A Report from the AI Frontlines with The Neuron's Pete Huang

0:01Today on the AI Breakdown, we are talking to Pete Huang, the founder of the Neuron. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to Breakdown.network for more information about our YouTube, our newsletter, and our Discord.

0:24Hello, friends, back with another travel-era interview. And today I'm really excited to have on the show Non-Mayor Pete, as he goes by on Twitter, who is of course one of the creators of The Neuron, an extremely popular AI newsletter. Hello friends, quick note before we get to the rest of the episode, you have probably heard me talk about the AI education beta over the past few months. We've had a ton of you participate, which has been amazing, and now we're almost ready to announce something big and something new. If you want to be one of the first to hear about our new approach to learning AI that is hyper practical, hands-on, immediately relevant, continuously upgrading, and anchored by community, go to besuper.ai and sign up to be notified when the project goes live.

1:08We're getting there in just a few weeks, and I want all of you along for the journey. Once again, that's besuper.ai. In this conversation, we talk about the rapid pace of development in AI, some of Pete's impressions from the recent NVIDIA conference, and of course, the way that an entire new media establishment is being built up around AI, which, as you know, is very interesting to me. It is a really fun conversation, so let's dive right in. All right, Pete, welcome to the AI Breakdown. How are you doing, sir? I'm good. How are you? Thanks for having me on. Yeah, super excited. Having been through a couple different sets of, call it, emergent content creators in emerging tech fields, I can very confidently say that I think that the people who are doing AI content right now are way nicer and more sincere and more sort of like driven by the right things than, as a for example, the folks who might have been creating content in crypto a couple years ago.

2:05And so it's great to have you on. For those who don't know, you are the Neuron. Let's just start with a little bit of a background about what you're building and the context, I guess, that you have to sort of be paying as much attention to AI as you do. Totally. So I wrote a newsletter called The Neuron. We have about 400 ,000 readers. the whole angle is to teach business leaders and knowledge workers how to use and leverage AI in their work and transform their business right it is very much about applied AI is not just oh all this like drama that's going on and everything it's like okay like how do we actually make use of this kind of stuff right so we ship a newsletter every Monday through Friday we've been at this since January of last year I think kind of going back to your earlier point there in the introduction I think the motivations here of the people creating content have been very different than the people who, again, are doing crypto stuff, right?

2:51Like crypto is all about financial gain and financial incentives, like things like that. And then here, I think, you know, at least my motivation for doing this is very much look like this wave is coming. And there's gonna be this very, very fast acceleration. And the more that we can bring people along and sort of share what's going on and sort of drip feed the information of, you know, again, how this is going to impact their work, the better, right? And so we saw this as an opportunity to get to do that. And of course, it's been super fun to be in people's inboxes every day and share, of course, the news and contextualize it, but then also the tips and tricks along the way as well.

3:23Yeah, it's super interesting. So first of all, I think huge congratulations are in order. There's been a million newsletters. And we were saying this a little bit before the show, but you guys are in the sort of the very small number that have sort of risen to the top of the heap, which means you're definitely doing something right. I guess what have you learned? Is there anything unexpected about the audience that's come here or the types of things that they're looking for that you wouldn't have imagined when you started? Oh, such a good question. I think my biggest surprise is just how much interest there is in AI today.

3:55Of course, I think that sounds pretty obvious when I say it out loud, but I spent the last five or six years of my career in tech startups, right? And so scaling a lot of these software products. And we oftentimes encounter these quote unquote early adopter types. And in our minds, that's a very specific persona, right? These are the folks who are gadget geeks. These people are always doing research online. They sort of are very self-sufficient on the internet. They just somehow know how to use things on the internet and find a way to certain resources. And when I started, I was imagining, okay, there's going to be a wave of people interested in AI who definitely fit this profile.

4:31Certainly, you know, I'm based in San Francisco. A lot of those folks are here, but a lot of them are located in big cities, sort of, again, very self-sufficient. What I've noticed is with AI, it is truly everyone. It is truly, truly everyone that is interested in that can benefit from the kind of resources that we're able to share and context that we're able to provide. The same folks who would not be trying sort of the next startup or the next fancy product that tech Twitter loves, they are going into ChatGPT or Claude or trying new prompt frameworks or trying new recipes that affect their work, right?

5:04So I've been very pleasantly surprised by just how much interest there is around AI, the amount of attention that people give. And I think it's appropriate because I think you and I both know this, right? Like this is having dramatic impact on businesses today. It's going to continue to be that way and ramp in the future. And so I love that people are spending the time and energy to pay attention to this because that's going to pay off for them. It's going to pay off in time savings every day. It's going to impact their P &L if they are business owners. And I'm really excited to see just how the future of business and work changes because of this.

5:35Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think that it's a very, there's a real mental reorientation that's required when you're sort of digging into this space to understand that on the one hand, there are similar sort of early adopter dynamics, but that the profile of who's early adopting is so much more diverse and just larger than things we've seen in the past, right? So it feels weird to say like ChatGPT has 100 million weekly users or probably more at this point. But it's weird to call 100 million weekly users and the fastest growing product of all time early adopters. But if you kind of understand that the total addressable market of people using this is probably more like 4 billion, then it feels less like crazy to call it early adopters.

6:18And I've certainly found that the people who are paying attention to this stuff now kind of get that. There's this interesting combination of urgency from the standpoint of not wanting to be left behind and sort of fear of missing out of opportunities, but also an excitement that, hey, I am seeing the future a little bit before the guy in the cubicle next to me to be a little bit reductive. And that's an opportunity for me to jump some rungs on the corporate ladder or maybe finally break out of the corporate ladder and do that thing that I wanted to do. And that's a very exciting energy, I think, to be around.

6:56Totally, totally. I completely agree. And I don't know if you've seen these stats, but it's something like, you know, the people using chat to be here, AI at work, oftentimes don't tell their bosses. I mean, it's sort of this sort of, oh, I have the secret with me that I know how to do this thing. And it's giving me massive leverage in my day job. It's allowing me to go save an hour or two and go pick my kids, like go run errands during the day or whatever it might be if you're working a remote job. or otherwise just do the things that I kind of want to be doing instead of the menial tasks every day or the boring work, right?

7:28So I agree with you. The impact here is huge. It is definitely billions of people. There's also a geographic element, right? So I've taught some courses where the audience was primarily located in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The awareness of the products, how many people have actually gotten hands-on with those products, way less than I I would say, in the US, in English-speaking countries, in Western Europe, etc. So I think it's just with how fast this is moving, it's creating some disparity a little bit, both within mature markets, but then also across geographies as to who is actually getting their hands on this thing and spending the time to be able to test and experiment and figure out recipes that work for them.

8:07Yeah, well, you know what's interesting about that too, contrasted a little bit with the fact that almost every survey that I see now shows that attitudes towards AI in, for example, the developing world relative to the West, it's way more positive. The attitudes towards AI in India are massively more positive than in the US. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about to what extent that reflects a natural sort of property that we're starting to see of generative AI to equalize opportunity from the bottom up, where it sort of levels the playing field in a way, and that being a better thing sort of for emerging economies.

8:45or if it's just a matter of how sort of viciously negative the media cycle around it, you know, has been for the last year based on, you know, real concerns that people could have. But it's just like, you know, a real concern about, you know, X risk turns into just like the favorite story that you could ever have from a clickbait perspective for media. And that's all Americans here at this point, I think about it. Yeah, yeah, I think I agree with that. I think the The X risk stuff is, look, that's a big issue, right? Like I don't have the answer. I certainly can't predict the future, but it is such a lopsided thing where like, yeah, theoretically the thing could be so bad in the end state or has some like devastating consequence that even caring 1 % about it is probably the right amount, right?

9:28And once you average it all out, it's all this stuff around, you know, I know the artist communities, the gaming communities are massively anti-AI. This is a huge question around copyright and who deserves what compensation And I generally think our current law and economic structure isn't set up properly to kind of serve those communities. And so I understand where they're coming from. I do think that a lot of it is the equalizer, right? Both on the micro level, at the individual level, and then also at the state sort of nation economic level, right? On the first side, plenty of research that shows that the lowest performers without AI magically start to get to 80th percentile with AI usage, right?

10:08And that is powerful. That is very, very powerful. If you didn't have certain training, if you didn't have a certain context, if you didn't work a certain job before, you can ramp up in a matter of hours, days, weeks, right? And get to a pretty dangerous level of knowledge very, very quickly with the help of AI, right? So on the micro level, at the individual level, that is game changing for an individual at work, right? And on the economic level for an entire country, I mean, these waves are massive. And certainly a lot of it has to do with resourcing as to, in this case, you know, who has the sort of R &D talent, who has the computing resources, all this kind of stuff.

10:45But all these opportunities create room for certain countries to reorient their entire economies, right? So in this case, I'm thinking of India and the Philippines, where those particular countries are huge in BPO, outsourcing, sort of offshoring services like these sorts of things. The U.S. benefits tremendously from working with those countries. A lot of that work is getting replaced by AI or theoretically could be done by AI very soon. And so for those countries, it is a huge opportunity for them to shift their focus and reconstruct a big portion of their economy to upskill the workers, to focus on higher value add services.

11:22And that fundamentally changes kind of, for example, India's position in the world. Right. And Jensen Huang spoke at this. I was at the NVIDIA GTC conference. There's a very targeted question around certain countries that that that will benefit. And he called out India, right? He said like, this is a big moment for the Indian economy to look a lot more like the US than it currently does today. And again, like changes position in the world in the global setting. So all that put together, look, all this is going to play out in like many, many years, decades, maybe, but it is something that's very interesting for us to think about on a longer time horizon.

11:53Yeah, absolutely. Let's actually talk about the NVIDIA event because you were there. So we're recording this on Friday, March 22nd. It'll be out sometime this week while I'm traveling. But I'd love to hear what the event was like from the inside in. It seemed like this sort of crazy step change in just the energy of this community. But what was it like to be there? Oh, I'm exhausted. I will say like I woke up this morning. I was like, I am just beat. So it was in San Jose, California. NVIDIA normally is a developer conference. So this is just some of the context I picked up while I was there. It's normally a developer conference.

12:32They have not had this in person in the last few years. So the first time kind of getting back together there. And look, it was wild. It was absolutely wild. because it normally is like this IT data center engineer sort of persona that goes there. And this time it kind of just felt like everyone just wanted to be there to go meet the CEO, right? And Jensen Huang, every time he was so good about it, right? He would just show up at the expo floor. He would just be walking around casually every time, absolutely mobbed, mobbed for selfies and autographs and all these different things. And he was very kind enough to sort of stop and do that.

13:11you felt the hype for sure. And a lot of people wanted to have a NVIDIA's point of view of like where AI is going. They're obviously such a critical player. Their stock has been going crazy. They're, you know, now I think like the third largest company in the world, like something like that. Right. And all the energy I think was just trying to figure out where all of this is going. And look like NVIDIA talks mostly about their chips, right? Like that is the majority of their revenue. And I would bet that most of the people in that room did not know actually what goes into GPUs. They probably were thinking like me, it's like, oh, bigger number is better.

13:49Like, that's pretty crazy. Cool. And like more, more power equals, I guess, like more powerful AI at some point, but it's not like you really knew the engineering behind it and like what, how big of a deal it was. Right. So I think people are just excited to be there and they just love anything AI related. I remember last year, the first conference that had the generative AI name on it, even though it was run by a particular AI startup. Again, people just mobbed it because they were just like, look, anything related to AI, I want to be there. And this was just, it felt very peak. And I imagine a lot of this was pretty different than the last time that they ran NVIDIA GTC in person.

14:27But certainly a lot of like really, really cool discussion around all the opportunities in enterprise, in creative work, in medicine, in protein and drug discovery, all these sorts of things, right? And so it was a very, very wide sort of agenda on all the different ways that AI can be. And really, really exciting to be there for sure. In terms of like the trend lines of things going on in AI, particularly in the context of what people seem to be interested in or talking about. Was there anything that was sort of, you know, common point of discussion at the event that was surprising to you versus like, you know, there's certain things that we've seen over and over and over again are interesting to people, but you know, anything that was maybe outside of what you would have expected?

15:12I would say the most surprising stuff was actually hearing Jensen talk about what the future future looks like. So when we talk about the short and medium term, I imagine the stuff that you're referring to is look ai agents like you know video is going to get even more insane like the images are going to get more insane and like you know all of a sudden tiktok is going to get flooded with like all this ai generate content like yes like a lot of that was there and you know um that i think was to be expected another expected thing is all these enterprise leaders trying to figure out what generative ai means for them um what are the resources i need what are the technologies i should be looking at what are the use cases i should be looking at all that i think was also expected just because i think the current state of ai in the enterprise is everyone knows they need to be paying attention but they actually they don't actually know what the use cases are yet but the surprising thing was to hear jensen say things like completely generated games will appear in the market in five to ten years and more broadly his his opinion that right now the state of computers is that when you use a browser for example and you're um you know getting listening to this podcast what happens is like your computer goes and navigates the internet, sends a request, and then goes to chase down that podcast content from a server somewhere and then brings it back.

16:27It's sort of retrieving all this information from a data server somewhere in the world that is hosting this podcast's content, right? And what he was saying is in the future, everything will just be generated on the fly. There's no more of this computer goes, talks to a server, server fetches the content and kind of brings it back, everything will be generated. Everything will be as if you had chat GPT on your computer all the time. And it was generating all this sort of stuff, everything that you see. And so the tail effects, I think we didn't really get into, but just to paint that very clearly for a vision of the future of what computing actually looks like was pretty wild.

17:04And there were some of these sessions too, that talked about agents in particular and the impact of that, that I think was again, very forward looking at it again, five to 10 years from now, maybe even more, but just to get a little bit crisper, a more concrete image of what that all feels like was pretty crazy. Yeah. It's, this is a particularly interesting line of, of conversation and maybe to intersect it with some of what we were just talking about with the society level issues. So I find that the folks who are enthusiastic in the long run about AI's impact on the world and the economy and stuff.

17:38I tend to have a sense that 100x the capacity doesn't mean that we need one one-hundredth of the people. 100x the capacity means we'll produce 100 times as much stuff and 100 times as much content and 100 times as much entertainment. And that's certainly my sort of belief. I think that if you just look at the pattern of human history, we have a basically never-ending appetite for more variety, more options, more whatever, right? Now, I think a totally separate question. I think that the transition to that could be enormously painful, have incredibly problematic consequences, like things that we really need to address, even though I'm long-term optimistic.

18:16And I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. But if you kind of zoom out to that future, when you start to think about like, just 100x entertainment, for example, 100 times more entertainment, you really do start to get into a world where the thing that makes sense is this sort of hyper personalization of content and games and, you know, and I think that the way that that plays out and how much sort of value that that places on things that can actually bubble up to the top and create, you know, shared experiences across people, like all of them are really interesting questions. But it does feel like even if you just look at the difference between like what what, you know, our parents had options to watch on TV in the 80s versus the entertainment options that we have from a consumption standpoint, now, it does feel like you're sort of on this inevitable track towards mass personalization.

19:03So interesting that that was sort of the type of topic that was at the event. That's exactly right. And just to give you a little bit more color on what those conversations look like, right? Certainly, while I was there with a group of content creators, everyone was sort of talking about this question, which, you know, most immediately affects a lot of YouTubers, for example, right? They're all sort of like, all right, are we all about to just, you know, do we have a limited lifespan on this thing? Like, are we, do we actually feel optimistic? So, I mean, the hybrid personalization thing I think is very real, right?

19:32We already saw early versions of this. I believe it was like Carvana that did a campaign where they took two or 3 million customers. Each one had a data point, right? Which is this person bought this specific car. It was this model in this location at this time. And so they translated all that into, okay, we're going to make a video of like this particular car model driving through a scene that with images that were reminiscent of the location that they were in at the time. They took what was going on in the world at the time, like certain holidays on that particular day or trends that were going on in social media, worked that into the script, and they generated 2 million unique videos in a matter of three weeks.

20:10Now, the videos themselves were low quality. You can clearly tell that it was like an early version of this AI thing, but they could just repeat that same exercise two, three years from now, and it's going to look completely different, right? It's going to start to look pretty high quality. I think the broader question is, you know, as human consumers, we are going to be limited by just how much bandwidth we have in our brain to consume all this content, right? To give an example on the B2B side, there was a stat where it was, you know, X many years ago, maybe 10 years ago, it would only take one, two, three phone calls or emails in order for a seller of a product to get in touch with a buyer, to have some level of of engagement.

20:51That number is now 10, 15, 20 touches across social media, across email, across phone calls, whatever it is in order for you to get some response, right? Now let's play out the scenario that you're talking about where there's infinite supply, a thousand X supply, right? And today, again, to paint out the impact of this, if you are a company that is selling, let's call it B2B software, and you decide to change your positioning, how you talk about your product, because it takes 10 to 15, 20 touches for someone to engage with you, on average, it takes six months from the day you start to change your positioning in order for the market to hear your message and start to resonate with it.

21:35In that time period, over the six months, you have to just keep on hammering the market with the same content over and over again. The question in my mind is, Again, if you thousand X the content, how long will it take for you to make a change to the actual positioning of your product, right? Does that go to two years, three years? Or somehow with hyper-personalization, and hyper-personalization also implies, by the way, new ways of consuming content. We are no longer probably going to be viewing YouTube, the same YouTube, right? Our YouTube experiences are going to be like Pete's YouTube versus Nathaniel's YouTube.

22:13All those are going to be different things. And so the delivery mechanism is also going to change. But what do we do with the content? Does that mean that every piece of content only gets one view, which is the person that it was designed for? That's a little bit different than the million YouTube views that you get on a video every time, the many thousands of podcast listens that you get. So all these things change the structure of, again, when you run the supply to a thousand X, a million X of what it is today, it's really, really hard to predict what happens. Things get kind of crazy. Absolutely.

22:47We also have no idea what sort of counter reaction it provokes in people where some meaningful number of people go the opposite direction. And it's just, there's so much personalization that even if I engage with that personalization in one specific area, like, I don't know, I, I person X, like really likes some fantasy series. And so they just like endlessly consume fanfic for that fantasy series, but otherwise they don't want hyper-personalization. They just want the one cultural touchstone that, you know, stands out above the rest, right? So, you know, whatever that might be at any given time, I think it's going to be really interesting to see.

23:21Cause you know, things never happen all in one direction. They happen in the direction and then the counter reaction all at once. Totally. I'm so glad you said that. I feel like that actually surprisingly rarely comes up in my conversations. And I always wonder why that is that people somehow tend to be over, sorry, they underestimate society's resilience, right? People will react to things and they will develop a counter trend to all this. It reminds me of Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit. his bet on ai is sports because of this exact argument which is there's a there's a possibility that people's reaction to an excess of ai generated content is to disengage from technology completely and instead what they're going to search for is in-person non-tech non-ai related stuff and sports in his mind is the biggest bet on that sports as the biggest unifier the biggest cultural touchstone of all that sort of brings people together that that's his play right which is it's just an interesting to think about like all the different ways that that that society could react with this yeah it's i mean listen it is a super interesting uh thesis i think that it's it's very credible and you know the thing that's fascinating too is that it's not at all mutually exclusive from like these things both could happen at the same time you know the uh i mean we're also living in a world where taylor swift has just completely destroyed all all records for uh what a tour can be.

24:46And again, it shows that the value that people place on these sort of unique in-person group experiences where you feel a part of something. And it does feel that those things, what loses out is the stuff in the middle that is sort of sad approximations of those really great experiences. Again, it's just sort of power law distribution, but the stuff that really delivers against those goals can get even more valuable to people. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I'll be so curious when we have the same conversation three years from now, what the world is going to look like. I'm going to be very curious what our reactions are going to be then.

25:27Yeah. So, okay. So I have a specific question about a thing that happened while you were there that was disconnected from, from NVIDIA. So I think I mean, it might've been the first day, it might've been Monday or it might've been Tuesday, but the news that inflection was basically all heading on over to Microsoft hit, which I think has a bunch of dramatic impacts or ramifications that we could talk about. But what was the response among the folks that you were hanging out with at the time? The general take is one, whoa, something like that happened. And then two, kind of expected, kind of expected.

26:03I think the general take on inflection is, of course, like huge story like the ceo and it's like um reid hoffman's involved like all these like great backgrounds of people starting the thing they raised such a massive amount of money they bought all these gpus to to build these models and they built a pretty good model like a pretty good product but at some point in the last few months the narrative really has turned against them and and was sort of like a what are they even doing like even the product that they released they weren't charging money for it wasn't very clear like business use case it was very personal and sort of meant for consumers and so it was kind of like this thing of just like what is this right is this just a front somehow to kind of give the ceo and to give reed hoffman something to talk about and kind of put on the resume i so i think it came down to that i think when um i think it was on wednesday probably a day after it happened i was talking to people about this and i'm like like chat gpt went away you know you know i mean like their product pie was good but it wasn't like dramatically better or significantly different or anything like that so i think it was just a more of um okay well it's very clear now that just because you had a good background and raised a ton of money it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to survive right and i think inflection was maybe the worst offender of that perhaps just given how much they raised it was something like 1.5 billion dollars or something like that right and no real product nothing nothing they were charging significant money for.