316 | MBA out AI skills in, rouge agents and bio-risk, new Agent Plugin industry standard, and more important AI news for the week ending on August 7, 2025

27:59It is going really amazing. There's a fantastic group of people there from all over the world that is taking this course. And the next cohort will start in mid-September, which means it will graduate in mid-October, which means the next course will probably open in November. So if you don't want to wait for the end of the year and you don't want to wait for the end of the year, come and sign up for the course. You get$100 off with the promo code leveragingAI100. And now back to our story. And I apologize for this plug, but I really couldn't resist myself with what this survey actually means and saying very clearly and out loud.

28:31But now back to the story. Now, to make this point even stronger, in 2025, and there's no updated number in the PwC survey for 2026, but in 2025, 88 % of AI-related positions in financial services were AI user roles, meaning not developing AI solutions, but knowing how to use AI in your day-to-day work. Again, this is not a come develop solutions for us. I want to see you doing your job with AI all the time, meaning it is applicable for basically any role in this particular thing in financial services. I think the same thing is true anywhere else. Now, in this survey, there's another parameter that shows the big dilemma of employees right now.

29:12So the same leaders, executives report that 44 % of leaders saying that employees have concerns about their job security because AI. 43 note that employees use AI only when required. 40 % acknowledge staff feels overwhelmed by the pace of AI-driven change. 34 % cite the change fatigue as an active barrier for adoption. So it is a very complicated time as an employee in large organizations right now because on one hand, you are asked to use AI as much as possible. On the other hand, they're telling you that you are going to lose your job potentially because 20 % of the workforce is not going to be there in the next five years.

29:54But the reality is they're saying very clearly that those who will know how to use AI effectively will keep their jobs and will get a salary raise. I still think that's a very scary situation to be in. The bottom line is you got to learn how to use AI and you got to learn how to use it safely and effectively in your role or potentially make yourself a brand new role if you know what you're doing. And I've seen this time and time again with people who are taking my courses, with people who participate in my community and has been there for two years and see the shifts in their careers in just two years, just because they're invested in learning how to use AI effectively, and they keep themselves up to date with skills all the time.

30:28And to connect this back to the course that I'm providing, Peter Polini, who runs PwC Financial Services Industry Practice, and I'm quoting, there is a clear need for people that understand not just what an agent is, but how do you build them? How do you think about managing them? And this is exactly what my course is teaching. But there are additional data points that are showing how different the job market is right now than it was before. So LinkedIn released a report called LinkedIn 2026 Skills on the Rise report. And that report shows something that is very interesting and yet not surprising.

31:04So technical AI skills like AI implementation, prompt engineering, etc. And on the other hand, distinctly human skills, executive communication, cross-functional collaboration are growing at roughly the same pace at the same time. Which means the labor market is not choosing between AI skills and human skills. You need to have both. The people who will have the right human skills together with AI skills will be the most successful in the future and probably the relatively near future. Another interesting data point that pushes in the same direction is from Harvard Business Analysis of US Job Posting 2019 to early 2025.

31:44What they found is that structured cognitive roles fell 13 % after Chachupiti's launch. At the same time, analytical, creative, and leadership intense roles grew 20%. That is at the early 2025. Think what happened since. The year of agents were in this past 12 months. And so I'm sure these two numbers are now more extreme, or I'm not sure. I assume that both these numbers are more extreme, meaning simple cognitive roles are probably falling even faster, and human leadership, creative thinking, judgment-related skills are probably growing even faster. Now, those of you who haven't heard my lecture, I'm saying that one of the most critical human skills right now is judgment.

32:30And judgment is the ability to make the right decisions as you are doing things and as you are working with AI. I think judgment with working with AI is the biggest differentiator between people who do the right things with AI, assuming everybody knows what they're doing. I'm not talking about people who don't have the skills, which is a gap that you can close. You can get the skills. But having the right judgment on how to use AI effectively. And it is something that is hard to teach and it is something that does require all the other things that these two surveys are talking about, right? The human-centric stuff that helps you have the right judgment, that helps you make the right decisions and steer AI in the right direction is a big differentiator in the new economy.

33:14Now, I told you the biggest problem that I see right now is that the education system is very, very far from catching up. Now, there are initiatives that we talked about on this podcast and beyond of universities that are understanding what's happening. They understand that the employers are very clear about what they need. And yet, I think they're just not moving fast enough. But just to designate a few things that are happening because there are happening, Ohio State University has initiated an AI fluency initiative in fall of 2025. It is now required coursework for first-year students on generative AI and technical tool training and so on.

33:54Carnegie Mellon University have their first U.S. bachelor degree in AI for a few years now, even before Chachi PT came out. Syracuse University has new AI degrees and university-wide integration starting in fall of 2026. Texas A &M University has discipline-specific AI integrations that are integrated into the main industries that they support, including engineering, agriculture, healthcare, etc. But the problem is not that there are no initiatives to teach AI. The problem is that teaching AI becomes a course of its own. There are multiple institutions right now that have AI degree programs. That's not what we need.

34:34I mean, it's not a problem, but that's not the real problem. The problem is that AI needs to be woven into every discipline. Anything you teach, any kind of profession you teach will use AI, meaning you don't need a course in AI. You need to teach people with everything they're learning, how to use AI in their field, how to integrate it into the actual things you're doing. And I talk to maybe not a huge amount, but not a small amount of university leaders. And they are very far from being at that point. Professors are pushing back. The actual organizations are pushing back. Some are even saying that this is, well, it's just like the internet.

35:12It is not going to fundamentally change the way we work. And I'm so shocked every time I have these conversations, but this is what top leaders in universities are saying to me behind closed doors. They do not understand that the world that they know, the world that they were teaching to prepare students for does not exist anymore. And it does exist. It exists because there's crazy friction in the industry of getting this into production and working at scale. But it's just a matter of time. In two, three, four, five years, it will be a very different universe. And if the universities only then start training people and kids into this new universe, then the graduates in these four, five, six years are going to be in deep, deep trouble when they come to try to get a job once they graduate.

35:59Now, at the same time that we're talking about the macro level, the micro level is already happening in more and more fields. And we talked about that as well. Again, I'm just reminding you and connecting all the dots together. The labs or other private organizations are doing everything they can to now focus on specific fields and develop specific capabilities in these fields in order to be significantly more productive. We talked about Microsoft, Will, that is helping companies train models for specific aspects that are now yielding significantly better results than the general models in these fields were costing significantly less.

36:31Anthropic just announced that they hired Robert Mahari, who is their first head of Claude for Legal. This guy holds a doctorate in legal from MIT, and he's now going to be working at OpenAI to develop specific legal capabilities for Claude to be able to be used in the field of law instead, or at least replacing somewhat, lawyers. I can tell you something from my own personal experience. I have a law firm that I work with to draft documents and so on. Now, my new way of working with them is I don't go to them when I need legal documents. I go to Claude and I ask Claude to research other companies in my field to see what kind of agreements they have.

37:10And it goes through these agreements and it finds all the stuff that is relevant to me and it drafts incredibly good legal agreements. Now, I'm not a lawyer. I cannot say how good they are from a legal perspective, but I read hundreds of legal agreements in my career across multiple different disciplines and they look legit. And then I send them to the lawyers to review. That means that the law firm, instead of charging me for 10, 20 hours for the work, charge me one or two hours for the work. If that happens at scale, then obviously they will need significantly less people to do the same work they're doing today.

37:42That is the situation right now. Now, to be fair, inside the law firm, I would guess, and I hope for them, that they're doing the review of the legal documents that I'm sending them with AI as well, which amplifies the problem even more. Now, obviously, Mahari himself was trying to sugarcoat it, and he said the expertise that matters most for creating impactful legal technology sits with practitioners. At its core, Claude for Legal is a set of building blocks that we are co-designing with the legal community so that lawyers can augment how they work. That is true, but the outcome is very clear.

38:15There will be a need for significantly less lawyers. Other than maybe lawyers that will handle the whole issue of gap in the legal system right now of AI damages and so on, but I'm putting that aside for a minute. Now, OpenAI has done the same thing, right? It's not just that Anthropic is moving in that direction. OpenAI has recently recruited Jason Bohemig and launching their own formal legal vertical to do basically the same thing. It's going to be called Codex for Legal, and the direction is very clear. Now, why legal, you ask out of everything? If you think about what AI is really good at and why programming was the first thing, programming is A, helps the labs run faster so that they have a vested interest to do this.

38:56But B, it's a very structured universe. Legal is the same thing. It's a very structured universe, word heavy, which are the places where AI thrives in the current level without any new improvements. It can do incredible things. And so this tells you where the direction is, but these dominoes will keep on falling one after the other. So recap of this topic. What does this mean to you? What does this mean to the world? What does this mean in your industry? What does this mean to your career? What does this mean to your company if you're a leader in that company? More and more executives and leaders are understanding that AI skills are more critical than the formal education that people had before.

39:33The actual universities are not ready with the right programming in order to enable that, which means people have to take care of themselves right now. By the way, the same applies for people inside of organizations. Many organizations are starting to take action. I'm doing workshops and courses all the time to private companies and public companies, to be fair. But what I mean by that is to companies and not public courses. I'm doing that all the time. And the gap is insane between companies who are ahead and companies who are the average right now, which has very few and very little AI skills, knowledge, and practices in place.

40:07And that is true all over the world. And that is true across industries and across sizes of companies. Again, I do this every single week. So the gap between the knowledge that people have and the knowledge people need to have in order to use AI effectively is enormous. The people at the decision-making positions are willing to pay more and more for these skills and see them as more and more important. And the labs themselves are now developing more and more capabilities that will shift from I can use AI to AI can do my job and focusing more and more on that. So the combination of all of that is the industry, any industry is not prepared for what's coming.

40:47The economy itself is not prepared for what's coming. Higher education and the entire education system is not prepared for what's coming. And while I do see the things that the leaders of the labs are saying recently more and more, that it's going to create new jobs, that human ingenuity and human research and human wish to do new things is just going to be increased by AI. And I agree, but I think the economy, as we know, it will take a very long time to adjust. And during that time, there's going to be a very big shift towards job losses, and it is going to be very significant to the economy because it is potentially going to get to 20 or more percent unemployment.

41:25And even if less, it is going to be in roles that used to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, which are the people who are moving the economy forward. I don't want to be a doomer, but this is what I really, really believe. So now let's switch to rapid fire items. There are a few really interesting topics to talk about. The first one is a group of leading companies has released Agent Plugins 1.0, which is an open format to allow standard packaging and distribution of extension for AI agents. And it is not tied to a specific vendor. Again, it's an open format that the industry will hopefully align with, similar to, as I said in the opening, skills and MCPs.

42:03So the idea here, how are you going to package all the things that agents need so you can move this package from one platform to the other, from one agent to the other, and so on. So what's in those packages? It packages agent skills, which provides the instructions for the agents what to do. It provides the MCP servers that they can connect to. And these components are now packaged within a common directory structured with a plugin.json at the end of it. And it has two directories inside, a skills directory and an MCP directory. Those of you who have been using Cloud for a while, like I am, know that a similar component exists as plugins inside of Cloud.

42:44And now I'm not sure they're exactly identical, but I assume that Anthropic will align with that structure as well. So I assume plugins will be in the same exact thing moving forward. The interesting thing is who collaborated in this process. So the company who initiated the push towards that was WerverSell. And that makes sense because they deploy things from more or less everybody on the planet right now. And so they're saying, oh, it will be a lot easier for us if things are standardized. But they collaborated with AWS, AnySphere, GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI to build and define the final version of the standard or the immediate version of the standard version one, but the one that was released to the public.

43:21Now, after the announcement, Google has also joined this group and saying that they will start using and implementing this new format as well. Now, because this collaboration in the development, agent plugins are supported across the following ChatGPT codecs, cursor, GitHub Copilot, Kiro, and VS Code immediately at launch. As I mentioned, I have a feeling this will be available and supported by everything moving forward because it makes sense. Just like skills and MCPs were so successful, I think this will be as successful in the immediate and long-term future. Now, it's been a while since we had a focused segment about OpenAI.

43:58Well, there's a few interesting pieces of news about OpenAI this week. First of all, OpenAI unlocks unlimited ChatGPT text chats for all users, including free users. So this is a major shift from the limits that we all had before. And again, the fact that it applies to free users is a little crazy to me. It will be very interesting to see how that works. There are still limits on uploading files and images and on using voice and generating images. But just text, pure text, there are no limits to how you can use ChatGPT. Now, the free tier users will now default into the new ChatGPT 5.6 Luna model, which is going to replace 5.5.

44:34And it's a 62 % reduction in factual errors compared to the model that it is replacing, GPT 5.5 instance. But I will say something from my own personal perspective. As a heavy, heavy user of Claude and still a decent user of ChatGPT, this is very attractive to me because Claude have changed sometime in the last two to three weeks. the limits on my$200 max plan. And I'm hitting my weekly limits every single week, which is really, really annoying. And having the opportunity to do this unlimited is very attractive to me. So A, I hope that Claude will follow the same path, at least for the$200 a month users like I'm paying Claude right now.

45:17And if not, I have a feeling that more and more of my work will shift to OpenAI, which is exactly why they're doing this move. How exactly are they financing this? I'm not 100 % sure because I'm pretty sure that the new restrictions in Claude, the changes in how many tokens I actually get per week for my 200 hours, I'm sure this comes not from them being cheap, but from them having capacity issues by allowing everybody to run on an unlimited environment. So it'll be very interesting to see how their response to that. But staying on OpenAI, they just launched three new education plugins to help teachers and students learn.

45:50So the plugins are K through 12 educator, college educator, and college student, and they're available through ChatUPT Work and Codex. And their goal is to streamline academic and administrative tasks for educational institutions. And as I said, one of them for students as well. Now, the college student plugins is aimed to drive engagement of college students with their course materials by generating personalized study guides, quizlets, flashcards, etc. I love this initiative. I've been delivering this kind of training to teachers for a while now as volunteer work and showing them how they can do the same and having a pre-made plugin that comes with the platform as long as you know that it exists and you know how to use it is really, really important because I think the future of education is significantly more personalized, more engaging and more fun for students.

46:40And then they'll be able to learn significantly faster than they are today in just the general standardized classroom environment. So kudos to OpenAI for moving in that direction. And the last piece of news about OpenAI is that they filed motion to dismiss Apple's trade secret lawsuit. Again, not surprising. We talked about the lawsuit. The lawsuit looks really, really bad. It talks about OpenAI stealing everything they're developing in hardware in a very aggressive way from Apple. And so OpenAI's core argument for dismissal in a 31-page motion to dismiss is that Apple's complaint is baseless and pretextual.

47:16And basically, they're claiming that Apple is failing in the AI space and that they're trying to go after OpenAI because they are not able to do that. If you want to hear some of the specific quotes from Apple's lawsuit, you can go two weeks back and listen to the episode. It is very, very specific on things that they're claiming that OpenAI is doing, including aggressively hiring employees and telling them to bring stuff from Apple to them and doing things that are very far from acceptable in any perspective. but OpenAI is obviously claiming that is not the case and they're saying and I'm quoting no use need or desire for Apple's trade secret.

47:51How will this evolve? I don't know. The courts will decide. I'm sure that's not going to happen in a day or two but on the other hand this may have a very significant impact on OpenAI's hardware initiatives which will have an impact on their public offering. So we will follow this closely and I will keep you posted. But switching from OpenAI to the growing competition in the AI field, Meta just launches Muse Code Terminal Agent and Muse Spark 1.0. Muse Code is obviously Meta's effort to have a player in the burning hot agentic code development universe. It is an ASIC background agents that run active throughout sessions in parallel to develop new capabilities, spawning for agents for specific individual tasks, reducing latency and reducing redundant information.

48:39So again, parallel work of multiple agents, as we've seen in the most advanced tools right now. I haven't seen specific reports on the capabilities of the model because it was just released, but we'll probably get those next week. As I mentioned, they also launched Muse Spark 1.2, which is the latest version of their really capable model. So am I saying that Meta is back in the race? I don't know yet, but they definitely have a much better chance in the race right now. The question is, are there too late in the race? I'm not sure. I think there are two competing arguments here. One is that a lot of the big organization and midsize organization, so on, already picked a horse and are running with it.

49:18But on the flip side, I think the pricing capabilities is going to be significant. And I think if AI will, and I think it will become a commodity, meaning the vast majority of things can be resolved by most models, and I think we're practically already there, then companies may switch and jump ship if it's going to be relatively easy to do so, if there's going to be a faster, easier, cheaper way to do things. So time will tell. The reality is in the big companies, the enterprise world, think about how many companies are with the same platforms for decades because it's hard to switch. I think the capture of territory that has happened in the last two years is going to make it hard for Muse to be successful.

49:58But in the smaller companies, small to mid-sized businesses, it is definitely still for grabs. And it will be interesting to see whether or not Meta is actually successful in doing so. Staying on the competition, Alibaba just launched QEN 3.8 Max, which is a$2.4 trillion AI model that is challenging the top models from China and the Western Hemisphere models as well. How good is this model? Well, one thing that they released is that the model has run autonomously doing a coding sprint for 16 days. This is out of this world. It is absolutely crazy. During these 16 days, the model accumulated 267 commits, 127 pull requests, and 151 issues that it has created and built.

50:43The system during this time continuously collected community requirements, dispatched issues, generated code, verified results, etc. Basically, a full development team, including product and engagement with users that is completely autonomous. This is not something I've seen anybody do so far. Now, is it good? How good is the code? How good is the product? I'm not 100 % sure. But just the fact that they were able to do this is really impressive. It is showing you where the world is going and it is showing you where the Chinese are right now in the race. So I think the gap, if it exists at all, between the US and China is very, very thin right now.

51:20Switching from competition in the model space to competition between the companies, Microsoft just had their earnings call and it was absolutely crazy good for Microsoft. So Microsoft Q2 earnings has driven a crazy rally. The shares has surged over 20 % in the beginning and then up following the call. The main thing is not their AI success, but their monetization success, which is what actually counts in the stock market. Azure cloud is exploding. Azure revenue is significantly surging 43 % year over year, and its cloud annual revenue is surpassing$100 billion for the first time ever. They've been very disciplined compared to the other companies, still crazy spending on their capital expenditure.

52:03So they're actually lowering their 2026 CapEx guidance from$190 billion to$175 billion, still a crazy amount. But it is moving in the right direction. And we talked about the other companies releasing their results and being punished for too aggressive capital investments. So the same thing is happening here. More capital discipline is driving better results for the stock market. One of the interesting things that they shared is that the usage of Copilot has grown to 30 million users. Now, this blows my mind, first of all, because it's a really, really, really, really large number. The second is I did a workshop this week for Copilot, which means I had to go back and I don't use Copilot regularly.

52:47I only go back to it when I need to do workshops for it and I have a license and I work with it. First of all, understanding the licensing mechanism is on the verge of impossible. I spent a few hours on the phone with Microsoft experts to try to figure out how to get specific capabilities into my platform so I can demo them. And I failed, including the help with Microsoft to try to figure out how to do this. But second, Copilot's performance is very far behind OpenAI and even further behind Claude on the specific things that I was trying to create. So I was trying to do the same exact thing with Claude because that's what I'm used to and then convert it into Copilot.

53:23and I failed miserably after multiple attempts. And I feel that I know how to use AI pretty effectively. And so co-pilot's capabilities is not even close to the frontier right now. And yet they were able to grow it to 30 million users. It's absolutely mind-blowing. My hearts and thoughts are with those 30 million users that don't really know what AI can actually do for them. And they're using a system that is maybe aligned with something that was available a year ago on the other labs. Not even that potentially. but from a financial perspective and a distribution success for Microsoft this is a huge success and it shows that in many cases having access to solid distribution is more important than the actual capabilities.

54:02The one thing that they mentioned that I found very interesting is that they are planning to deploy the capability for Copilot to be more of a router than an actual model if you want where it will behind the scenes potentially be model agnostic. It will allow you to switch to whatever model you want or potentially, and I'm assuming, choose for you. So going down the path of the router craze that we're seeing right now, just built into the Microsoft environment. If they do this, they will see, I believe, huge success because then they will not be stuck with what Copilot is doing as Copilot, which is a very reduced watered down version of whatever it is they're running in the back end right now, to potentially being able to run the top models from the top labs, potentially open source models to run on your data in your Azure cloud while you just talk to Copilot and be fully connected to everything.

54:51Microsoft, if they pull this off, I think it will be gangbusters and it will be a huge success, even more than they're seeing right now. Now, staying on Microsoft and on a topic that we talked a lot about in the past couple of months, which is the reduction of usage of AI inside large organizations. So Microsoft is directing individual divisions to meet token consumption targets and face potential restrictions if they don't, basically saying no more token maxing, you each have a quota and you got to work with that quota instead of using as many tokens as you want. This is not new. Again, we've seen this across industries, across countries, across different sizes of companies.

55:25I'm seeing this with many of the companies I work with. It's a very serious challenge to keep the AI usage under a specific quota. And it is something that all organizations would have to learn how to deal with. The main thing is not even how many people are using it or how they're using it is using advanced models for things that don't necessarily require advanced models. And these advanced models require sometimes 50x the tokens than the lower quality models that are still good enough to do the tasks in an effective way. Again, this is the huge success of the smart routers that we're seeing in the recent few months is because this is a real need in the business world.

56:05Now, switching to robotics, there are a few interesting robotics news this week that all connect to the fact that the robotics world is going to change dramatically. And I have a feeling it will happen in 2027 or worst case scenario, 2028, where we're going to see a huge leap in the usage of robotics. So the first one is Reimagine Robotics, which is a new company founded by former Google DeepMind applied robotics leaders, has emerged from stealth. And what they're developing is a robot that learns on the job, meaning instead of spending hours and days and months in training robots they just learn as they work with humans next to them you show them the task they're watching uh you do it the robot attempts it you give it feedback just like a human employee would learn and it learns significantly faster and way way way cheaper than the way robots learn right now another new robotics company was announced this week.

57:03It's called Exclaim Robotics, and it's a Swiss startup founded by a former Microsoft researcher called Helen Olienkova, and they're emerged from stealth with 4.95 million in precede funding. Their robots are specifically built to maintain and help operate data centers. So this is not a generalized robot come and do any kind of job. They're built specifically for data centers. Why do I think this is an interesting piece of news? Because we're hearing more and more the argument that AI generates a lot of jobs, especially around data centers that will require people to build them and maintain them.

57:40And now you see immediately a robotics company that's going to target that specific need. So will there be a huge spike in needs for humans building and maintaining data centers? Yes, in the short term. In the long term, the robots will do most of that work or I don't know if most but some of that work for sure. Switching from that to Anthropic that are now going to build their own custom chips just like all the other big labs. Anthropic is launching an in-house chip design team to enhance cloud efficiency at scale. Now they're doing something interesting. They are planning a strategic initiative that aims to call design hardware and AI models enabling cloud to basically have chips that are custom built for it.

58:20Think about how Apple builds its stuff. So Apple builds the software and the hardware it runs on. The same kind of thing for specifically Claude to be more efficiently running on those things. We heard just last week or two weeks ago, OpenAI announcing their first chip is ready. So the same kind of thing coming from Anthropic. They are actively hiring for a custom silicon team and they're looking for people who are engineer experienced in shipping semiconductor designs and they're offering pretty hefty salaries between$320 ,000 to$485 ,000 per year for these petitions. Again, this is not a new move.

58:54It's just a new move from Anthropic. All the other labs are already doing it. So this is just Anthropic trying to align with what the other labs are doing right now, building their own custom chips. Now, a really big piece of news when it comes to AI leadership came from Google this week. CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that there are significant leadership changes in Google DeepMind, elevating Demis Asabis to chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet to focus on shaping the future of AGI, while Kavu Kuglu assumes the role of senior vice president overseeing the daily operations. They're saying that the restructuring comes as Google reports extraordinarily momentum across its AI stack, with Gemini reaching 950 million monthly active users and Gemma models surpassing 900 million downloads.

59:43Now, we talked a lot about Google in the past few months and how they've disappeared from the race. And I told you what my thoughts were that I was thinking that Demis doesn't care about the race. He said that multiple times. He cares about solving world problems. And I think this shift is in order to move him away from the day to day where he wasn't delivering or his department wasn't delivering. I don't know if that was on purpose or not, but his focus is very, very clearly on other things. And I think the move is exactly to do that. It allows Demis to focus on the things he believes are important for humanity with the future of this technology and allowing somebody else to actually run the day to day in order to potentially stay competitive in the AI race.

1:00:29going back to the huge success that they're talking about with almost a billion active users for Gemini, again, not surprising, very similar to Microsoft. They have the distribution. If you have the distribution, you don't necessarily need the best models around in order to see financial success. So it will be very interesting to see what happens now in Google. I assume we will see them back on the map with some interesting models coming and integrations into their entire ecosystem. They've been focusing a lot on that integration and not necessarily on driving new models. And I'll summarize this section with two quotes from Demis.

1:01:03He said, it's critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder. And at the same time, he said, we have arrived at a pivotal moment of human history. I've been working towards AGI my whole life. And now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. So there you go. One of the most respectable and knowledgeable people in the AI space since its more or less modern inception is telling that AGI is basically here and that is going to be focusing on trying to get it right. And now the last thing I want to share with you, and there's other articles, and you can go and read them in the newsletter, but the last article is a very interesting one.

1:01:48Heijin's co-founder, Wayne Liang, developed an AI sales agent powered by his digital avatar and a knowledge vault system to handle the prospect calls during his eight-week eternity leave. According to his ex-post this week, the agent conducted 2 ,741 prospect conversations, converted 132 into paying customers, and opened 37 enterprise opportunities worth$3 million in revenue while he was on leave. So how does the agent work? It has three main components. One is a live avatar, which is the actual video avatar of the person. The second is Live Claw Knowledge Vault, which is a system that knows how to access the vault very effectively, so how to manage the data.

1:02:37And then the actual Knowledge Vault itself that maintains over 1 ,400 markdown files that teach the agent everything it needs to know in order to have the context across everything it needs to know. Now, going back and closing the full circle on how we started this episode, this did not come without any issues. So the agent has had three main failures that now have been redesigned and been resolved, but the agent reasoned pricing instead of retrieving it. So it quoted a non-existent annual plan at 4 ,800 hours that it completely made up. It leaked internal triage metadata to customers and it promised meetings with teams who hadn't really been agreed to.

1:03:17So those have been exposed during its operation has been fixed. But it is telling you again, these tools are incredibly powerful in the ends of the people who know how to connect the dots together. Again, having the visual aspect, the brain aspect, and the data vault aspect figured out correctly can do incredible things, but it will also do unpredictable things that you can't anticipate and you have to monitor very closely all the time in order to prevent it from causing damage. That's it for this week. Really interesting things are happening. The level of things that we're talking about and their impact on the world is rising every single week.

1:03:56I assume you've noticed that. I hope that you find my new way of telling that story by connecting the dots and trying to tell bigger stories versus just news articles. I hope you find this valuable. If you do, I would appreciate if you would drop me a note on LinkedIn and say, hey, we've been listening to the new versions of the episodes. We really like it. We hate it. You tell me what you think. I would really love to hear your feedback. We'll be back on Tuesday with a really interesting how-to episode that is going to show you how to create visual content in an incredibly effective way that actually works versus looks like AI slop.

1:04:28Before I go, I want to remind you to take a look at the course. There's a link in the show notes if you're interested in taking the course in September. And also, I want to remind you that we have an amazing community that meets every Friday at 1 p.m. Eastern. We call it the AI Friday Hangouts. there's now over 30 people every single week and it's growing all the time. These are people who are sharing their AI findings, sharing amazing golden nuggets on things that they've developed and how they went through different issues that are asking questions and getting answers. Just an amazing lively community of people who care about AI.

1:04:59So you can come and join us. There's a link for that in the show notes as well. That's it for today. I hope you learned a lot and I hope you have an amazing rest of your weekend.