Ep 78 A.I. is the New Gold Rush

In episode 78, I talk about the wild, wild west ride that is AI and why this is the new gold rush.

Click here to learn more about The A.I. Skillet (Skills Program)

You're listening to the remote work retirement show. I'm your host, Camille Attell. And this is the only show that helps semi-retirees figure out the remote work options. I believe remote work is the new retirement plan and that many retirees have both the ability and desire to work, how they want so they can live how they want. Let's dig into today's episode.

Hello again, and welcome to yet another AI episode. If you're wondering how many more artificial intelligence episodes there are. I can tell you that there's one more after this, which will wrap up this series. Now, if you're new here, let me share a little more context back in October of this year.

Well, really September late September, early October, I launched a new program called the AI skillet designed to help people increase their AI skills. I had planned a series of podcasts to follow along. So that the folks who didn't join were able to learn alongside us then I got some weird flu thing and I lost my voice along with about two weeks' worth of episodes.

I used my artificial intelligence voice to catch up in the middle of that President Biden signed an executive order. So of course I had to talk about that. And since then there've been a whole bunch of new changes. So my whole schedule got a little bit thrown off. And just as I was climbing back onto this already bucking Bronco, Open AI, the company that owns chatGPT made huge announcements on November 6th, with Sam Altman at the helm. Pretty much just pulling rabbits out of a magic hat.

Just in case you don't know, Sam Altman is the inventor of chatGPT and a bit of a wonder kid who may one day unleash either AI to cure all cancers or perhaps murderous robots or both. I will get into those updates in just a moment because they are pure gold. But before I do, I want to tell you that just days after Sam pulled his AI magic tricks, right out of the hat, the board of open AI fired him with a little more than a tweet or an X or a post or whatever it is the heck you call these things these days, because he wasn't exactly sharing all of his genius or information.

IE he wasn't being transparent with them. According to the board. We don't know the real story. Maybe it'll come out very soon here. Now in the interim, they appointed Mira Marathi who was the Chief Technology Officer, and a woman, hooray, as an interim CEO. But then an investor revolt pushed the board back into perhaps negotiating to bring Sam back on as CEO about 24 hours after firing him.

So once again, the podcast episode I had planned for today, has been completely usurped by just more, I don't know, wild stories. I guess we'll call them keeping in theme with our wild wild, west theme today. And I'm not going to get into all the nuances and complexities of this story because as I record this, it's still unfolding.

In addition to that, I'm guessing you're a regular person. You're probably not concerned about things like, you know, AI and technology. I think your focus is probably on the price of gas. The rising cost of groceries, and rent. And probably whether or not you're going to outlive your money, what you're going to do for work.

Maybe you're also concerned about not, I don't know, things like war or the environment. My point is you only have so much capacity to worry about things like a 30-something Silicon Valley tech guy, whose job just got eaten up by AI, the irony of this story. But for me and other people living in the tech world and those who are trying to implement AI, this stuff is LITERALLY WILD! It's the wild, wild west, but without cowboy hats. Okay, now that I've covered that story and brought you up to speed I want to tell you what really makes this the wild, wild west. And why I do believe that these new updates are pure gold, pure gold I tell ya. The updates that Sam talked about at the open AI development day back on November 6 Were partly geek speak, part wowzers. And then there were a few speckles of gold that regular folks like you and me can actually understand. So, let me boil it down and tell you what I think is some of the most important information that came out of that development day.

Open AI, which again, owns chatGPT, in which Microsoft has made huge investments now has the ability to build and customize what are called custom GPTs. Now, let me back up and say, what a GPT is. It stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which probably doesn't clarify things at all for you. And if you look it up, it will sound like gobbly goop. So let me put it into regular terms. GPTs give different applications, the ability to create conversational language that sounds human. And it can do this in text, in art, in music, in all kinds of things, and you can interact with it and ask it questions. And it will respond to you in human, like ways. So the easiest example of this that already exists is something like Siri.

If you have that, now I'm not a big Siri user, but a lot of people are. And that seems to be the thing that people can relate to. But I'm talking about Siri on a completely different level. For example, you may have heard that the Beatles, the band, the Beatles just released a new song. And if you're scratching your head and you've not heard this story, you might be thinking that's impossible because two of the Beatles are no longer alive. But it is possible, with AI.

So this project was approved by Paul and Ringo. And what they did was take the elements of a song John had been working on before he passed away, before he was killed. And they took his voice and they put it into, I don't know what the application is, but they used AI to then replicate his voice along with his music. I also heard that they grabbed a track from one of George's early guitar playing and fed that into the AI.

And then they layered on their music to complete the song. The song is called Now and Then. It was really interesting when I listened to it, it sounds like a Beatles song that I know or have heard, but I really haven't because it never existed. And so it was really cool to hear this.

It gave me chills. And I think that is a really cool way to use AI because I know some people have their fears about AI or they don't intend to use it. For me this almost brought tears to my eyes when I heard it, because I thought, wow, AI can take something that an artist was working on and finish it out and put something really beautiful in the world. Obviously, there are pros and cons to this, but if you have a chance to hear the song I encourage you to do so, especially if you're a Beatles fan. And that is an example of how the GPT, Generative Pre-trained Transformer can be used to create this custom beautiful song.

Click here to see the video for the new Beatles song Now and Then (with the help of A.I.)

Now going back to the dev day that I'm mentioning Sam talked about how open AI will now allow users to create their own versions of these GPTs. Because before this time you could use chatGPT and come up with some really cool custom stuff. There were other people who knew how to create custom GPTs because they knew how to use code and other program languages that we, the people didn't have access to. But now we do, because they've created these new features to make it.

Unfortunately, you would have to upgrade your chatGPT account from 3.5 to 4 to gain access to it. And here's the rub. It was so popular after the dev day announcements that they had to stop letting people upgrade because so many people wanted to do this upgrade. And they couldn't support it.

They couldn't support the user growth. So at this point, if you do want to upgrade your chatGPT account, you have to go on a waitlist. Which I encourage you to do, even if you don't want to upgrade to the $ 20-a-month version. Maybe that's not for you right now. At least get on the waitlist. So that you have the option to do so when it becomes available again. So let's talk about what it means to have these custom GPTs because again, this still might not be sinking in for you. So I want to try to explain it. You can create your own GPTs to do all kinds of things that really help you.

For example, let's say you wanted to create some kind of solution to help you manage your day. For me, my days are often rather chaotic. I run an online business. I'm in multiple software every day. I have two different calendars. I have three different email accounts. People private message me on Facebook and Instagram.

And before I know it, it just feels like digital chaos. I mean, it really is. It's pretty hard to manage sometimes. I could create a customized GPT to help me manage all of that. I could check in with it in the morning and I could ask it once I integrate these systems, I could ask it, what does my day look like. And it will respond to me and tell me the meetings that I have at certain times. I could ask it to summarize my emails for me, and it could tell me the emails that came in.

I could even tell it to respond to a few emails and what to say, roughly speaking, and it would write and send the emails for me. Wow. Bananas. And the list goes on and on. You can use this one custom GPT to tame that digital beast. Now maybe for you, that's not as applicable. I don't know if you have as much digital chaos in your life as me, but I'm sure you have something. I'm sure you're managing a busy schedule or you have things that you do during the day or people to call or emails to read and write or articles you'd like to read. But maybe it takes a long time.

You could ask your assistant to summarize the key points of those articles. The list goes on and on. I want to move on from this example to get you into some other examples, but that's just the first one that he showed in this dev day presentation. By the way, as I mentioned, I will link to that presentation in the show notes.

I want to caution you. I have watched this presentation and so have the members of the AI skillet and we all agree that it kind of goes over our heads. Except there are some points in that presentation where again, I call these flecks of gold, where you go, oh, oh! I may not grasp it entirely, but I see the opportunity.

I see the vision. So, if you do want to watch something that's about 45 minutes, where you know about 35 of those minutes might go over your head, that's up to you. You can always fast-forward it. Like I did. Another thing you could do with a customized GPT, depending on your skill set is you could build a financial budget. This is something that we do in Remote Work School. My husband built out this really cool workbook that has different spreadsheets in it that help people create custom budgets so that if they want to have a freelance job, they know what to charge, how to manage all their bills, et cetera. And that took him a while to build. But with a GPT, a custom GPT, it would take you minutes to build that. And it would take you even less to check in with it on occasion, whether that's every day, once a week, or once a month, et cetera. So maybe that's something that appeals to you, but maybe you're not a financial person and you want to use it for something a little more practical. It can help you tell you what groceries you need to buy because maybe you build a GPT and you put all the things you love to buy in there.

I know, I'm talking really conceptually about all of these possibilities. It will require you to have some creative ideas so that you can bring your creative ideas into the tool. What it does, however, is it makes it way easier to create those things.

Whereas maybe today you have an idea for something, but then you don't know code. Right. And you don't know technology and you don't know how to build an app as an example. But you have good ideas perhaps. And so now you will be able to take those good ideas or even not-as-good ideas and put them into these custom GPTs and try them out and see how they work.

Now, here's the next cool thing about this. You can build these GPTs and you can do things like sell them to other people if other people find them valuable. You could sell your services to build GPTs for other people or other businesses, which gives you the opportunity to sell a service. And that's where the gold is in all of this. Now that we're going to have the ability to customize tools and customize AI in a way that works for us. The sky is the limit. I mean, this really is like a gold rush because you can build things really easily. The average person can build these GPTs and sell them to other people or sell their services to people who are busy and don't have time.

This creates massive opportunities for new jobs, new freelance ideas, and new business ideas. I mean, just in the last couple of days, I've dreamed up so many new possibilities. I want to give you a practical one. Well, two practical ones that I've experimented with already. So I just mentioned that you could maybe use a GPT to create a budget.

Well, it occurred to me the other day that maybe I could create a GPT that would give me a financial plan, a financial projection for 2024 for my business. So I didn't create a custom GPT, but I did start using some custom models to input the metrics of my business to see what I could come up with. And oh my gosh, I was totally blown away. I took a few key metrics, like how much money I spend on ads. What my conversion rate on ads is, the price of my products, how many I think I'll sell, et cetera. Very basic stuff. I put it into this financial model and it gave me three projections scenarios. It told me what I could make on the low end, the medium end, and the high end.

And I was like, wow. I mean, it took minutes. Now this is a type of service that my husband already provides to people. He does business projections. Financial models. He values businesses. And I wouldn't say that this was better than what he does, not by any stretch, but it certainly sped up the process so that now I could take that information to him and say, now let's run it through your models and see how close it is. Let's validate this information. And then, of course, he's going to come in with his art and science to really put polish on this thing. But that was really cool because it, again, put something that is really difficult for me, financial projections, into my hands. I felt really empowered. Also, it made me rethink my business plan. Which was like the coolest thing. Cause I thought, Ooh, I don't know that I like these high, medium, and low scenarios. Maybe I'm thinking too small. So really, really cool lesson learned there.

Now the second example I want to give you is that of our Customer Experience Ambassador, Rae. That's her name. Right now what she's doing is learning a platform called Click up. Click up is a project management platform. The problem with these types of tools is they always come right out of the box and you have to use them as is.

There's not a lot of customization. Now they are starting to include more customization with AI. But you still have to basically use their platform. So what she's doing is learning Click up and then when she's done, we're going to look at and see if we can replicate a lot of the features from Click up into our own GPT. Could we basically build a competing version?

And if it's good, could we then sell it to other businesses? Or could we sell this service of creating something similar for other businesses? And this would give Rae a whole new set of skills that she could do so many different things with. So I wanted to give you those two real-world examples.

So you can see how we're already experimenting with these GPTs. Now, once again, you are not in a position to jump in and start experimenting because unfortunately, as I mentioned, the demand to get access to GPT 4 was too high. So one more time. I want to remind you, to get on the waitlist. You can go to open AI and if you haven't set up your chat GPT account, please do.

And then if you already have it make sure that when you try to upgrade, when it gives you the option to join the wait list, get on that wait list again. It'll just give you options when that time comes. So I want to leave you with this. You might be thinking, wow. Camille has been talking a lot about AI for, what seems like weeks now and really, even longer because I've been talking about it on and off all year.

I want to remind you why, why this is so important. It's important because AI is literally reshaping everything. And it is definitely reshaping the workforce. It goes hand in hand with remote work. I've talked about that in other episodes.

We're seeing it in the job descriptions. Job descriptions are now being written with AI being included as a requirement. We're seeing it in Remote Work School people are coming into. That's my other program. People are coming in talking about how now the jobs are asking for it and they don't know what to do or how they learn it.

So we're very quickly talking about that in our coaching circles and making sure that people at least have a baseline understanding and can navigate around chatGPT, Bard and Bing, and all of the other tools. So it's really important. It is no longer a luxury to learn AI. It is no longer an option to say I don't know. Maybe I will. Maybe I won't. You have to. Because the jobs are demanding it and it's happening in every industry and it will likely affect every job. Even my step-mom who lives in a retirement community, sent me an email the other day that they are starting to offer classes on AI to all of their members. For a while, she was even trying to avoid it. Now she's like, well, shoot, I guess I better go learn this stuff. And I'm like, yeah, you should, if for no other reason than because I am your stepdaughter. I do it for me.

So to summarize, there were a lot of changes that happened this month related to open AI and chatGPT. They released amazing new features, and then they fired the CEO. And maybe they're going to rehire the CEO. Who really knows what will happen? And quite frankly, it doesn't really matter because the AI genie is already out of the bottle. And here's the thing that I really want you to focus on. There is so much opportunity. You're still on the early side of this. If you start using AI now you will be an early adopter for the most part.

And if you get on the waitlist to get the upgrade to chatGPT 4, and you start using the create GPTs feature, you will be well ahead of the pack. And you, my friend might just be able to participate in this very next gold rush.

Alright, thanks for joining me. Next week I'll be back to talk to you about how all of this impacts the AI skillet program. Hold onto your hats my friend, this is going to be a wild ride.

If you're looking to learn more about artificial intelligence and how to use it in practical ways that will help you get a better job, keep a job, start a side business, or make income in new ways, then consider joining the wait list for the next round of my AI Skills Skillet. Click the link in the show notes to join. 

Click here to watch the OpenAI DevDay (referenced in this episode).

Click here to join the waitlist to learn more about the AI Skillet Skills Program 

Click here to join Remote Work School:

https://www.camilleattell.com/remoteworkschool

If you want to start something new but feel a bit overwhelmed, I invite you to take my free remote work training:

https://www.camilleattell.com/remote-training

If you have any questions, Click here to DM on Instagram.

Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts

If you’re loving the Remote Work Retirement Show please consider rating and leaving a review! This helps get the word out about the show and helps other people find hope and practical steps to find the right remote work for them. Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then let me know what you loved most about the show.

Also, make sure you don't miss an episode by clicking here to follow and get notified when each one is published.