BONUS | Will.i.am: will AI repeat the mistakes of social media?

0:00This episode of the Times Tech podcast is sponsored by health and life insurer Vitality, your health's best friend. Most of us want to be healthier, yet life so often gets in the way. Vitality's health and life insurance is built around that reality. Get active, look after yourself, and you can unlock rewards from some of the UK's top brands and help keep your insurance premiums low. It's insurance that works for you. By using tech and insight to understand your health, they can incentivize you to live better. The healthier you get, the more you are rewarded. Find out more at vitality.co.uk. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by KPMG.

0:40Katie, we've been tracking the AI surge for a while, but some of the latest data is pretty striking. It is. KPMG's latest quarterly AI pulse suggests that 7 in 10 UK business leaders still see AI as a top investment priority, even if the economy slows down in the next year. But turning that investment into tangible value is another question. And so a lot of organizations are still figuring out how to move from endless AI pilots to something that works across the business. KPMG's focus is on that gap, helping organizations scale from the pilot phase to AI-powered transformation they can trust. To find out more about how KPMG can help your organization make the difference, you can visit kpmg.co.uk forward slash AI.

1:31Hello and welcome to this bonus episode of the Times Tech Podcast with Will.i.am, where we bring you my conversation with the musician turned tech entrepreneur and someone who's thinking very deeply about where AI goes next. We talk about personal AI agents, who owns your data, and whether AI could repeat the mistakes of social media. You'll also hear him mention V1 and V2, which are different versions of his own AI projects. And V1 is where he launched Fiona, his AI co-host for a radio show, who's a bit like my Norman, but with a voice. Norman has got a voice, but maybe not as good as Fiona's.

2:06And his next version is about people building their own AI agents shaped around their own data values and goals. It is a very wide ranging conversation where we speak about everything from creativity, education, privacy and power. And please be aware there is also a fair bit of swearing as well. Anyway, we started by talking about social media.

2:33What parallels do you see between what's happening with AI now and social media over the last 20 years? And it's something Mark Benny, I've spoken a lot about. We could end up in some version of social media where people aren't educated on what data is and what data is for. And there's never been a container to put your data in. So imagine the company is like, cool, great. You want your data? Here you go. Okay, now what do you do with it? What do you put it in? You put it in a data cup. How do you make your data work for you? There's never been a product for your data until now. But now you're Chad GPTing.

3:10That's supposed to be your AI, not the village AI. And if you needed to have an AI that's yours, you need your data. Because that is what is going to power your AI to be yours. And so that container, that business model around it, the protection, the equipment for it. And so I think we're going to move to a world where your refrigerator in your home does not just store things you are about to consume. It's going to store things that you've consumed digitally. And a data center is cold. A hard drive needs to be cooled. So if there's any equipment that's going to alter, it's probably going to be the refrigerator.

3:49It already is requiring power. every single day. And an individual, if you had like 10 terabytes, 100 terabytes at home and compute computing, that's way more than enough for a family. And that means if every single home had its own GPU, that means the whole city is a data center. That means the data center is now decentralized and the power consumption reduces dramatically. But more importantly, it'll be data solvency agentic ai liberty privacy security civil liberties and if you want to have your data like mine it's your choice right if you if that's the business you want to get into it's your choice and that's the discussions we have with ai for good those are the discussions we used to have at the world economic forum that i used to sit on but they don't have that anymore That's why I'm happy that they have the AI for good.

4:51Those are the discussions that we have at the Minerva Dialogues at the Vatican. I sit on that panel at the Vatican's AI Council as well for the past four years. Because of the work that I've been doing in the space, the robotics teams that I have in the inner city, getting kids up to speed so they can have jobs that are AI-proof, which is mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. I've been doing that since 2008. You know, I started with 65 students. Now it's over 15 ,000 students in L.A. and over 400 schools teaching robotics. Neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, like the Bronx, and what's this neighborhood that reminds me of Boyle Heights and Brooklyn in London?

5:35It's called Peckham. And now it's like gentrified. Yep. Okay. So, and that's when the outside comes into something cool or feels a little edgy and like, oh, prices are low here and the neighborhood changes. And then the prices of living go up and the people that live there, survive there can no longer afford to live there. And that's because they were never invested in and the folks that have the means can now move into that neighborhood because it's kind of cool to be adjacent to the edge and the art. So our vision, my vision is the people change the neighborhood from the inside because they were given the ability to change the conditions of life and build without compromising the vibration, the intentions, and the culture from that community.

6:30If everyone had the means and the ability to learn at their pace to solve problems and make a living, that would be awesome. So we will agentify communities, not gentrify communities, and make life better. And the creatives will be all right. They're very lucky to have you at the table at the summit. because I have to say, I speak to a lot of people in the world of tech and not many people who are as thoughtful from such a broad perspective as you about it and about the implications. Yeah. It's incredible times. The thing I'm worried about are the folks that are like, it's an incredible time to manipulate.

7:12Well, yeah. But I do think about like the bad apples that do what they do to take advantage, to divide, to raise havoc. They manufacture chaos and then provide their organization around the chaos that they created. That, from the perspective of AI, that's hardcore. Because that means the AI who doesn't, it doesn't experience time the way we experience time. We have to live through time. These predictive models can predict a whole bunch of scenarios. You may think that you're talking into different entities or different models, but because all these things are in your cookies, that eventually when you use your, that's why I don't like using GPS, because I don't know why it took me to that street to be by that billboard.

7:58And I don't know if that billboard is tied into whatever comment that I was in, whatever post that I landed on when I was doom scrolling. So I don't know how deep the rabbit hole is. So I stay out of certain things. I don't live in the comments. I don't know if those are humans or bots. I don't use social media like that. I'll post things that I'm promoting other than that. I'll take a gander sometimes on doom scrolling when I'm bored. And then I build agentic solutions for people to build agents to keep them out of the depths of the internet because we can't swim it anyhow. It's too vast. The internet is too vast.

8:37and none of us have scuba gears. So the agent itself is your scuba gear for the vastness of the internet. So humans can be, you know, amongst humans and let the thing that you built that reflects your beliefs, your concerns, your intentions, your aspirational GPS things, the places that you want to go, you build an agent that's yours. And so on FYI... Looking forward to this because I heard Fiona on Piers Morgan with you. Yeah, so that was V1. So V2, you build, you come to your agent builder. You go here, you connect it to your own GPU, whatever GPU you want to connect it to, toggle it and turn it on.

9:14Right now we have it connected to a DGX Spark, mine, my particular one. You configure its beliefs, its concerns. You give it its abilities, its talents. And it has its encryption key that's just as robust as blockchain architectures. And that's what we teach with. so people build agents free from having to be terminal wizards with the intentions of going out and solving problems. So Unit 2, we're going to provide a book of problems, and each community, now that we partner with California Community Colleges, are going to have a book of problems specific to that community. And so everything that I do now, entrepreneurial-wise with FYI and Purposeful AI, is connected to what I started in 2008 with bringing robotics to the inner city and having kids from the inner city focused around science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

10:10My love for music is hands-on making music. But I use AI creatively for videos. I like AI for music videos. I think it's fun. Is it right that you're one of the top 1 % users of Lovable? So I invested in Lovable. My portfolio of investments, I invested in OpenAI in 2022. I invested in Hugging Face, which is a repository for open source models. These are like seed rounds, seed rounds. OpenAI was like their A round or something like that. I invested in Runway. I invested in Eleven Labs, their seed round. I invested in Lovable, seed round. As an early investor in those companies, do you feel that it gives you, perhaps influence is the wrong word, but like a seat at the table in terms of conversations about shaping the future of the businesses, the tech they're using, or is it more those relationships with, with key people in the tech world, along with yourself that helps to shape the agenda a bit?

11:11I just wonder how that works or if it doesn't at all. Certain companies are more open to it. Like there's a company called inflection that i invested in with mustafa uh solomon mustafa suleiman the before he went to microsoft so when he was doing inflection we would have like ethical brainstorms conversations of like purpose and like what's the point of pi and uh and reed so mustafa and reed those those are the types of founders that welcome that kind of stuff maddie from 11 last reed hoffman founder of LinkedIn. Yeah. So he was also a founder of Inflection with Mustafa Suleman. Maddie from Eleven Labs is another one.

11:53We have our quarterly dialogue like, hey, Maddie, da, da, da. Okay, let's catch up. What are you seeing out there? Here's what I'm seeing out there. Oh, what's coming next on the pipeline? Hey, maybe you should think about this. So Maddie is one of the good guys as well. Anton from Lovable is another one of those good guys. When I say good guys, meaning like great conversations on like, what's the purpose? Wait, why would you do that? Let us think about that. Hey, good talk last session. We've thought about that. And here's a banter back on that. Speaking vague on purpose. Or Clem from Hugging Face, like another one of the love art conversations.

12:31We don't talk as much as my Antons and my Maddies. Dario put me in touch with Andrew Bent. He is focused on Anthropics education path. So I engage with Andrew Bent often because of the work that we're doing in education. Anthropics, wowzers. I salute the team there. What they're doing, how they're doing it, why they're doing it, the transparency is pretty sound. And if everyone can rock like that, we would be in an awesome place. They have Apple spirit. Apple spirit as far as, like, let's think about people first. But to your point, your question directly, there's some folks, like I say, that welcome it, and some folks that it's all creative.

13:21so at open ai we have creative conversations like open ai has an amazing music model that they don't put out so just because they do research does not mean the product comes out yeah of course that's fascinating i wouldn't think of that so my commitment to go out and teach to make sure that my what i don't want to do is wake up one day like damn it i should have tried my hardest in all the corners to inspire people to be purposeful and solve problems with AI, just from, at least from my little area of hope to be optimistic. Like how much impact do you think you're going to make teaching? Well, what if my teaching at the course inspired somebody to solve a problem in Compton?

14:08And then they built a company in 10 years time that changed the living conditions of Compton and East LA college and San Jose and all the places that we're going to teach online and, and then the physical locations in LA and Arizona. So yeah, I'm going to freaking sacrifice getting paid for tours. I've done that since 1998. I've been touring every fall, every winter, like clockwork since 1998. Yeah. It's a lot of money, but there's a lot of opportunity. there's a lot of freaking like potential to make a difference at least try i don't want to wake up in 2036 and like damn it i should have should have did my part well it sounds like you are more than doing your part and you need some sort of harry potter-esque time turner to make all of your different commitments like a will i am in every place yeah let's say it's an awesome time to be creative.

15:08It was an amazing day yesterday at AI for Good. It was like, wow, like what? And then representing the creative community and the work that I do in AI there, it was an honor to be there at that table amongst these dignitaries, these presidents, these CEOs of companies, VCs, telco owners. It was like, wait, what? And so then the question came around to me and I asked, what ism is it? What ism are we pushing AI towards? If AI for good is a prompt, we are the large living models to execute it. And the second simple question, what ism is it? And if it's not humanism, why is it any other ism? How did that go down?

15:55Just like any WEF meeting or any UN meeting, the answer doesn't come that day. The answer comes the next session. what we did about it, what did we learn from it. And I think what we have right now, like the phone, it's not really configured the way it's going to be in 2030, 2036. Like you know how easy it is to doom scroll and there's this whole bunch of bullshit you're just fucking scrolling through? Shit that you said, like how did you fucking know that I said that? Oh, they're in my fucking cookies? Just think about how the invasion is really convenient. The invasion of thought, the invasion of privacy, the invasion of fucking getting lost in a fucking sea of what the fuck is that?

16:38I thought I was supposed to fucking follow shit that I wanted to follow. What is this other shit they're showing me? And why do I like it so much? How do we get here? And why isn't it the same for solutions? Why isn't it the same for action steps and purpose? Why isn't it that easy to be purposeful, action-orientated, and solution-driven? Why are we in a copy-paste mentality where nothing absorbs? That's why the agent builder tool is like, it's conversation-based. It fosters critical thinking and hypercognition. There's not even a button to understand on my phone. There's a like, there's a dislike, and there's a heart.

17:19They don't care if you understand any of this shit. They just want you to consume, consume, consume, retweet, retweet, repost, repost, and give you the most fucking mind-numbing bullshit on a feed. So my question is for social media is, are they feeding you or feeding on you? And if they're feeding me, is it good for my mind? Is it good for my community? And if that's the case, is this the path that AI is going to take? What has been more detrimental to the creative community? Back to our original question, TikTok or Suna? TikTok, it's reduced a three-minute song to a 15 minutes song, 15 seconds song.

18:00That's been more detrimental to the art form than AI has, because that's altered how you create. We went from five minutes of funk to 15 seconds of flunk. We went from raids against the machine to now people about to raids against the machine. I am not worried for the creative industry. The creatives are going to be all right. Thank you so much. Well, it's been such a pleasure to talk to you. It's been a real joy.

18:31Thanks for listening to the Times Tech Podcast. If you haven't heard the full interview, do give it a listen. And if you prefer to watch it, you can also find the interview on YouTube. And we'll put out a link to our YouTube channel in the description too. See you next week. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast was sponsored by KPMG. One of the themes we keep coming back to is the gap between AI ambition and real world application. And that's where KPMG is focusing its work, helping organizations move beyond pilots and think about how AI can change the way the business operates and how it fits into wider processes and decision making.

19:10You can find all their insights and how they can help your organization make the difference through successful AI workforce adoption. Visit kpmg.co.uk slash AI. Today's episode of the Times Tech podcast was sponsored by IBM. IBM's long running work with Wimbledon shows how AI and data can be used in a setting millions of people recognize. From instant match insights to digital tools like match chat and likelihood to win, the aim is to help fans follow the tournament in a more personalized way, whether they're on the grounds or watching from anywhere around the world. And beyond sport, it points to a bigger question for businesses.

19:51How do you turn data into something useful, timely and easy to act on? To learn more about how IBM helps create smarter business, visit ibm.com slash Wimbledon.