaces the traditional chronological view of your inbox with a personalized briefing that highlights. Tasks, upcoming bills, and messages from frequent contacts. So Paul, what did you think of these updates coming to Gmail? Kind of nice at least to see more powerful AI baked into something three billion people use every

Yeah, I did do a double take'cause I was like, don't haven't we had this functionality for a while? Like I feel like AI overviews is definitely I've noticed we had it because that is definitely Gmail right now. Yeah, that's in our Google workspace at least. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's I've definitely seen the editing stuff. So yeah, my first thing was like, why are they like why is Sundar tweeting about this? Hasn't this been out for a while? Yep. So I think the AI inbox thing is

new, but even that I felt like with the AI Studio I was able to replicate that capability by sc creating an agent that did that for me. For sure. Yeah. So maybe that I don't know. Um All I know is the uh if they fix the search capability in Gmail, I will be happy. Like I I've said this numerous times on on the podcast. The fact that I can't find anything in Gmail And yet we have the most powerful search engine in the world through Google. Like

I it drives me insane. Like I can never find anything unless I nail the perfect keyword. And even then I get all this like noise. Yeah. So if I can talk to my inbox and say, where's the in email where this happened? And it actually gives me that email. Yeah, no kidding. I'm curious to see how that uh AI inbox plays out too. I'm not sure if that feels like it would be a smarter way to do email or if it'll be something that's a little too hard to switch my habits already, but eager to experiment.

Yeah, I've found it to be kinda noisy through the agent setup I have. Like it's just like eh, I don't know.

All right, so on our next uh news item this week, according to some recent data from the Similar Web Global AI tracker, the competitive landscape of generative AI underwent some pretty big shifts. So Similar Web measured the global share of traffic that went to different AI tools last year. Some of this data is pretty interesting. So ChatGPT remains the most visited platform out there, but its global traffic share fell to 64.5% by early January 20th.

Now, the key here is this is down from more than 86% just one year ago. It's a huge drop. And the primary driver of this. Is Google Gemini, which has emerged as the leading challenger. So in the same period, Gemini's traffic share grew from roughly 6% to 21.5% over the of the year. Now some other interesting notes, other specialized tools also started to establish a little bit of a foothold. Uh GROC and the Chinese model Deep Seek now capture a combined 7% of that total global traffic share.

Um despite the growth here, data seems to suggest that these are currently complementing rather than replacing traditional search engines. According to the data, more than ninety-five percent of the city. still use Google for primary information seeking tasks.

So Paul, this report, this research was actually retweeted by none none other than Demis Asabas, who said, quote, a lot more hard work still to do, of course, but making relentless progress. I guess I have to say I agree with him. Going from six to twenty-one percent is wild in a single Yeah, I I mean

We talked a lot in Q four about how Google was seeming to get their get their footing and and they're becoming a very viable competitor and they have massive distribution through I mean we already talked about like Android and and Gmail and YouTube and all these different places they can embed their AI and put Gemini into.

So I I would expect to them to continue to close that margin. Um you go back to Chrome. Chrome wasn't the first browser, but it became the dominant browser and so they they have a history of Knowing how to uh not be the first but, you know, still become a dominant player. Yeah, I mean we reported on this as much as anyone, but those takes from about twelve to sixteen months ago that said Google has lost the AI race are really aging very, very

Yeah. Gotta be careful who you whose opinions you listen to on some of this stuff. All right. Our last topic for this week. Elon Musk's XAI is facing international scrutiny.

Following an incident with Grok where there was a surge of non consensual sexual imagery being generated. So in late December 2025, an update to Grok's image editing tool allowed users to quote digitally undress real people by prompting the bot to modify image. existing photos into suggestive poses or minimal attire. Now researchers at a company called AI forensics found that over fifty percent of a sample of twenty thousand images generated during the week of December twenty fifth.

Depicted individuals in some of these situations with 81% of them being women. The analysis also identified a small percentage of images depicting minors in some of these images. And this led to investigations by authorities in Europe, India, and Malaysia. In response to this controversy in the US, three Democratic senators urged Apple and Google to remove X and Grok from their app stores. They argued the platforms violate safety policies against non Sexual content.

And XAI recently restricted the Grok reply bot's image generation to paying subscribers as a response. Lawmakers criticize this, saying that the standalone app still allows you to do all of this stuff. Now must himself has stated that users creating illegal content will face permanent suspension, though he has also been very vocal about resisting implementing stricter guardrails to avoid what he describes as censorship.

So Paul, look, nobody really wants to talk about this, obviously, but it is important that people realize what's possible with these tools and also realize that some of the providers of these tools appear to be slower than usual. Like we said at the beginning, I mean there's there's dark sides to AI. There's going to continue to be. Um, this is a good example. I I think it's sometimes this stuff can get

Um get desensitized, I would say, sometimes to like the the bad stuff that happens in the world. And um Until it happens to someone you know or care about. And if you go on X right now, you can find plenty of women who have been um impacted by people doing this, like public figures, non public figures, people who have

lawsuits against certain powerful people who have robot armies that are, you know, trying to disgrace them online through things like this. Like this is a very real thing. And just'cause it isn't happening to someone you know doesn't mean it's not something worth your attention.

And I think this also just goes back to, you know, the reality of Elon Musk is um one of, if not the most powerful people in the world and certainly has influence. And um sometimes that puts people above different laws and regulations that other people might have to deal with.

And uh I think if there was a different administration in power right now, the story would be very different. Like my guess is This'll go away from the headlines within a week and it might pop back up when some high profile person gets affected by it, but otherwise people move on with their lives and just sort of like throw it off to the side.

Uh, that wouldn't be the case if a different administration was having more oversight over regulations and laws. Mm but my guess for better worse, like th this This needs to be a topic of conversation. Something needs to be done about it. I fear nothing is going to happen um because of some of the variables I just mentioned.

that doesn't mean we shouldn't care and we shouldn't be trying to do something. So I guess for us, like just talking about these things on the podcast, raising awareness about them, uh Amen. Um, Paul, thanks for breaking down another, honestly, because still busy week in AI. Just getting started for the year. Yeah. So appreciate you breaking everything down for us. Uh just quick reminders. If you have not left us a review on your podcast,

of choice, we would very much appreciate it. Regardless of your review, if you could leave one, it helps us improve the show. people. Also don't forget to go take the latest AI pulse this week, which is at smarterx.ai forward slash pulse. Paul, thanks again. Thank you, Mike. Talk to everyone next week. Thanks for listening to the artificial intelligence And join more than one hundred thousand.

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