In short
Podcast Summary: Marketing School - Episode #2985
Episode Title Famed Investor Asserts That AI Is Underhyped, How ChatGPT Connectors Are Changing The Game For Businesses
Episode Description In this episode, hosts Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss the escalating adoption of AI technologies, significant investments in AI infrastructure, and the implications of these advancements for the marketing industry. They delve into market valuations, the efficiency of OpenAI connectors, and the regulatory challenges surrounding data ownership in enterprise software.
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Key Discussions
- AI Adoption and Infrastructure Growth (00:00)
- Rapid User Growth: ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just 0.2 years, a stark contrast to previous tech milestones (e.g., Netflix took over 10 years).
- Investment Insights: Major tech companies are investing heavily in infrastructure, with $212 billion spent annually, marking a 63% year-on-year growth.
- Cost Reduction: Costs associated with AI technologies, such as inference costs, have dramatically decreased by 99.7% in two years.
- The Future of AI in Marketing (02:49)
- AI's Long-Term Potential: Despite current limitations in AI capabilities, the long-term potential for transforming marketing practices is significant.
- Changing Job Dynamics: Traditional IT job postings are declining as AI job postings surge by 448%, indicating a shift in workforce requirements.
- Valuations and Market Dynamics (05:51)
- Valuation Examples: Notable private market valuations include OpenAI at $300 billion with a 33X revenue multiple, and Anthropic valued at $61.5 billion.
- Investment Perspective: While some may consider these valuations high, the hosts argue that they reflect the anticipated long-term value of AI technologies.
- OpenAI Connectors and Business Efficiency (08:51)
- Integration Capabilities: New connectors allow ChatGPT to integrate with platforms like HubSpot, driving efficiency in business operations by automating data analysis and reporting.
- Decision-Making Enhancement: The automation of routine analytics can significantly speed up decision-making processes for businesses.
- Regulatory Challenges and Data Ownership (11:55)
- Data Privacy Concerns: The hosts discuss the complexities of using AI tools within organizations, particularly regarding data ownership and compliance with privacy laws.
- Enterprise Restrictions: Some enterprise software contracts now include terms preventing clients from training AI models on their data, raising questions about data usage rights.
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Key Takeaways
- AI Underestimation: The potential of AI in marketing and broader applications is often underestimated, especially regarding long-term impacts and capabilities.
- Transformative Tools: New AI tools and integrations (like OpenAI connectors) are transforming how businesses operate, allowing for faster and more efficient workflows.
- Market Shifts: The landscape of job roles and skill requirements is shifting dramatically due to the rise of AI, suggesting a need for adaptation in workforce training and hiring practices.
- Regulatory Landscape: Navigating data ownership and compliance remains a challenge for businesses leveraging AI, which can impede rapid growth and innovation.
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Next Steps
For further insights, consider
- Subscribing to the Marketing School YouTube channel for more marketing strategies.
- Exploring resources from Eric and Neil, including their respective YouTube channels and agencies.
- Engaging with the broader marketing community to discuss these evolving trends.
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Feedback and Engagement If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review and suggesting topics for future episodes at [Marketing School](https://www.marketingschool.io).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28Anyway, we can move on. is literally unprecedented. So you look at the years to reach 100 million users from 2000 to 2023, at the very high point, chat GPT took 0.2 years to get there. Netflix took like 10.3 years. So we know that part already, right? To get to 100 million users, it's at zero to 800 million weekly users in 17 months, okay? But the internet adoption has also skyrocketed since people like Netflix first came about. Which else? Infrastructure math is unprecedented. So we know that the big tech company, CapEx, they're spending a lot on infrastructure right now, right? So$212 billion annually, which is 63 % year-on-year growth, right?
1:07Wow. And you like numbers. I'm going to keep going. This will be entertaining. Infrastructure, including like power plants and stuff like that. Yeah. Amazon AWS CapEx has percentage of revenue, 49 % versus 4 % during initial cloud buildout. So it's way higher now, right? Microsoft AI business,$13 billion run rate, 175 % year-on-year growth. NVIDIA data center revenue, 39 billion quarterly, 78 % year on year growth, okay? I'm gonna keep, I'm gonna read off a couple more numbers here. So token costs have collapsed 99.7 % in two years, right? So inference cost, that means the cost to do something using like a chat GPT, fell 99.7 % from November 2022 to December 2024.
1:48NVIDIA's GPUs are 105 ,000 times less energy per token, right? So what costs dollars now costs pennies. So the cost of intelligence is coming down a lot, right? And this is, I still think we're in the very nascent stages right now. And so you can see this graph over here, the AI efficiency gains over time. It's basically dropping to near nothing. We're talking pennies, right? Yep. Now, just a couple more things and I'll turn it over to you. So you look at, there's a couple of enterprises. So Cursor, obviously, you know, from 1 million to 300 million ARR in 25 months. And it's used by millions of programmers, edits over 1 billion characters per day.
2:23Harvey, the legal AI. Wait, didn't Cursor go public recently? No. Or was there something else? Winsurf sold to OpenAI for$3 billion. Are you talking about that one? No, who went public in the AI space recently? I wasn't Cursor. Okay, that's fine. Someone went public recently and their stock just boomed. I forgot. CodeWeaver or something? Code, what was it? I don't know. You're talking about the one that has the data center stuff, right? AI stock, IPL, booms. Okay, well, I'm going to keep going here. So CoreWeave. CoreWeave, yeah. So they help with data center stuff. Cool. Yeah. Harvey, legal AI, 10 million to 70 million AR in 15 months.
2:58That's legal AI. Abridge, which is healthcare AI, 50 million to 170 million CARR in five months. I don't even know what that means. And then physical world AI scaling even faster than software. So Tesla, full self-driving, 4 billion fully self-driven miles. Waymo is now 27 % market share of SF rideshare bookings. And then Anduro, you know, the defense company, 2x revenue growth for AI enabled defense systems. And the final thing I'll say here is AI job postings are up 448 % while traditional IT jobs fell. So the great reshuffling. So I think you and I can both agree, maybe we're in the first inning of AI right now.
3:38I think it's very early. I don't think we're going to see the full gains of this for a while. It's just like the internet, the dotcom era. We didn't see a lot of these gains for a very long time. And so you have Shopify CEO. Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify. Duolingo CEO. AI use will be part of what we look for in hiring. AI use will be part of what we evaluate in performance reviews. Headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work. So I believe a little bit different than Mary Meeker. I believe that's her name from Bond. I believe AI in the short run or right now is overhyped, I think it's underestimated and underhyped for long-term potential.
4:17And the reason I say that, and I'm specifically talking about marketing, when you look at marketing and AI and you talk to organizations, they believe AI agents, AI tools, as it stands right now in today's world, can just do everything for you and run marketing campaigns. And we're seeing startups fire all marketing teams and be like, we're just going to run it through AI. That's not the reality we live in today. in the long run though i genuinely do believe people underestimate what ai can do for you in marketing and just in general when it comes to advertising from a global aspect like knowing your fingerprints on a fridge and you're the one opening it up and figuring out what items you take and weighing milk and being like this is how much of this food you neil ate or eric ate or whatever it may be and this is how they need to optimize their health and then insurance companies can adjust premium or figure out if they want to target you because you're a better potential patient or candidate or life insurance companies could figure out how much they're going to end up charging you and they can adjust how they do their marketing based on a lot of those devices.
5:17Now data comes into play here and what they can or can't take and laws and all that kind of stuff. But I think A is really going to change the way we do marketing in the long run. And I believe the pyramid is going to be flipped upside down in which right now you have few executives, a lot of people underneath, I think it's going to be flipped around in which executives portion-wise, percentage-wise, right? Not total number of headcount, but percentage-wise will make up a bigger number of your pool. And then you're going to have a lot less people on the bottom end of a pyramid because a lot of that kind of stuff can be automated by AI.
5:51Let me read some of these valuations here and then I'll give you my thoughts on underhyped long-term and short-term. So private market valuations, OpenAI is$300 billion valuation on$9.2 billion in revenue. So 33X multiple. Anthropic is$61.5 billion valuation on$2 billion in revenue, the 31x multiple. But it's already, it grew to$3 billion ARR already. They did. Yeah. And then XAI,$80 billion valuation on less than$1 billion in revenue, so greater than the 80x multiple. So combined,$95 billion raised against$11 billion in annualized revenue. So I think the valuations are, some people might say it's rich, but I actually believe that AI is under-hyped in the long term.
6:28And I think it's under-hyped in the short term too. just because the vast majority of people right now, I do agree, they can't do a lot of things that we want to do, right? But the vast majority of people also, when I'm playing around with it, like I was playing around with the connector yesterday with HubSpot and ChatGPD, I'm like, I have all these superpowers that I didn't have two years ago. I feel freaking unstoppable. And so I think we're just scraping the surface right now, but I think long-term, the stuff you mentioned versus like, I'm going to be able to see what's going on with my body every night, what's wrong with my biomarkers.
6:58Oh, something like, I don't want to make it disgusting or whatever, but like you're going to have toilets that can scan everything that's wrong with you. Like we are going there. And I told everyone, earlier we talked about my mom passing. I told everyone, I don't know why I've been doing this. I think it's the growth oriented side. But when I talk to my relatives, like, how are you doing? Whatever. And I just, I go into like, you know, guys, as long as we just live another 10 years, like we don't have to worry about this stuff anymore. Right. And I truly believe that cancer, disease and all this stuff, if we can just live five, 10 more years, AI, healthcare, all these things, we're just going to be in a good spot.
7:28by the way, speaking of AI, do you know who might sponsor this podcast? Sam Altman. Really? Yeah. They hit us up. Yeah. OpenAI did. Not OpenAI. Another company. ChatGPT. No. Yo, you don't know about, you know about this. They have like this eyeball scanning thing, the world thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a crypto company that he had that's doing this now. Yeah, yeah. So it might happen. Who knows? That'll be cool. We'll figure it out. But yeah. Anyway, that's what we think about AI. But dude, can I just talk about that OpenAI connector? You like this. Yeah, go for it. You're going to do this over the weekend.
7:59I guarantee it. Because it won't make you money. This will make you money, guys. Okay. It will or will not make you money. Will make you money. All right. Let's talk about that. All right. So the OpenAI version that we pay for right now is the pro version, which is$200 a month. As of two, three days ago, ChatGPT just added connectors, MCP connectors to HubSpot, to your Google Calendar, to your Gmail. So what I did two days ago, I was like, hey. So I just connected my HubSpot. I was like, tell me about the last six months worth of deals versus the previous six months. Tell me about all the key metrics and everything.
8:30It started to summarize the conversion rates. It started to summarize the weak points. Oh, here's your sales velocity over here. Here's what it looks like. And the numbers were accurate, right? And it spent two hours researching. And I'm like, dude, this would have taken an analyst days, maybe even weeks to do. And it just did it. And now I can make decisions faster. I instantly compiled that. I sent it to the team. I was like, guys, here's our new sales plan for, and I want you guys to talk about it next week when I'm not gonna be in that meeting because I wanna see how they do without me. And so then I started asking about, oh, on the carrot side, right?
8:59Because that's more of a startup right now. Oh, who should we be following up with there? And it listed the reasons on who should be followed up with next and then when the last contact was and what we said to them in that contact. And I'm like, oh, okay, my calendar, help me. Tell me how I've been spending my time in the last six months and how it's been trending upwards or downwards for each of these different categories. It did that for me, right? That used to have to be done by hand using an EA. So my point of saying all this is that someone like you or me who likes to look at numbers, you can get these things quickly.
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11:44I bet you I will not be able to use it this weekend or it'll take a while. My legal team will have to look into who owns the data. Are they training off our data and all that kind of stuff? They're not training on it. But we still have to check contractually because we are based on their terms of service and privacy policies. The reason I say that is we have clients with strict contracts. The bigger organizations, usually the stricter contracts you have. The last thing we can have is other people's data being passed into open AI, them using it for other purposes. Like it'll just cause me to get into a lawsuit.
12:17Do you use it for your Salesforce or your HubSpot? No. You can't? Potentially. Do you have your client information in there? We have client information in there. Okay. So I had to find out. And also personal information too. We let people know and our privacy in terms of service, I don't know which one it is, that we're collecting data. We list out tools and things like that. Yeah. And I don't know exactly how it works, but we have in-house counsel plus outside counsel. I just know for a fact, we can't just use tools that may access the data. We have to see exactly how it's being accessed. Is it ours?
12:49Is it they don't store it? Like I have to get checks on all this kind of stuff. That's the hardest part about growing right now in our organization. So send them that message. I mean, so you can play around with this in a couple of weeks then. No, no. But hopefully the reason I say this is the hardest part, like this is what's frustrating for me as an entrepreneur. And it totally makes sense. And I'm not trying to break any laws is my growth potential is also being stuck because of rules, laws and regulation. And I'm not saying that's wrong or right. Usually when you're a startup, what allows you to move fast is you don't have red tape.
13:24You just do whatever you want. There's not really any consequences. You're not making money. when your organization is scaled up and you have revenue. You need to protect. You need to protect. Yeah, which makes sense. So I trust that you might be using this in the next couple of weeks because I think you would love this. I hope so. I'll have to find out what I can and can use. Oh, you guys are on Teams and Microsoft too, right? They have a lot of Microsoft Connect. Oh, because they're partnered with Microsoft, obviously. Yeah, dude. They're the big partner. You can do a Teams integration too and all these things, but you can just ask whatever questions without having...
13:51I think that's the thing that bothers me the most. It's like, why do I have to wait so long to get these seemingly basic things? basic things because I just want to make decisions fast. And everyone talks about how OpenAI is crushing it and they're making all this money and they're growing so fast. Very few people talk about how much Microsoft will make from this because they were the earliest funder and they put in the most money at the earliest time. Now they've raised tons of money from other players at crazy high valuations, maybe more in total than what Microsoft funded. But percentage ownership wise, I don't think it's public or I don't have the data.
14:20Maybe it is. I'm pretty sure Microsoft owns a majority or not the majority. They're the largest individual shareholder of open AI. Yeah. And you can tell open AI is trying to break out of it a little bit. Yeah. I think they're having issues, but dude, people talk about like, oh, it's too high valuations. This on perplexing your open AI. These investors, what people aren't seeing is they're giving the crazy valuations to the ones that are already somewhat proven and the most likely to win. And they have bottom side protection where some of these deals, they're getting liquidation preferences and things to make sure they're making at least double their money or triple their money.
14:58So, yeah, they're giving high valuations, but a lot of these deals usually have downside protections for these investors. I do think before we move on from this and we can talk about Meta for a second, then we can move over to the Elon versus Trump thing. I do think that these MCP connectors, me using it the other day with OpenAI, I was like, oh, wow. I feel like a lot of apps that go through it this way when you make like a custom MCP connector, that's going to be the new app store. It's not the OpenAI app store. It's actually connecting it through Answer to Public or Scout or whatever else that you have and helping people use your product from ChatGPT.
15:32Yeah. I think that's the new app store. I think that will be the new app store. Time will tell, though. I have no idea. The real problem with the App Store is what are they going to restrict? Because Apple and all these players really do try to restrict. Yeah. And they take a big tax too. Yeah. But if it affects their revenue, they will restrict on what you can do. And maybe they open it up with connectors and all this kind of stuff, but they probably want to make sure they're still making money. I just love the fact that I can get this data at my fingertips now. And I feel like I'm unblocked.
16:03It's like I'm getting more and more unblocked every day. That's what it is. Wait. wait, you can get the data right now. Wait till some of these platforms start blocking you. Like I was in France the other day. Did you know there's no AI overviews in France? No. Yeah, there's regulations. Every country is different. It's not as simple. Yeah, I didn't know that. Just wait, I'm telling you, it'll get harder and harder because then you're going to have to deal with laws for individual countries and be like, oh, you can't do this with AI or you can't. Like, just think about that for a minute. You're talking about data and connectors.
16:33I'm talking about Google has already scraped content they can't just quickly and easily roll out AI overviews in certain countries because of regulation. I was listening to BG Squared this morning and I think there's like some enterprises saying, oh, that you can't train off like your own data or something like that. Or like, even though you paid for like a, oh, Salesforce said this in their terms now. They've updated their terms. Apparently, someone can correct me here. But imagine you're paying seven to eight figures a year for a Salesforce contract. And they say, oh, you can't train off that data.
17:03You can ask whatever you want, but you can't use like an LLM to train off of it. That's in the terms now. I believe it. Yeah. Which sets a precedent that maybe if you're enterprise software, even mid-market software, that you might just put that in your terms now, where it's like you can query whatever you want, but you know, you can't. It's not your data. Even though you're paying big money for it. But they want you to use Salesforce's LLM. Their agent. Their agent. Yeah. To do everything and collect more revenue. Which is fair. Like you would too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I don't blame them for it.
17:32That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.
