Alex Valente
We thought we'd invent robots so we could do art in our spare time, but instead, we invented robots that do art so we can do our household tasks in our spare time, which I find pretty terrifying. Technology always increases the number of jobs available. We often think that technology reduces jobs, but it actually gets people to do more productive things and ends up creating jobs.

Alex Valente
That's my view, not a hot take or a prediction; it's a real thing that's already happened.

Georgie
Hey everyone. Thanks for tuning in to 'In the Blink of AI'. I'm super excited for a different kind of episode today. We're unpacking Forbes' top  predictions for  with the best guest imaginable. I managed to get Alex Valente, who was in the Forbes  Under  list in late , also the founder of Redactive, an AI enterprise security platform.

Georgie
He's super knowledgeable about all things AI, and I knew he'd be perfect to unpack these  predictions in great, granular, educational detail. More importantly, he's not shy of a controversial opinion. He's not afraid of an entertaining perspective, and this is just the best of both worlds.

Georgie
I learned a lot and also found this incredibly entertaining. If you loved this format, if you loved hearing headline news broken down so that you learn a lot, but also understand why we should care, please get in touch. I'd love to record something like this again in the future. Thanks so much for listening.

Georgie
Alex, welcome back to the show. As I've told you, your episode was one of many people's favourites so far. You joined us for episode three to talk about your company and yourself. Listeners, if you haven't heard it yet, you definitely need to check that out. But you're back today for a very special episode.

Georgie
Thank you so much for joining.

Alex Valente
Thank you for having me. It's great to be back. I've got to make sure I don't ruin my reputation. We've got to keep the hot streak going.

Georgie
Yeah, but for the listeners...

Alex Valente
That's right.

Georgie
Right. I've managed to get my hands on Forbes' AI predictions for . They've got  pretty spicy predictions.

Georgie
I know you've had a look through them, and I couldn't think of anyone else better suited with the AI acumen that you have, as well as great chat. Are you excited?

Alex Valente
We also need a bit of the ridiculous arrogance to be able to make a prediction and put my name to it.

Alex Valente
Only an idiot would do this in a recorded fashion, because invariably you'll have to have me back a year from now to see if any of the predictions were right. But I think this is my favourite part of making a prediction. It is being held accountable to that prediction for a whole year.

Georgie
Yeah, let's add some stakes to this.

Georgie
If you get less than five correct, drinks are on you.

Alex Valente
That's right.

Georgie
Otherwise, drinks are on me. That's how little I have faith in you.

Alex Valente
We're gonna do it for the listeners. If any listener sees me in public and I get more than five of the predictions incorrect, I will buy them drinks.

Georgie
Okay, let's dive into the top ten AI predictions. But before we start, Alex, have you heard of Forbes before? Just curious. I have heard of Forbes. What's your context with Forbes?

Alex Valente
We were very fortunate to be featured on their  Under  list, which was very kind of the Forbes team. Yeah, that was a great day.

Alex Valente
That was my first time I've ever done a professional photo shoot in my life. It was my first time getting professional makeup done. Oh my gosh. I very awkwardly complimented the makeup artist while she was doing it saying I'd never seen a person do this before and it was really impressive. And she said, no one I've ever done makeup for has actually ever done this before.

Alex Valente
Being so surprised by my ability as to actually compliment me. She's like, you're the first, but it was quite a nice moment.

Georgie
Oh, and that is so nice because she probably does it every day and everyone expects it to be perfect.

Alex Valente
Oh, for me, it was like, I looked like a different person afterwards. I was completely presentable, which is a refreshing change of pace.

Georgie
No more under eyes. Are you wearing makeup today, Alex?

Alex Valente
No makeup today. No, no, no.

Georgie
Kicking off the year strong with AI predictions for . I'm super pumped because I've seen a lot of predictions go out there. This is the first time I've seen someone actually in the AI space unpack them a little bit.

Georgie
Let's start with prediction number one. Meta will begin charging users for their Llama models. First of all, bit of context. What are we talking about when we're talking about Meta's Llama models, Alex?

Alex Valente
Yeah, right now, Meta builds their own large language models. Those large language models are called the Llama models.

Alex Valente
And those models right now are open source. So, they're free to use, they're free to essentially pick off the shelf and start building applications with. Right now, the only thing that you'd pay for if you're a developer is the usage associated or the compute associated with those models, but right now, if you're using, say, for example, even something like Instagram or Facebook Messenger, you'll notice that there's like Llama model features and they're all free.

Alex Valente
So, I guess here that the kind of the question that Forbes is posing is like, you know, what do we think? Is this going to be something that they're going to start charging for as a service? My opinion is, I think, given their business strategy and the fact that they've already open-sourced a lot of these products, I think it's probably going to remain open source.

Alex Valente
I think Mark Zuckerberg is really looking at trying to tackle the cloud players here and the closed-source providers to really capture as much market share. So I think if Meta begins to charge for anything, it's probably going to be some sort of feature inside of some of their apps. And even then, I think, as a business, we've kind of seen that they're pretty averse to charging like a subscription for their consumer products.

Georgie
Yeah, I so agree. I thought this was such a weird prediction. They don't charge for Facebook. They don't charge for Instagram. Uh, it seems like an odd prediction, like just, do you think it's just an odd prediction or do you think there were any murmurs that, that they needed to charge for the models? Like, where does this even come from?

Alex Valente
I think it comes from the fact that they spent a lot of money on those chips. Um, they've got, I think, one of the largest clusters of training, uh, chips available, uh, then, like, when it comes to, uh, any corporation on earth. And eventually, you need to really start generating some serious revenue given that, that amount of investment.

Alex Valente
So I think there's some thought process here about, well, like maybe they have to recoup some funds. I think though, bit of a miss, I don't think they're going to recoup the funds by charging for the use of the models. They're going to find some other method to get there.

Alex Valente
And I think that method is likely going to be user-facing. Um, that's generally how they make their money and that's where they've found most of my success.

Georgie
I love it. Thank you. Thought number one is a miss. Number two, scaling laws. These will be discovered and exploited outside of text, in particular, robotics and biology.

Georgie
We're about to have a VC on the podcast to talk more in-depth about scaling laws, but maybe just paint a little bit of a picture about text scaling laws.

Alex Valente
Yeah. I think like, uh, what we've seen is that the ability to train and to have improvements, um, on the quality of those models, there's a direct relationship between the amount of text that you can ingest and the quality that you see in that, that scaling that continues to scale up until what people perceive to have some ceiling.

Alex Valente
And the ceiling generally is. You know, all of the text that we've been able to generate on the internet and we've kind of already there, kind of hit that, that spot.

Georgie
So all this stuff on the internet, all the texts, all the Reddit forums. They've already boiled the ocean.

Alex Valente
We've kind of already boiled the ocean, yeah.

Alex Valente
And the next question is like, can we take synthetic information that we've generated ourselves and begin to train on that and provide some sort of improvements here? And I think it's an area of research that's really fascinating. At the moment, we've actually seen some areas where it does work. So, for example, um, it does work when it comes to generating different methods of representing logic in order to train a model to do more logical stepping through of a problem.

Alex Valente
So, um, what models have been instructed to do is when they get asked a maths question to transfer the reasoning into Python code and then try and run the Python code to answer the maths problem. Rather than trying to answer the maths problem just by reasoning through the text. It's quite a unique solution architecture, but it seems to work so we know that there's methods for kind of getting around the ceiling and kind of expanding the amount of scaling.

Alex Valente
We have I should mention betting on ceilings of scaling is one of the worst bets that you could have ever made in the history of technology. I mean, like, you know, if you bet on the Gutenberg, you know, press to, to not print that many books, you would have had a terrible investment. If you bet on the internet, not getting too big, you would have had a terrible bet.

Alex Valente
If you would bet on the CPU, you know, transistor count, you would have had a terrible bet. These are all bad bets, betting on a ceiling. So I tend to agree with Forbes on this one. I think we're going to see these things continue to scale, and I think we're going to see a lot of applications outside of just text.

Alex Valente
I think we're going to start to see things like robotics, like biology. I think robotics is an interesting one. We're already seeing a huge amount of, um, of application there. And I think, uh, when we get down to my predictions for , I've got one already for, for robotics. So I'm going to agree with this one.

Alex Valente
I'm back myself.

Georgie
Well, thank you for that. Because I did kind of want to hear a little bit more about the robotics side. Biology, you know, we're seeing, uh, we had a guest, uh, from Harrison AI on the show and I, I get the med tech cases, robotics I want to hear more about. So that's, that's a hit. Um, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are going to have a messy falling out.

Georgie
Alex, this will have a meaningful consequence. For the world of AI, you know, just an easy lowball one for you.

Alex Valente
Easy one. Look, if betting on ceilings in scaling of technology is one of the worst bets, probably one of the better bets is betting on Donald Trump having a falling out with anyone. I would say it's an interesting one to bet on though, just because we do find that, um, although Donald Trump is, Probably a bit unpredictable and his relationship with Elon Musk is probably a bit odd.

Alex Valente
We do know that, um, it's probably quite well serving to both of them. When it comes to kind of politics, American politics, contact sport, you know, if these two people are aligned, they're probably going to stay aligned. Um, if their, if their interests serve each other, and right now they definitely do. So, I might even take the inverse of this one.

Alex Valente
I might say, um, at least for , I'll bet on them remaining. I believe they've been calling him the buddy in chief.

Georgie
Buddy in chief Elon.

Alex Valente
Elon, yeah, I believe that's what, it's very

Georgie
cringe. I vomited my mouth a little bit just then. Yeah,

Alex Valente
yeah, yeah. I don't, I don't blame you. Um, but yeah, let's, let's give them, let's give their relationship at least another year.

Alex Valente
Um, I'd say, I'd say for us,

Georgie
I could have a falling out, but it won't be, it won't be in the short term. No,

Alex Valente
I don't think it's a short term thing.

Georgie
Epic. Thank you for that. What about web agents? Are we going to see them mainstreaming ? Forbes is saying they're the next major killer application in consumer AI specifically.

Alex Valente
Yeah, I think this is where I start to get very opinionated. I think my, a lot of my predictions for  are about agents. Um, I do think that they're going to go very mainstream and I think they're already going mainstream in the corporate world. So for a lot of the listeners who have maybe, you know, work in a big company, you're going to start to see agents emerge in your workflows and inside of your applications.

Georgie
Can you

Alex Valente
paint a picture for what that could feel like? You know, I'm, I'm working back at Accenture, like where, where does the agent come in?

Alex Valente
Absolutely. You kind of probably have some tasks at work that look a little bit like, Hey, go off and perform some research for me pertaining to this particular customer.

Alex Valente
And right now, the way that you do that is you maybe you go and build a picture of that customer. You might type in into chat GPT, Hey, you know, tell me what you would do if you had to go and do research on this particular customer. And there's a lot of you linking information together. There's a lot of you doing actions and then throwing it to the model to kind of synthesize the information.

Alex Valente
I think what you're going to see is that UI experience comes down to you describing to the, to the model its job rather than it's the specific steps it needs to take, and it will synthesize the steps that it needs to take in order to complete that job. So the agent is almost like an employee inside of your company.

Alex Valente
And once we get to that stage, you're going to start to see workflows that look like instead of you speaking to a model like it's trying to perform a web search, you're going to be talking to it as if it's a member of your team. And when it's a member of your team, it's going to do actions. And access teams on your behalf in order to solve the problems that you kind of assigned to that team member.

Alex Valente
Um, that's probably the easiest way I think to think about it.

Georgie
Yeah, this, this is something I think everyone's can't stop talking about agents, right? Um, you're an enterprise expert, you live and breathe enterprise. This question is really, you know, about consumer AI, but I can't not ask you when does enterprise versus consumer, where do you see one taking over?

Georgie
Yeah.

Alex Valente
It's been super interesting in AI because we've seen the enterprise take up of AI to be really rapid and in some areas more rapid than the consumer, I think definitely in agents, we've seen the enterprise take up be faster than the consumer take up and we're going to see, I think, more enterprise internal agents.

Alex Valente
Before we start to see consumer apps, even then, though, for basic stuff, we're going to start to see the consumers kind of start to, uh, to utilize these particular agents. So, again, you're probably going to see things like booking a restaurant, probably going to become something that an agent could do for a consumer, but in the enterprise world, you can turn that into finding a meeting time.

Alex Valente
You can turn that into performing an automation at work for a particular workflow, you know, turn it into performing a sales task. Performing business development, you can turn it into doing research, performing compliance work, whatever it might be, you know, a productive, we use agents to perform data security tasks already.

Alex Valente
Um, so how we analyze documents is actually often by, by utilizing the semantic content of information. We already kind of do a lot of this stuff. And what we've seen is like enterprises take that up very quickly in order to solve challenges inside of their organizations that normally would have taken lots and lots and lots of human resources that are normally unavailable to them.

Georgie
Oh, see, I didn't even know it was already rolled out. Um, so that's so exciting. So this is clearly a hit. You're already doing it.

Alex Valente
Big hit. Yeah, big hit. Absolutely.

Georgie
I actually want to start using agents because I have Three bands that I like these days. I'm too old. I don't discover new bands and I want to know when they're touring Australia and I'll just kind of go to their website when it occurs to me and then, um, go again.

Georgie
And oh, they've already toured and left. If I could get an agent to tell me when they're in Australia.

Alex Valente
I like this. I think Spotify needs. So maybe be notified of this as a feature request. This is a great idea.

Georgie
Spotify listeners sorted out. Okay. We're halfway prediction. Number five, multiple serious efforts to put AI data centers.

Georgie
In space will take shape. I feel like we've gotten to the like insane part of the interview because this, this to me sounds like batshit crazy.

Alex Valente
Hey, you know, sometimes when you come up with nine predictions, you need a . I would say it's not the worst thing I've ever had. But it's probably not the best.

Alex Valente
I know how expensive these data centers are to build. And I have to admit, like, you know, we think of chips as very small things. I should mention to the listener, if you don't know how big the chipset that NVIDIA sells to a data center is, it's kind of like human size, almost quite large.

Georgie
Oh, wow. It's a very

Alex Valente
big box, probably, is the way I'm explaining it.

Alex Valente
And this very big box, Um, and it's also it's very expensive. Um, and so if I could say, if you wanted to have something in space, you probably wouldn't want to have something that's very expensive, very fragile, that's very heavy, that you don't want to lose, and that's also consumes a lot of power. There's probably quite a difficult thing to run in space.

Alex Valente
I think we're probably more likely to have, uh, data centers in, in remote areas and under the water before we probably have them, I think, in outer space, but I can kind of see what people are trying to allude to here, which is space has a lot of benefits when it comes to maybe cooling. Cause it's pretty, it's pretty cold out there.

Georgie
I heard that the sun, you know, you don't have to worry about nighttime in space.

Alex Valente
Yeah.

Georgie
It's all about out there.

Alex Valente
You can have some good solar power, but again, getting all that stuff out there, you know, Sounds, sounds pretty expensive. I think it's probably not a  one.

Georgie
Miss, major miss. Okay. Thank you. Um, an AI system will pass the Turing test for speech is our number six prediction.

Georgie
What's the Turing test?

Alex Valente
The Turing test is a test that we use to kind of, Understand whether or not a respective AI is like human like it has like this AGI. We have kind of already passed it. I think, and I think that's the reason why we don't actually use it anymore as a test. The test actually is like, you know, does a user who is communicating with this model.

Alex Valente
Perceive it to be a human. That's, that's really the kind of the core concept of the Turing test. Most people are likely communicating with AIs every single day and they don't know that they're communicating with them. They're probably bots on an internet forum or on a Facebook post or whatever it might be.

Alex Valente
People have no idea that they're talking to an AI chatbot. And I think already when it comes to some of the interfaces that people utilize. You know, knowingly, they kind of perceive these things already to pass this test. So I'm going to say this is a good prediction because it's already happened. So, but also maybe not an amazing, you know, long term prediction.

Georgie
At least you're honest. You get more than five right. At least you're like, well, that one was a bit low

Alex Valente
ball. Really lining my own pockets with that one. I'm saying that one's already done. I got one in the bag.

Georgie
Like I really back myself on these. Number seven, major progress will be made. AI systems that can themselves autonomously build better AI systems.

Georgie
I think rephrased better, no offense, Forbes, AI that can build itself. Right?

Alex Valente
Yeah, I like it. Look like the way that we look at this internally at work is quite interesting. Like we look at the only way to solve a lot of these AI problems is with AI. In many ways, we've already kind of gotten to a place.

Alex Valente
Again, where these things are already happening. And if you look at, for example, that example we talked about before about how a model could, you know, instead of trying to solve a problem using text, try and generate code that could solve the maths problem that's been asked. You know, in many ways, these are pro like, this is progress that the AI is kind of making onto itself.

Alex Valente
Sometimes maybe directed by humans still, but I think we're already kind of getting to a place where we're seeing AI make that progress, or at least generative AI make a bit of progress on itself. At work, again, we look at this through the lens of like, you know, if we have security challenges that emerge from AI, how can we get those security challenges solved?

Alex Valente
And oftentimes it's by utilizing AI to kind of fight AI. Thanks a lot. So, we see this as kind of, like, a kind of a must happen, you know, this, this, we kind of must be able to build systems where the AI can make themselves better in some way. I think that the difficult part of this prediction is autonomous, the word autonomously, like, without a human input, do we think this, these services are going to make themselves better?

Alex Valente
I wouldn't confidently say that in , I think every single element of these things are going to get better without the, without human input. I still think humans. Very smart humans do a great job of making their AI systems better, because at the end of the day, the things that judge the goodness of a system is often another human.

Alex Valente
So, human opinion is very valuable. Um, and I think like right now, I would bet on these AI systems. remaining, uh, instructed at least for the, uh, for the next year, uh, to be instructed and trained a little bit more by, by human beings. What do you think, Georgie?

Georgie
When I first heard this, I thought that sounded very sci fi like, like, you know, it's building itself.

Georgie
It's going to create a monster. The monster will eat us. Um, but that's because, like, even me, who loves AI so much and always surprised when I hear the, the fear mongering take, the idea of not having human intervention, for whatever reason, takes my mind to the early sci fi movies. Um, but where am I getting this wrong?

Alex Valente
I mean, it's probably not going to happen because we're not going to let it happen. That's probably the honest truth. Like, maybe like, we're all underestimating the AI's power, and if we just let it go crazy, like, maybe it would, um, have those, those impacts where it gets really, really good and, and also really, really scary.

Alex Valente
But yeah, I don't, I don't see any organization, kind of, with the requisite amount of, like, feedback, really letting the AI run wild. I don't think it's in anyone's kind of commercial interest, and again, these things are very expensive to run, so I still think we'll probably be safe for now. But I don't think we'll be safe for long.

Alex Valente
Maybe that's maybe a better way of phrasing it. If we do see people start to kind of, you know, throw all of those, those safety thoughts out of the window, we probably would end up in a situation where, like, maybe we'll have models that are lying to users. Maybe they're saying things that are negative, but maybe they're saying things that aren't.

Alex Valente
Keep the users on the platform, but don't make the users, you know, solve their problems, whatever it might be, you know, we don't actually know how we if we change that that function that that that AI is trying to optimize for how it could impact what those models end up doing. When they don't have any boundaries.

Alex Valente
So I think like the autonomously element is really something that we, we kind of want to control. That's probably why in , I don't see this one necessarily happening, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.

Georgie
Um, to peek behind the curtain for a moment, because I know that there's human feedback that, you know, comes in and then the model goes off and iterates again, and then more human feedback, but I don't really understand it in detail.

Georgie
Can you just very quickly explain like, Where the human element is currently, along that process flow.

Alex Valente
Yeah, so the human element kind of exists in a couple of remits, and it depends on the architecture, but generally, like, you know, some of these models are given a function that they're trying to optimize for, and that's how they're constantly fine tuning towards getting this number higher.

Alex Valente
And so they might, you know, if, if, uh, let's say a model provider is trying to keep users on the platform, they might. Make that function, uh, the amount of time a user spends on that platform. And oftentimes this has been the criticism of things like Facebook is the fact that a lot of the stuff that Facebook pushes you, which is again an AI algorithm, is often, uh, there to push you to, to spend more time on the platform.

Alex Valente
And so it pushes you controversial things. Things that don't make you happy. Things that you wanna, you know, spend time commenting on if that's the case, you know, and that gets an open, AI was to do something like that, or Anthropic was able to do something like that, who knows what that model might send back to you, uh, in order to, to kind of keep you on their platform.

Alex Valente
Right now, it looks like the main thing that these model providers are trying to push people towards. It's sort of towards like, you know, positive resolution of problems that the user is explaining within a particular bound. And that seems to be like, uh, working from both the safety standpoint and seems to be working as well with the end users.

Alex Valente
End users like spending time on these products because. Uh, they get their problems solved, but they often, uh, they're not talking about the same things that like a Twitter or a Facebook, uh, AI, um, push to a user on their platform. So, it can be an interesting way of thinking about how we kind of manage these things going forward.

Alex Valente
The reason why. I think models behave the way they, they perform, they perform is because humans have decided that that is how they should and we kind of keep them in check a little bit. And I, again, I don't see us getting rid of those safety checks anytime soon. I just actually see likely more of those safety checks coming into place.

Alex Valente
Um, particularly in the corporate world, but also in the consumer world.

Georgie
Genuinely one of the more fascinating ones. Um, I mean, I'll give you an out though. It did say major progress will be made on this. Do you think this will be a focus for  for companies? Getting the AI to self check and do things like that or?

Alex Valente
Yeah, interesting. I, I think, I think we're going to go more. I think people are going to bet more on safety than they're going to bet on autonomous building. And I think people what they want is they want really high quality results within a particular security and safety boundary. And the reason why that is, is because every company that offers a product that uses AI is very cognizant of the fact that if something goes wrong.

Alex Valente
They got to foot the bill. So, you know, we don't want to end up in a, in a scenario where, you know, my model has thought that this is the best thing and it's gone off in this direction. And now it's promised a product to a customer or it's promised them or it's given them a piece of advice that I'm, uh, that I'm liable for.

Alex Valente
So we start to find that these are the areas that the companies really care about. And when people have commercial incentives, they generally want to be in control. And the word autonomously, I have to admit, scares most big companies. And I think. Yeah, it's probably going to scare people again. So I would say probably most progress is going to be made in the security safety space as well as the quality space rather than in kind of this autonomous space.

Georgie
Yeah, great shout. I guess my my answer to you being very fear mongering. It's going to take a while for the sentiment to start being a little bit more autonomous is fine. Exactly.

Alex Valente
Maybe they need some more agents going and writing Facebook posts to kind of convince people otherwise.

Georgie
Yes, yes. Some, um, Scarlett Johansson movie where nothing goes wrong in this.

Alex Valente
Correct.

Georgie
Okay, number eight. We're nearly at the end, Alex. OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier labs will begin moving up the stack, increasingly shifting their strategic focus. To building applications. So I mean, just high level moving up the stack. What are we talking here?

Alex Valente
We're talking here about the model providers providing more than just the model compute, right?

Alex Valente
So right now, people like Anthropic, they have very limited kind of applications that they offer to users. They really just offer kind of a chat window as a way of communicating with the model that's being run on their servers. And I think this prediction is really saying like, Hey, we're going to see them start to offer more features outside of just, Hey, this is a chat window and you can talk to our model.

Alex Valente
And if you want to build stuff, you go and build it and then you can utilize our software. They're really saying here, they're going to start building applications, maybe consumer facing applications, um, that people can go and interact with. I think this is a great bet. I think, um, we're going to see a lot of these providers start to provide more functionality up the stack towards end users, both in the consumer world and in the business world.

Alex Valente
So, I think likely we're going to see them start moving up the stack faster in the business world than in the consumer world, because I think in the consumer world, there's still a lot of safety concerns and there's still a lot of trouble, um, dealing with, um, Kind of outliers of these models when they do the wrong thing while in the business world, like businesses have been happy to subsume some amount of risk in order to get a high productivity benefit so we can see like the open AI of the world is already starting to offer more and more tools for businesses to say, connect their data to a model, their models can understand, you know, some of their business context, for example, um, we saw that with some of their vector database products that The other, um, area of this as well is like some of these models are now moving up the stack kind of themselves in the way that they operate.

Alex Valente
So, the  model, which probably some people who are, um, subscribers on the OpenAI Chat GPT product. I've seen it already does like quite deep reasoning, so it will go through and I'll try and break down problems into numerous constituent parts and then try and solve those constituent parts. For example, if you ask to write a LinkedIn post for you, it'll kind of think about what people do on LinkedIn st, and then it might ask, you know, what type of user are you?

Alex Valente
And then it might try and write a post. And I think already these things are also moving up the stack. They're kind of taking larger problems that the user is experiencing, um, and kind of resolving more of the elements of the problem, uh, flow that normally, uh, would have to be resolved by a separate app.

Alex Valente
So OpenAI, Anthropic, Frontier Labs moving up the stack. I really like this bet. Makes a lot of sense to me. I, I see that. I see it happening. I think it's a hit.

Georgie
Devil's Advocate here. Is this because, like, They're reaching that ceiling we talked about with, with boiling the ocean of texts that exist, like they have to do something next or like, that's my first impression of this.

Alex Valente
Like, it's a good analogy. Like, at the end of the day, these, like, these are all businesses and they're big businesses, have big valuations, um, they make a lot of money already and they can, they need to continue to offer more and more services because of those growth assumptions that are built into those valuations.

Alex Valente
So, unless they're able to significantly grow these existing businesses, it's very likely that they're going to expand into new products. These new products are likely to be more consumer-facing or more end-user facing in the business world. We've already kind of seen this from bits and pieces of their strategy.

Alex Valente
One thing we haven't talked about is OpenAI's App Store. They created an App Store very early on. I don't know if people remember this. It was very popular for a very short period of time. Oh, don’t—

Georgie
Say that. We had a guest on the podcast from Top Robe, which was a Y Combinator recent graduate. And they're helping builders monetise their apps through the app store.

Georgie
But she says that you need to pay just to even know that there's an app store. It was a mess.

Alex Valente
That's right. It's got nothing to do with the builders on that app store. I think all the builders in that app store were building really interesting, cool stuff. It seems like OpenAI really kind of dropped the ball on running an app store pretty early on.

Alex Valente
I actually recall a previous prediction from another unnamed podcast, which was that the OpenAI app store would make more money than the Apple app store in like two years. Um, something along those lines, uh, that was a bad bet. Yeah, miss. Miss. Um, but I think we're probably going to see some return to that app store.

Alex Valente
It makes a lot of sense for OpenAI and Anthropic to have some place where people can come and access the things that people have built on top of these services. And in some way, that is moving up the stack slightly. That's moving from being a piece of developer infrastructure to becoming a developer platform.

Alex Valente
And I think we'll probably see some movement there this year. Particularly as we start to see more and more agent experiences emerge. I think an app store is a great place for those agents to surface to an end user.

Georgie
Before we get to number nine, I overheard, I can't remember the forum.

Georgie
Everyone wants their own app store. Why is this, Alex? What's so great about an app store?

Alex Valente
Yeah, I think everyone wants their own app store because they make amazing amounts of money and are extremely defensible businesses. So the app store on Apple, the app store on Android, the app store that you see when you go and play video games on something like Steam, they generate a very large sum of money.

Alex Valente
They sell digital products, which are very easy to distribute. And they're highly defensible because they have a large number of users. And those users go there to purchase products that then run on their respective devices. They're great for a company that has some sort of moat, and they're looking to monetise that moat.

Alex Valente
And here for Anthropic and OpenAI, they would argue they have a very large moat pertaining to the data they have on their customers, and the data that they've used to train their models, and they're looking to find additional monetisation methods. So one method they have is, hey, we've got all these eyeballs on our ChatGPT app.

Alex Valente
We've got this great developer product, which is this model. Why don't we put these two things together and create an app store where we can connect developers to our users. And everyone wins. Developers make money from users from our application. And our users get more functionality from these developers.

Alex Valente
And we win because we get to clip the ticket along the way. And oftentimes those clips are very substantial.

Georgie
Yeah. It cost me a hundred dollars for my app to be on the Google Play Store per year. One little tiny app that I didn't monetise. I can't remember. Apple would have been similar. Imagine that for every app.

Alex Valente
And imagine them clipping the ticket. I think it's in the tens of percents for every microtransaction that happens on those applications.

Georgie
Printing money.

Alex Valente
Printing money. I mean, a lot has happened in this space from a legal standpoint. So, you had the litigation that Spotify had with Apple over a very extended period of time where they didn't believe that Apple's amount that they were charging them was fair. Um, I believe they won that litigation, probably rightfully so. But for a very long time, you were unable to purchase the Spotify license inside of the app. You had to go to the website and buy it. And the reason why was because Apple was taking a very large chunk every time someone went to click buy inside the app.

Georgie
Oh my gosh. Ooh, some extra spicy hot takes embedded in there. I'm loving this.

Alex Valente
Absolutely great business. I would say eight. That's a great bet.

Georgie
Okay, big hit for number eight. Number nine, RoboTaxi services will win double-digit market share and launch in at least five major U.S. cities. Yeah. Alex, what's a RoboTaxi?

Georgie
Give me, give me your brand name. There

Alex Valente
are these very odd things that you see in San Francisco at the moment. So right now in San Francisco, they have Waymo. Waymo is the Google robo taxi. It drives itself. It comes and picks you up. It is a fantastic experience.

Georgie
I think the first time we met, you told me about a Waymo.

Alex Valente
I think they're awesome. Um, they're a bit

Georgie
Everyone thinks they're awesome though, right?

Alex Valente
Yeah, they've got very high customer satisfaction.

Georgie
Yeah.

Alex Valente
I have, um, I've spent quite a few trips in a Waymo. I would say they're a bit cautious. Um, slow or just kind of drive like my mom drives.

Alex Valente
Um, so like, you know, turning left and turning right. There's a terrible thing. Yeah, exactly.

Georgie
My mom drives is at the Italian side or something. Italian will be driver.

Alex Valente
Yeah, I think my mom's now, she's officially a nonna now, so she drives like a nonna. Maybe that's

Georgie
I had a nonna. Yeah.

Alex Valente
So, no, she's um, she's cautious and so are the Waymos.

Alex Valente
But they're very popular. So people often say it's a great experience because, you know, you don't have any issues with rider safety when it comes to the driver and the rider, because there is no driver. So people feel more comfortable putting their kid in a Waymo than they normally would with just another random driver.

Alex Valente
Um, same with a lot of young women say they feel a lot safer in a Waymo, uh, because they don't have to communicate with the driver really late at night.

Georgie
That's such a great point. I wasn't even thinking of. Yeah.

Alex Valente
Yeah. So lots of people report really high satisfaction with these products. I think in San Francisco, they're probably already a double-digit market share, I would bet on them going to other, to another four cities. I think they're a pretty killer product. And I would also say it's been pretty amazing to see the moat that was supposed to exist with ride-sharing disappear very quickly when people started using things like Waymo.

Georgie
Oh, so you're saying like, how did Uber's market share get impacted by the Waymo research. Absolutely.

Alex Valente
So, lots of people said, for example, like, oh, it's really hard to attract consumer eyeballs onto this app, but consumers are pretty, pretty quickly moved onto these applications from apps like Lyft, um, and apps like Uber.

Alex Valente
So it'll be super interesting to see how, and like those businesses behave in light of ride-sharing kind of being disrupted by robo taxis. Um, and I think it's like, it is happening right now in front of our eyes, like, you know, probably what is one of the largest employers in the world, which is transport.

Alex Valente
It is being disrupted in front of you in San Francisco. Right now, you can go and look at it and, and it is a real innovation, uh, that's happening as we speak. So I think this is a big bet, big yes, big hit.

Georgie
Amazing. I love this one. I can't wait to ride in a Waymo. And you've really articulated exactly why I'd be excited apart from just the cool technology.

Georgie
Just for the listener. Um, I think it has already launched in As you mentioned, Alex, San Fran. Actually, I'll give you a chance. Do you know the other two cities it's launched?

Alex Valente
Uh, I want to say, Phoenix?

Georgie
Yes, correct.

Alex Valente
And I want to say maybe somewhere else in California, maybe in LA?

Georgie
Correct. Too smart. There's predictions about where else.

Georgie
Any guesses?

Alex Valente
I've got to throw surely Austin in there for the innovatives. I've got an idea on the other ones. Do you have, uh, you got any ideas?

Georgie
So you're correct. The prediction is Austin, and maybe Waymo have come to market to confirm this since the predictions came out, but perhaps Atlanta and Miami as well.

Alex Valente
Super interesting. Big car cities. There's a lot of people getting Uber rides and getting ride-sharing around in all these places. Wouldn't be surprised if they get a lot of market share very quickly.

Georgie
Globally, do you know where they're thinking next?

Alex Valente
Oh, that's a great question. I have no idea.

Georgie
I'm gonna tell you, and these do not track when it comes to where I would think you would launch a service like this, you think grids, you think solar panels, like lots of sun, the two places that are predicted a London and Tokyo, I'm like, seems odd to me, but

Alex Valente
Yeah.

Georgie
Population of this show

Alex Valente
when I go to London, I want to get in a black taxi. I want to get in there famous.

Georgie
Yeah,

Alex Valente
I don't know. It's a bit of an odd one. That one. And and Tokyo, I think the last thing I would want probably in Tokyo is to get in the car like best public in the world. Hey, look, you know, maybe they know something we don't know.

Alex Valente
Don't.

Georgie
We'll check in in a year, hey?

Alex Valente
That's it. Let's check in in a year.

Georgie
The last one, because I'm really pumped to hear your predictions. The first real AI safety incident will occur, but we're really ending on a, on a sad, negative Nelly prediction here. Do you think a big AI safety incident will occur in ?

Alex Valente
I think this is very similar to some of the other ones. I think it's already happened. I think it's already happening. I think a lot of companies are trying to protect themselves already. And I think a lot of users are starting to wake up to some of the threats that do exist. I think that that AI safety incident has occurred.

Alex Valente
So far, it's been something that we've been able to contain, but it doesn't mean that there hasn't been pain and suffering because of it. So, I would say here, like, obviously, Redactive is a, um, an LLM data security business. We see the data security problems every single day. Um, so we know that these safety incidents are occurring.

Alex Valente
These security incidents are occurring. They're going to happen to more and more people, to more and more different types of consumers. We see a lot of issues already with deep fakes. There was actually an issue in the Australian media, um, last week about deep fakes about the deep fakes being used by a teacher, um, on their, on their students, uh, in quite an, a very inappropriate and illegal way.

Alex Valente
Um, so, you know, this is an area that's. Um, already has a lot of regulation. We already know that these things are illegal, but they're very hard to stop. And we're starting to see like evidence emerge that these things are occurring and we're starting to see a lot of companies trying to come in and kind of resolve and make investments in this space.

Alex Valente
Obviously, you know, red reactive makes big investment into this LLM data security space in helping big companies make sure that they don't leak any data and that they have the right data security posture in light of AI. But, you know, there's a large, there's gonna be a large cohort of people that try and solve that problem of LLM data security.

Alex Valente
Um, we know that it's a, it's a really big expanding space and we're gonna see a lot of, a lot of investment into it.

Georgie
Uh, one quick question. Say the toothpaste is already out of the tube. You've had this incident. You haven't had Redactive with you, making sure that the leak wouldn't happen. Is this like you mentioned before, Alex, AI, it should be the thing that combats AI or what do you do once it's happened?

Alex Valente
Yeah. Um, like every single company should really be preparing themselves, um, for a world where you have agents, you have LLMs inside of your company. Um, that are performing access and that's going to be an avalanche of access. It's going to be a lot of access. These things are going to be doing stuff inside of your, your services at a scale.

Alex Valente
It's kind of unforeseen, right? And so in order for that to be done safely and securely, you need to make sure that all of your security and permissions are correctly set up before that happens. But if it's already happening, you should definitely make sure that security posture is uh, currently safe and secure.

Alex Valente
So whether the toothpaste is out of the tube or not, you know, people need to protect themselves. Um, if you're utilizing these products and every company kind of is and every user is. It doesn't mean that, you know, you shouldn't be trying to maintain that security posture. So, most big companies right now, they're, they're testing stuff.

Alex Valente
They have stuff in, um, you know, different bits and bobs, kind of, uh, in different use cases inside of their company. But it's ever expanding. And I think we're already starting to see that more and more access yields more and more leaks, more and more, uh, security vulnerabilities. Um, and so people need to kind of work with a vendor that can assist them to solve that challenge.

Alex Valente
And that's really where we came in. That's where, why we started the company.

Georgie
If you had a magic wand and you're like these industries, you don't need to name names or anything, but these industries, like low hanging fruit guys, you need to, Like up your security posture, who, who, who would they be? Who is the most at risk of headline news right now?

Alex Valente
Most at risk of headline news is any company that has lots of users, lots of people and then secure data. So what we found is like people in the financial services industry, You know, all of a sudden they can, they go and get copilot. The st thing that they do when I get copilot is they type in, tell me about something bad that's happened at a Christmas party or tell me about, you know, someone's personal information or tell me about, um, you know, a particular company's financial position.

Alex Valente
And they use all of these things inappropriately, um, you know, that is just one leak, one threat vector inside of a very large amount of access that's going to happen inside of a company. So you can imagine that's one tool, that's Copilot, that's inside of one company and that's already causing data leaks.

Alex Valente
What happens when, you know, you have agents that are doing things and they're speaking to other agents, how can we have confidence that they're not accessing information and then leaking to the wrong person or to an outside user or, you know, to a, to a malevolent actor, you know, information that's, that's highly privileged.

Alex Valente
So, financial services is an area we see a lot of issue, but any tech company that has user data, it's very, it's a very large challenge for them. They often also have a lot of. Technology, they often use a lot of AI already, so we see them being a really large need for this LLM data security. Um, and then finally, just any company that has critical information, power companies, um, companies that, you know, are in critical infrastructure.

Alex Valente
These, these places, um, we maybe don't talk about this in Australia that much, but they're often targets from international governments, uh, criminal syndicates. Um, because their data is very valuable and given that now there's these new threat vectors that are emerging, they need to come up with a plan in order to protect themselves as well.

Alex Valente
So, uh, those are kind of the three areas that we see are kind of really critical that really need to act now in order to kind of get their data security posture in check.

Georgie
Epic. Okay. So this is a hit, but we don't want it to be a hit. Get in touch with Alex. If you are one of those major enterprises that have not sorted your security out.

Alex Valente
It's kind of funny. Like we want to get the predictions right. Yeah. But it's like, I kind of want to help that one to not be, not be too tried.

Georgie
Please don't be right on this one.

Alex Valente
That's exactly right.

Georgie
I'm really looking forward to your predictions for , Alex. Tell me what, what's, what can we expect if you look in your crystal ball?

Alex Valente
Well, thankfully, some of them are covered already by what we've spoken about. Um, but I've got my , um, my  predictions here and, um, I'll jump into it with the first one. Um, my first one is that reasoning models will start doing more search and tool access on your behalf. So everything is going to become more agentic is probably the way of thinking about this.

Alex Valente
Um, so we talk about agents are going to become a big use case, but I think my prediction is agents are going to become a big use case and you're not going to even know about it. Right now, when you write a query to a model, you don't think about what it's doing in the background. But I think we're going to find out pretty fast that these agents kind of become part of that, that model and they're going to, the models are going to end up running longer and doing more.

Alex Valente
So that's probably prediction number  right now. We've already seen models attempt to increase the amount of time they reason through a problem as a way of increasing their performance.

Georgie
And tell me a little bit about that, because I know that that is often brought up in response to the, um, scaling laws.

Alex Valente
Yeah, absolutely. So, what we found is like getting a model to respond and improve its, its quality of its response. There was a direct scale, like a direct law, a scaling law between like the number of parameters in the model and the improvement of, um, of its, its, um, its response. We found out later on, we could actually change the amount of time it took to reason through a problem.

Alex Valente
And that would also improve its, uh, the rates of its response and, and it meeting different characteristics. So, what we're starting to see now is different products. That kind of spend longer reasoning through a particular task in order to resolve or certain use cases. And the classic one that people are already using is we mentioned earlier, which is that  model, um, at, at ChatGPT.

Alex Valente
So if you go to ChatGPT now and you click the  model, it'll, it'll kind of think through things. It'll tell you some of the steps it's, it's using to think through. But what they've found is they can actually take that  seconds and make it, you know,  seconds, two hours. Three hours and the responses actually get better.

Alex Valente
So, we're likely to find that for some use cases, we're going to increase the amount of time that it takes to reason and by increasing the amount of time it takes to reason, we're going to get a better response. And so, maybe if you're a company and you're trying to understand, is this person a good creditor?

Alex Valente
Is this person, should this person be given a loan? Should this person, um, should we do business with this person given some risk profile? Whatever it might be. We might find that reasoning through that over a three hour period results in a very good response. And so we're going to keep doing that as a method for resolving this challenge that we used to do maybe with people.

Alex Valente
So these are the types of things that we're kind of starting to see.

Georgie
I really hope that this is accurate because these are all hits for you, right?

Alex Valente
These are my hits. These are my

Georgie
hits. Okay, I'm excited to see that. Because yeah, most consumers, I think, Like, Oh, dude, take your time. If you're going to nail the answer, I'd prefer that you nail it.

Georgie
And I'll get on with my work in the meantime. Right,

Alex Valente
exactly. Exactly. So I think as well, we're already kind of, we spoke a little bit about robotics as well. Like someone said, if a robot took a really long time to iron your clothes, would you care as long as they ironed your clothes for you? And the answer is like, I don't care if it takes,

Georgie
take it to them.

Georgie
We bought a washer dryer since the last episode. Every time I look at it, I'm like, thank you, Alex. We washed like  towels, like. At once.

Alex Valente
The best. I'm telling you. The other thing, next thing you need to get, um, when a dishwasher, you need a dishwasher that when it finishes, it opens the dishwasher slightly.

Alex Valente
I don't know this, if you've ever seen this feature before.

Georgie
No.

Alex Valente
So, when the dishwasher finishes, it just cracks the dishwasher open and then the airflow dries the dishes. So, when you leave the house, oh my God, another winner. You come back to the dishwasher, oh, it's already, the stuff's dry. There's no like streak marks on it.

Alex Valente
It's much better. I've got so many opinions on, on household white goods.

Georgie
Let me get you on the white goods episode.

Alex Valente
Get me a whole episode on white goods. I can talk about it forever.

Georgie
Actually, like, sorry to take you off piece, but one more thing. Every time at the end of the episode, when I do the rapid fire questions, I say, what would you like to use AI for?

Georgie
It's always

Alex Valente
Of course it is. Everyone hates

Georgie
household tasks.

Alex Valente
Someone said, um, we, we invented robots so that we could do art in our spare time. But instead we invented robots that could do art so that we could do our household tasks in our spare time. And I think that's pretty terrifying.

Alex Valente
That's it. And so it's a shocker. It's a shocker. I've got, I've got a prediction on here for us, which is, we spoke about robotics before, but the hardware conversation is going to shift towards more accessible hardware. And we saw Nvidia with the, that, that new, uh, digits desktop thing that they've, they've kind of put out, which is a ,  kind of AI computer that you can put on your desktop, great for researchers, great for companies that maybe want to test with stuff.

Alex Valente
So we're seeing some more accessibility there. We're seeing Apple make lots of investments into consumer hardware that can run AI workloads.

Georgie
Is that what Apple are doing? Because I just thought they'd give it up.

Alex Valente
Their investments on their chipsets are super impressive. Like, don't get me wrong, I think we all kind of know that the, um, the OS, um, you know, changes to notification summaries.

Alex Valente
Bit of a miss.

Georgie
I heard that the Photos app was really shitty too. Oh,

Alex Valente
the Photos app. Let's not get started. I, I, I don't know about you, I can't find any photos anymore. Can you find any photos, Jordan?

Georgie
I'm a Google girlie. I just love from my Android Hightower because you guys have been making fun of me for years.

Alex Valente
That's right. We have. We have. I don't want you to know in private. What phone do you

Georgie
have and why does it have a USB adapter? Now look who's laughing, Alex.

Alex Valente
I don't know who's laughing because I can't find them on my photos

Georgie
app. You don't have any friends now. Okay, we're at number four.

Alex Valente
Yeah, this is number four.

Alex Valente
The other element of this consumer hardware thing is consumer robotics. Tesla's got the Tesla robot. I think that was about ,  USD, they kind of predicted. In China, they've released via Unitree robotics, which is like quite a famous robotics company in China. For , , you can buy a humanoid robot that kind of has like pretty state of the art tech inside of it, um, you know, that you can, you can train to kind of unload your dishwasher.

Alex Valente
So we're seeing mass advancements already. We're going to see more advancements here. I think it's going to get more accessible. It's not impossible that in the future, in the next couple of years, you're going to see a humanoid robot doing a task. I don't think that that's an outrageous prediction.

Georgie
?

Alex Valente
Mid .

Georgie
Okay. End of .

Alex Valente
End of . Exactly. My next prediction, so what are we up to? We're up to prediction number five now, or number four. We're going to see agents start touching customer data and start touching the interface with customers. So when you go to talk to a business, you're going to start to talk to more AIs.

Alex Valente
They're going to do more things for you right now. I don't know about you. I recently called a Optus hotline. I went through the button pressing with the fake robot to get to the human person. The human person goes. You know, and starts doing another checklist of items, obviously, on the other end of the phone line.

Alex Valente
We're likely going to see a lot of those basic operations get done by an AI. I think my bet is that early on, they might give you a choice. They might say, Hey, do you want to talk to an AI now? Or do you want to wait  minutes and talk to an operator? And people might take that AI option and see where it leads them.

Alex Valente
We're probably going to start to see more of these customer facing agentic workflows. Uh, start to emerge, I think, in .

Georgie
I do a lot of online ordering for groceries. It's just one easier life hack for me personally. And any time there's a tiny issue with the order or whatever, I've never actually gotten to the point where I've had to speak to a human.

Georgie
And I've actually really enjoyed that experience.

Alex Valente
So, yeah, I tend to agree with you. It's like when, when those things work, they feel awesome.

Georgie
They give me my money back too. And I'm like, thanks.

Alex Valente
Thanks robot. You and I can hang out.

Georgie
Dollars at a time.

Alex Valente
Exactly right. I don't know about you. I'm often reporting like bruised bananas from my order.

Alex Valente
Like, you know, go get my money back.

Georgie
I've had a really bad one where they sent the entire wrong order, and it was a Georgia H, and it was like my specific pet peeve because it's not my name, but everyone always calls me Georgia, and she had ordered, she must have been like having a barbecue, she ordered like So much meat, like, like we could not physically fit it in our freezer to eat because you can't give it back once it's been delivered.

Alex Valente
Yeah, yeah, safety

Georgie
issues. And I was like, try and not waste food here. And, you know, family of four, we could not physically eat that much meat.

Alex Valente
I mean, like, yeah, that's like a weird one. It's like kind of a good thing. Like you've got a lot of expensive products and then it's like kind of a bit annoying.

Alex Valente
Like carnivorous diet for a month is a bit tough.

Georgie
And it was like, like, you know, not judging, but like, I prefer a lean meat. It was just that really funny mince where you're like, Oh man.

Alex Valente
Not for the fourth meal this week. Number five, we've seen agents are going to talk to customers. We're going to see agents talk to other agents.

Alex Valente
That's the next thing. So we're going to see that agents are going to begin to try and do a job. And in order to do their job, they're going to talk to another agent. And you can start to see how with this picture of like more workflows, touching more and more data, doing more and more tasks for more and more people, we're going to see like a really big security and safety question get asked.

Alex Valente
Um, lots of people are going to care a lot more about that when they see a lot more access happening. And this is a lot of this conversation we're talking before about, like. There's going to be a lot of access, like models are going to be doing a lot of actions. They're going to be doing it likely on your behalf, which means they're going to be accessing things as you.

Georgie
Freaks up my time not talking to a chatbot, correct? Yeah,

Alex Valente
that's exactly right. And it's going to free up time for you. It's going to be an amazing experience. It's going to go and, you know, make sure that you've got the right health care coverage when you go and ask your health care bot to do that. It's going to make sure that inside of a big business, you know, that the form gets filled out in the right way or that the customer passes an AML check or whatever it might be.

Alex Valente
But again, it's going to be a lot of access and companies and people are going to want to make sure that those workflows are really secure and safe. Because when it does access things on your behalf. You're going to want to be able to approve it. You're going to want to be able to make sure that those things are correct now.

Georgie
I can't wait  you say?

Alex Valente
.

Georgie
Yes.

Alex Valente
Jesus. Let's do it. Given that, my sixth prediction is IT departments are going to become the HI departments for AI agents. We already heard this from Jensen Huang. It's probably not my prediction. It's his. I stole it, but I'm going to take it and I'm going to say that's my prediction as well.

Georgie
Remind the listeners who Jensen Huang is.

Alex Valente
He's the CEO of NVIDIA, uh, he's a pretty cool dude.

Georgie
Great snakeskin black jacket recently.

Alex Valente
Every time. Yeah. Every time. It's an amazing story. He wore the jacket once at a press conference and his PR person said, you're never taking the jacket off ever again. And now he wears it in every single press conference.

Georgie
I didn't know this. It's the first time I had seen it, you know, and it's going to be massive for this year. I think he started it.

Alex Valente
You're right. That's a great, that's a great prediction. I like that one. It's my one

Georgie
and only prediction for the pod.

Alex Valente
That's like an AI and fashion prediction. I kind of like that.

Alex Valente
That's a good one. But yeah, we're going to see this become a big thing. The, the IT department becoming the HR department because they're going to be building these like and installing these agents that are doing tasks. And these tasks have jobs, they're going to be accessing things on people's behalf, people are going to be talking to them and utilizing them, so they're going to have to manage how those actions are occurring inside of an organization to solve the jobs, and it's not going to be a conversation now about I buy a tool, people are going to be buying an agent, that agent solves a job, And the tool is going to become a little bit of the second tier when it comes to solving a problem.

Alex Valente
People are going to try and solve problems, I think, first with an agent. And then when they can't, they're going to try and solve it with a tool. Um, and we're going to see, um, at the IT department, and we're normally those people who manage the tools inside of an organization. Start to manage those agents because those agents are kind of like people with jobs.

Alex Valente
You're going to kind of be like an HR department.

Georgie
Wow. I did not have that on my bingo card. Um, I guess cause I think HR and I think people and it just, it's hard to compute that. That's, that's really incredible. Who will roll this out first? Do you reckon?

Alex Valente
Uh, I think for organizations that have large amount of Textual processes.

Alex Valente
So what's a textual process? It is a job that requires a large amount of unstructured text. So if you're in the finance world, for example, you probably consume a lot of text. Uh, if you're in the legal industry, you consume a lot of text. We already see a large amount of permeation of agent experiences in there.

Alex Valente
Insurance is another large one. Uh, but then in technology, we see a lot of people that have to deal with a lot of processes. They have to analyze a lot of customer information. They have to analyze all these different jobs. Might have compliance, might have governance challenges. We see a lot of these things getting, um, automated by agents really fast.

Alex Valente
Um, and a lot of people now prefer to try and build an agentic experience before they build a tool experience. And so, like, that is the reason why we're seeing IT departments, like, when we speak to them, they go, like, we need something to kind of be able to manage these agents. Like, what are we going to do?

Alex Valente
So, it's a big topic of conversation and we see that being really, really valuable coming forward. Let's do the next one. I think we're up to number

Georgie
I've got seven in my mind.

Alex Valente
Let's say seven. I'm, I'm not following.

Georgie
Create a, uh, sub stack of these after, afterwards, so everyone can. Thank you.

Alex Valente
Yeah. You're

Georgie
welcome.

Alex Valente
I've got, AI agents have a big security event. That's my prediction as well for.

Georgie
Bad security event. Not good.

Alex Valente
Bad one. Bad one. We're going to see, um, some companies get this wrong. We're going to see some users get this wrong and we're going to see those agent experiences leak data. We're going to see them.

Alex Valente
People try and use them for malicious activities. We spoke about this before, and I think for a lot of people, they need to get their LLM data security in the right spot in the right place. And I think most people don't have that right now. And so they're probably going to need to start to think about, like, how can I get myself ready to use these experiences?

Alex Valente
Could be consumer. I think it's likely going to be corporate because we're going to see a lot of the corporates start to do a little bit more than the consumers early on, but it'll be an again, that avalanche of access that, that really ends up hurting.

Georgie
Alex, can this happen even if there's no bad actors, even if there's not someone trying to hack the system, can it just happen like innocently?

Alex Valente
Yeah, right now that's most of the time that happens is with people trying to use tools and they accidentally, um, don't have things set up correctly. And then before you know it, they've. Leaked data to the wrong person.

Georgie
This has happened to me. Like I won't name names, but I was a consultant and people gave me very personal data about the company.

Georgie
And like, it was very awkward for everyone.

Alex Valente
It just happens. Human beings are kind of pretty good at figuring out when information, like they shouldn't have access to information. They go like, this is probably not, it's not something I should know. You know, AI agents are terrible at that. They actually don't have that at all.

Alex Valente
Like they'll just use any information they think is relevant. We use relevancy as the metric. You've got to determine whether or not something is used. So this is really the space that we play in. It's like, well, these things, all they care about is relevant information. Like, it's really hard to get them to understand what is the right information given security and safety.

Alex Valente
So that's probably where, uh, I think the next. Uh, kind of frontier of securities going. It's a, we're going to have a big security event and we need to make sure that we're ready for that.

Georgie
Yeah, it's something that we don't want to have happen. But yeah, I can see this happening too. Yeah,

Alex Valente
exactly. Um, number , I think we're up to now.

Alex Valente
China enters the model battle with low cost. So, yeah, get a bit. Bit of geopolitics involved last time, you know, in the Forbes article, they had, uh, American, uh, domestic politics. Well, I've got international politics. I raised them and I raised them. Like, I think everyone recognizes these things to be of a strategic importance to countries.

Alex Valente
And given that it's a strategic importance, I think China's made pretty big and pretty big leaps and pretty big investments. And we know that China loves to compete on cost. That's a great way for them to, to enter more markets very quickly. And I think with DeepSeek AI, who's like their kind of national champion when it comes to LLMs, we've already seen them produce a really high quality LLM for a very low cost.

Alex Valente
Um, and they're likely going to try and distribute that as much as possible, um, to, to get as many people using that and, and kind of chip away at the global competition when it comes to, to kind of AI. China's always been great at AI. There's, there's probably no reason that they wouldn't be good at this as well.

Alex Valente
So. We're going to see them really enter the race.

Georgie
Yeah, that's a really hot take. Does that concern us here in Australia?

Alex Valente
It's an interesting one. We, I guess like the, the, the truth is we don't know, like we don't really know how this is going to play out. We know that there's quite a robust regulatory framework kind of globally on how things are being computed on, um, how we share data, where business data should go.

Alex Valente
Um, we know obviously America is kind of in a trade war with China that kind of tariff all their products. And it's very likely that like if America was to see, uh, these Chinese products, say, get market share in America, they'd likely tariff them again. But I think the Chinese market is really interesting because it's, It's more about the consumer, like there's nothing that stops a consumer from typing in a website and going and using something if it's cheap and it's really good, and like China does really well at that, and so it's going to be difficult to kind of see how a consumer would behave in this scenario and whether or not they're able to beat out kind of their American peers.

Georgie
Just quickly, Alex, you said there's a global legislation with regards to what they build. I'm very ignorant in this space. I thought it could be like cowboys, you know, like they do what they want. It's their roles in their domain. But really, they will be held accountable.

Alex Valente
Yeah, it's the, the, the rules here that exist aren't on AI.

Alex Valente
They're on, on how we manage on how companies manage their data. And right now, If you're a large business, it's very difficult to go and utilize something like DeepSeek AI and get the requisite kind of security guarantees that you require as a business in order to get your ISO certification, your SOC certification, all these different HIPAA certification.

Alex Valente
So that's the reason why people don't utilize those providers. You know, there's nothing that says, you know, a Chinese company can't go and train a model and, you know, they want them to do that. But when it comes to consumers, Again, consumers can kind of choose as they want, you know, that stops them from going and utilizing these products right now.

Georgie
Liked number , that's, that's one of my faves. What's number ?

Alex Valente
Number , we're going to see chip competition heat up. I think last year we had a lot of announcements come out from big companies about their chips. But so far NVIDIA has really dominated the space. Yeah, they've got

Georgie
a monopoly basically, right?

Alex Valente
That's right. We see a lot of like, pretty much every single company still buys all their stuff from NVIDIA. Um, but we've seen from AWS, they've started to release their own chipset that enables them to do very low cost inference. So, um, this is not too dissimilar to a lot of stuff that Google does as well.

Georgie
Yeah, because they're not going to buy AWSs, so.

Alex Valente
No, they're not going to buy AWSs. Exactly right. Uh, we see Grok, the ASIC manufacturer that makes specific chips for very low cost inference.

Alex Valente
They have also entered the market. They've been very successful. So, we're starting to see, like, these. Providers come out and compete in the chip space and generally where they compete is they compete in inference. Like, hey, let's leave training to NVIDIA. They can kind of keep that market. But maybe where we can kind of get our foothold and chip away at their market share is at inference.

Alex Valente
And that seems to be working. So Grok, for example, yep, very highly performant chipset, very affordable. Uh, so we're looking like that's going to be a, um, a winner. As well long term so we're probably gonna see a lot of the businesses continue to invest in their own chips going forward

Georgie
chips for  is a really.

Georgie
What take that I'm going to look out for? I loved that one. I didn't, I didn't know.

Alex Valente
G R O Q, not G R O K. Probably the most annoying thing in the AI space at the moment is that Twitter's LLM is called Grok, and that is also a chipset manufacturer.

Georgie
I was thinking with a K, with a C, with a Q, with a Q, with a C.

Alex Valente
So we'll see a cost reduction there for customers. And then finally, I think we're going to see AI success for big companies. This is prediction number . AI success for companies become a financial metric. In markets, public markets. So we're going to start to see public markets asking companies, what do you use your organization doing in AI?

Alex Valente
Do you have a strategy? Yeah. What are you doing? People see the productivity improvements. They see the potential for growth. They want to make sure that the companies they're investing in have a strategy and that they're making really, really intelligent investments and that they want to make sure as well, that it's going to be done safely, securely, and that they're not going to have to worry.

Alex Valente
We're going to see financial markets start to ask these questions. So we're going to start to appear on quarterly updates, um, AGM, these are the types of places we're going to start to see a lot more, uh, conversation about AI, in the same way that we see conversation about ESG, in the same way that we see conversations about their financial performance, their strategic performance.

Alex Valente
We're going to see that, I think, emerge as well.

Georgie
Uh, I live with a public markets investor, and so I listen in on these calls and the questions that the, the analysts will ask. And yeah, it's so funny you mentioned ESG. You know, the environmental and social consequence of the company became very important for obvious reasons.

Georgie
And I haven't overheard specific AI questioning yet, but know that they are They have to be just as on top of the AI movements as anyone.

Alex Valente
That's it. And I think like in , you know, when you start to see financial performance of companies change and them crediting the AI strategy, maybe, Hey, we had a massive productivity improvement from this AI agent, or we had some additional revenue coming from some AI product.

Alex Valente
We're going to start to see their competitors get asked those questions. And before you know, it's going to proliferate throughout the financial market.

Georgie
And if it means a reduction in headcount in the company and saving more costs because of that.

Alex Valente
We'll see. I would actually say technology always has increased.

Alex Valente
The number of jobs available. We always think that technology reduces jobs. It often gets people to go and do more productive things. It ends up creating jobs. That's my, that's not a hot take. That's not a prediction. It's a real thing. It already happened.

Georgie
Nate, what a positive note to finish on. You've been so generous.

Georgie
It's, it's honestly such a treat to get to pick your brain. Um, I've learned a lot and it's also some juicy's the education, entertaining. You've still got it, mate. You've still got it. Um, I, I really want to give you the opportunity to shout out as well. At the end of our last, um, chat together, you guys were hiring at redactive.

Georgie
You're one of the three co founders. What what's happening. What would you like to shout out to people that have joined?

Alex Valente
Yeah, absolutely. We're, we're, we're currently hiring, hiring a designer. If anyone's a designer, we are keen to, to have a senior designer come and join that team. So that's the first thing.

Alex Valente
We are hiring jump, jump on our, our hiring page, our careers page on at redacted ai. Um, you can just navigate to the careers page on there and apply for a job. We'd love that. The other thing as well is we'd just published a, a white paper on, um, LLM data Security and for, for CISOs and, and other people interested in security.

Alex Valente
Super consumable. We'd love people to go and download it and give it a read. So probably my two, two shout outs for today. And then the other one is, um, love a follower on Instagram and X, on Twitter, whatever it might be, uh, LinkedIn, um, come give me a follow. I'm often talking about these things if you're interested.

Alex Valente
So LinkedIn is probably the best bullet.

Georgie
But follow his Instagram. He's always on a boat. It's really like he demoralized the rest of us.

Alex Valente
I'm actually dressed like a gondolier. So, yeah, we'll have the

Georgie
YouTube link if you want to see Alex's gondolier outfit as well. Um, mate, I couldn't be more grateful.

Georgie
Thank you so much for unpacking all of these and bonus  predictions. I'm looking forward to my drink.

Alex Valente
That's it. That's exactly right. Hopefully I get some of these right so I don't end up going bankrupt.

Georgie
I'm feeling positive for you. Thanks, mate. Have the best day.

Georgie
for listening to In the Blink of AI. You can check out the show notes for anything discussed in this week's episode, and we will be back next week. This podcast was produced by Day One, with music by Dan Hanson and visual artwork by Sophie Tyrell. If you loved the episode, please tell your mates, and I love AI news.

Georgie
Please share your thoughts and suggestions to georginarosehealy@gmail.com.