Gareth Rydon
Don't stress if you're not a prompt engineer and think you need to save long lists of the top 10 best prompts. A funny story—I've lost count of the number of people I meet who say they've got ten tabs open with the best prompts for XYZ. They've been open for like six months!

Gareth Rydon
I haven't read them, but I don't want to close them because I don't want to lose them. Let's take a step back and ask the model to prompt itself.

Georgie
Hello and welcome to In the Blink of AI, where I talk to the brightest AI startups and innovators each week.

Georgie
I'm Georgie Healy, and this week I'm speaking with Gareth Ryden, the co-founder of Australia's generative AI studio, Friyay. Gareth is a leader in generative AI. He wears many hats, one of which is supporting SMBs with strategic AI implementation. Based on listener feedback, we're excited to have Gareth join us to discuss AI tools that anyone can try to make their lives easier and more productive.

Georgie
It's also just kind of fun to play with. You can follow In the Blink of AI pod on Instagram, where you can see visual examples of the AI products in action. A huge thank you to Gareth for being on the show. We can't wait to hear about your experience trying these new tools. Hey Gareth, thanks for joining In the Blink of AI.

Georgie
This is a really special episode. It's the first time we are focusing on the listeners, and being able to try some AI tools for the first time. This brings me to you, my amazing guest, Gareth. Tell me, where do you work? What's your day job?

Gareth Rydon
Thank you very much. What a great way to get me excited for our conversation, Georgie.

Gareth Rydon
I'm one of the three co-founders of Friyay, an Australian generative AI studio.

Georgie
Big fans of the show will remember one of your co-founders, Charmaine, was on the show. She was incredible. And if anyone wants a deep dive on Friyay and the business, definitely go listen to that episode. But I specifically wanted to bring you on the show, Gareth, because...

Georgie
You're perfect for this episode, where we try a few AI tools and have a bit of a deep dive on why they're going to help listeners in their day-to-day productivity and lives. You post daily shorts on LinkedIn with some AI tools and tricks, and I've been following you for some time. Do you have a particularly well-received short or one that comes to mind?

Gareth Rydon
Yes, there's a couple, but the one that stands out is not from a techie perspective, as I'm an ex-service designer. My posting is all about my exploration and the stuff we do at Friyay and how I use it personally. The one that was really well-received involved a tool called Pika, P-I-K-A.

Georgie
Um,

Gareth Rydon
It's so much fun.

Gareth Rydon
It's where you upload a photo and then add video effects. We got our new profile photos at Friyay, and I uploaded mine to LinkedIn but made a Pika video where it looks like hands come in and squish my face like Play-Doh, and people went nuts for it.

Gareth Rydon
Because it's like, oh, you know, a standard new LinkedIn photo, then all of a sudden my face...

Georgie
Keeping it real on LinkedIn, where everyone's always posturing and showing off. And I'm definitely guilty of this, but a bit of humor? I love that. I'm going to try this after the episode goes live.

Georgie
Why are you so passionate about this? Like, your day job is helping people learn about and use AI tools to help their businesses. Why is it so important, do you think?

Gareth Rydon
It's why I'm so passionate, and Charmaine and Ben, my co-founders, share this passion. When we first started playing around with ChatGPT, we all had that "Oh my gosh" moment. For us, that moment was "This can transform how we work and really liberate our time." The ease of getting started and beginning to play really drives us, and our central thesis at Friyay is that generative AI is easier than you think but more powerful than you can imagine.

Gareth Rydon
If I can help one or two people a day just start doing one new thing, like recently, I've been helping their kids' surf club embed AI across their whole organization—from how they run their nippers program to how they get sponsorships, even down to how they run the barbecue, the free sausage sizzle they put on for nippers on a Sunday. The passion comes from showing them something like taking a photo of the inside of your fridge and asking ChatGPT for a dinner recipe.

Georgie
And then the next day, you get calls like, "This was so great. We made this." And just listening to that really makes me feel good. So people see the value it can bring to them.

Georgie  I love that example. I actually haven't tried that. My fridge might be more complex than the AI can come up with, given the sparse offerings currently in there.

Georgie  We're not even in the episode yet, but I've got another one I'd love to share too, if that's okay.

Gareth Rydon  Yeah, of course.

Georgie  My eldest started school this year and, frankly, a lot of us parents are quite overwhelmed by the school calendar. We got an entire page full of events for the year, just listed, and it was, you know, my heart rate elevated to about 190. And what I did is I copy-pasted that into Gemini and said, can you put these into my Gmail calendar?

Georgie  And I think the message of this show is if it doesn't work the first time, please don't give up. Like you said, it's easier and more powerful than you think, but also don't give up if it doesn't work the first time. I tried to use the PDF document first up; that didn't work, but copy-pasting the text, it all populated into my calendar—every event for the year. I was so excited, Gareth. Have you tried that yourself? Have you ever done that?

Gareth Rydon  One? I'm doing it this afternoon. It will transform my wife's afternoon.

Georgie  Totally. Okay. I think we're so ready to jump into the episode because, yeah, little things like this, you don't have to be an AI expert. You mentioned that you're not, you know, a CTO. I'm definitely not a CTO, but these things can really make a huge difference. And you don't need to be a software engineer to make the most of it. Would you agree?

Gareth Rydon  Oh, a hundred percent. And I think from my own personal experience, code for me makes me think I'm watching The Matrix. That's about my level of understanding of code. I'm like, "When's Neo going to jump out and, you know, attack Agent Smith?" But that ability to understand how these things work in natural language... So, I always think when people say to me, "Oh, you know, what do I need to be really good at?" Or "What's so important for me to be successful in this new context?" And I said, well, can you ask really good questions? Can you think about ideas and things you want to do? And then can you communicate clearly? Those for me are three of the most foundational skills. If you can have that, you can start interacting with an AI tool.

Georgie  I love this. So everyone listening, that's the message for today. Just ask questions, treat it as a friend. It's going to be fun if you just go with that open mindset. Okay. So I'm excited to dive in. And I've got a bunny that keeps eating my power cord. So this could be a short call, but we'll try and power through, and I'll just keep nudging her away. So let's dive in. I'm really excited because I only started using this tool this week. I know. And, um, I'm already pumped. What have you got for us, Gareth? What's our first tool that we're going to try today?

Gareth Rydon  So the first tool to talk about today is Otter AI.

Gareth Rydon  And, and I'll be really clear. I don't get anything from it, I'm not paid. I'm not employed by Otter, but I just love that. I

Georgie  can confirm not getting a paycheck from Otter. Not sponsored, but if you want to...

Gareth Rydon  Yeah. Otter, if you're listening, I can put this on my blog. You know, there's free advertising right here, but it's an AI meeting transcription tool, similar to others you may have heard of, like Fireflies, Circleback, um, Spinach. But that's the tool that I really love to dive into today and just share our experiences and how easy it is to liberate so much time from your day-to-day activities.

Georgie  Amazing. I am so excited. So Otter, cute little furry animal. They hold hands in the ocean so that they don't lose their friend. But in the AI world, what is it?

Gareth Rydon  It's classified as an AI transcriptional meeting assistant. But in its most basic functionality, Otter can take good notes from your meeting. So a good, really good transcript. So if you're there scrolling away in your notebook getting a really tired arm, or tapping away feverishly on your keyboard and everyone can hear you typing, it's really augmenting you by taking really good notes. But the thing that is truly amazing, well, we found in terms of what Otter does is that if you think of it as more than a meeting note taker, if you think of it as a really effective assistant that helps you have more effective meetings.

Gareth Rydon  So the basic functionality, if you sign up for something like Otter or Fireflies or Circleback in your onboarding steps of when you sign up to it, it'll sync with your calendars. And then you can choose for Otter to turn up to your meetings. And I think that's a really important point for people to note is that when you first sign up with these tools, the first thing I encourage people to do is go into the settings and actually switch off the default to join every meeting while you're getting used to it.

Georgie  I wish I listened to this before downloading. Yes. I've been getting a lot of spam from Otter lately. Yes.

Gareth Rydon  But you imagine, say, if we're having a conversation over Google Meet, it'd be, you know, Gareth, Georgie, and then it would have Gareth, Otter note-taking assistant sitting there in the meeting. And it's taking really good transcription and really good notes. And then at the end, which is quite good is it'll give you a summary. So it'll say, "Here's your summary. Here's some actions that it's identified from the meeting," and it's allocated. It'll often allocate me to those actions. It might give you some insights.

Gareth Rydon  So that's kind of like doing what you've always done slightly better. Yeah, like taking notes for you. But where you can really take these types of tools is that, and it's similar for Firefly, Spinach, and Circleback, is they also have an inbuilt AI that sits on top of your transcription. So I know that sounds weird, like an AI sitting on top of words.

Gareth Rydon  Well, what I mean by that is that after a meeting, you can talk to and interact with Otter about what the transcription had in it. So, a case in point, what we do almost every day is we'll have Otter join in key meetings. Straight after, I'll start chatting to Otter, so I'll say, "@Otter."

Georgie  You're typing this in, Gareth, into the interface.

Gareth Rydon  Yes, I'm typing this into the chat. I'll ask it to take actions based on the meeting. So if you think about what's the stuff you usually have to do after a meeting. So probably going to have to send an email out thanking people for the meeting. You might have to send some follow-up notes. You're probably going to have to plan the next meeting.

Gareth Rydon  If you're in a secretariat role or on a board, you're probably going to take minutes. All of those tasks your Otter assistant can do not in like a week, which usually takes me when I'm back and forth trying to do stuff, within a handful of minutes.

Georgie  I'm thinking of my days where there are lots of meetings, right? And I'm so busy with a million different post-it notes. What meeting was that one from? Oh gosh. Um, was that an action I needed to take away or did Tina say she would do that? All of that stuff, as well as the fact that you made a really good point about, you know, you can have someone jotting down the meeting minutes.

Georgie  Whenever I'm the one doing meeting minutes, I'm not really paying attention, being involved in the conversation. I'm so busy just focusing on making sure I don't miss what's being said. So that's incredible. I do want to ask you though, you know, you mentioned a few of the other tools out there. There's Firefly, Circleback, Otter. What you talked about actions from the meeting being addressed. Not all the tools do that. Is that correct?

Gareth Rydon  I think the best thing to look for in these tools is, first of all, do they all have a free trial, and Jermaine and Ben will be rolling their eyes because I'm the cheap one. I'm like, if it's free, we'll try it. If they all offer a free trial, I'd try it. Some of them, and I know Fireflies has this and Otter has this, has that inbuilt AI feature. So that, that's the thing we're going to look for. If you're looking for an AI meeting assistant or AI note-taker, see if they have an inbuilt AI in the tool because that's where you're going to get tremendous value.

Georgie  What's the most popular question you ask it when you type into that chatbot?

Gareth Rydon  Um, there are two, actually.

Georgie  Yeah.

Gareth Rydon  Because I sometimes chat with it mid-meeting, like I've typed mid-meeting. So, my mid-meeting one, sometimes I might say to Otter, "Hey, Otter, I just tuned out for the last five minutes. Can you give me a five-point summary of what was just discussed so I'm not falling behind?" And it'll go through the transcript for the last five minutes, give me the points. So I'm, I'm tuned back in. And then often safer, more formal meetings. You know, I'm being an ex-service designer. I really want to create a great experience for our clients and the people we interact with.

Gareth Rydon  I asked Otter to write me specific thank you emails for all the meeting attendees based on what they said in the meeting. So instead of a generic, "Hi all, thanks for coming to the meeting, here's what we discussed broadly." I'd say, "Hi Otter, can you write me a specific thank you email for Georgie and call out the actions that are applicable to her." It'll draft it, I'll review it, might add in a few things, send that off, then I'll ask it to write back. Thank you email and the actions for the next person in the meeting and all the way through so each person in the meeting rather than them having to wade through a big list and say what's relevant to me, I'm helping them get a personalized specific summary and action points that they need to.

Georgie  That is so powerful. Um, and also like, I like getting a thank you email as well. So you're kind of packaging it beautifully, but that's such additional work, especially when you've got multiple meetings in a day or in a week. Which brings me to who is the best person to spend out of pocket for a service like this?

Georgie  Um, I'm on a free trial at the moment, but how many meetings would I need to be doing a week to really justify paying for this, do you think?

Gareth Rydon  Well, the pattern that we've seen is, say, if you take, on average, say, a one-hour meeting, a one-hour meeting usually has anywhere between 15 and 20 minutes of follow-up stuff that you'll have to do.

Gareth Rydon  And that's on a good day. But I don't mean like 15 minutes, 20 minutes straight away. It's like over the next three days, there's about 15, 20 minutes. The right use of a tool like Otter, if you have a one-hour meeting, that 15 to 20 minutes can be done, that work can be done in about one or two minutes. Wow.

Gareth Rydon  So, my view is that anyone who has more than one hour of meetings a week is saving 10 to 20 minutes per week, per week. So if you add that up over a year, you know, almost, that's more than an hour, you know, an hour a month, just for one hour meeting. So then you've got 12 hours back in your time over the year, even if you're just meeting for one hour.

Gareth Rydon  So that's where people are like, "Oh, you know, I need to be a heavy, heavy, heavy meeting user." So I should justify it. Well, if you do the maths that way, it's more than justifying it's sort of cost and the value it's giving you back. Just if you're meeting for one hour a week.

Georgie  And now to play the, you know, devil's advocate position, big misconception or big, um, pushback on AI transcript tools is accuracy.

Georgie  You know, what if I've got a thick accent or there's background noise being picked up? I'm at work and there's a conversation going on behind me. I haven't used the tool as much as you have. Is that a genuine issue or concern that you've had with Otter or any of the tools?

Gareth Rydon  So I've tested all of them and when we've used them for customer research, so we do a fair amount of customer research, sort of ethnographic interviews, we would spend a bit of time going through the transcript and it's not, none of them are 100 percent accurate, none of them.

Gareth Rydon  But in terms of the value we get and the importance of reviewing and going through the detail we need to go through the detail, we might notice things. Well, that wasn't quite the word that I used. This was this person talking. My traditional meeting, if there's a couple of people in the meeting, we're all taking notes or say traditionally when we're doing customer research, you'd have the moderator in the conversation, the note taker.

Gareth Rydon  We would debrief after and we would go through the notes and there'd be things that we missed or things that weren't quite captured. So I think this is a really important thing to know is that people are saying, well, it needs to be perfect and capture the transcription perfectly. And I'm saying, well, in what context have we taken notes perfectly?

Gareth Rydon  So that expectation of if you had a human assistant in the meeting taking notes, would you expect them to take the notes verbatim perfectly? Probably not. So what would you do? You would actually go through that and back and forth to correct them. So we try and say, if you have that mindset for these transcription tools, you're going to get the value.

Gareth Rydon  But if you have this expectation that it needs to be perfect, you're holding that expectation to what, to a higher quality would when a human was taking the note. So I just find that really curious.

Georgie  It's such a fair pushback and one I'm guilty of, you know, the AI should be perfect and I should be able to completely switch my brain off entirely.

Georgie  And it's like, well, maybe just don't switch your brain off entirely and, and it'll handle, you know, 99%, but you know, stay present, stay focused, use your brain as well. Right.

Gareth Rydon  Yeah. And I've seen a few people do this and I've started doing this, which I think is a really good approach. I still write a few things down in a meeting like things that sort of jump out to me and I take that as I'm going to use that with Otter's transcript.

Gareth Rydon  So when I'm chatting with Otter, I would say, you know, I've taken these notes I've noticed this is this in your transcript and then actually almost collaborate with the tool I know it sounds strange because it's like a transcription service But I've I actually load my notes into the chat and so what that doing is that's actually lifting the quality in the output to that next level and So it's a really good point you made.

Gareth Rydon  It isn't a case of I've got transcriptions. I'm just going to sit there and listen. How can you be as effective as possible in that meeting where you're not having to listen to absolutely everything, but you're listening to the really important things. You can note those down or even I've noticed this little bit of a pattern now is that my note-taking is changing where I'm now focused more on writing really interesting questions that come to mind about the meeting, because then I interact with Otter about those questions.

Gareth Rydon  So I'm free to, to your point. I'm freed up a little bit from writing everything down. I can listen like, Oh, that makes me think about this. And I put a question or an idea down. So it's enabled me to think differently in the meetings.

Georgie  So valuable, especially with the number of hours you've used these transcript services, you've really probably seen the best way to maximize their potential as well as still be involved in an active member of the meeting.

Georgie  Anyone that wants to try Otter, um, it's otter.ai. I would love to hear how you guys feel about this. Like let Gareth and I know. I'll also put a few screenshots of me in a meeting by myself, just playing with Otter, uh, on the, in the blink of AI pod Instagram page, it's, you know, it's quite embarrassing.

Georgie  Like I was worried people would walk past my meeting room at work and see that I'm just in a meeting with myself, but you know, the things I do for the listeners of the show, Gareth. So

Gareth Rydon  The sacrifices, the

Georgie  Sacrifices I make, it's such a labor of love. Okay. I'm already feeling more productive. Uh, before we get into our next recommendation, your other recommendation that you're bringing to the pod, I wanted to briefly zoom out a little bit and talk about LLMs in general.

Georgie  Um, something that you're, you're all over and you've tried everything. There are so many models out there, Gareth, and definitely if you read any AI headline news, there's, there's a race, you know, there's OpenAI and XAI and they're fighting each other. And then Google's got their own suite and then you've got the open source.

Gareth Rydon  And I don't know, do you feel that sense of competition out there with all the models?

Gareth Rydon  Absolutely. And you even saw that this week where Claude released Sonnet 3. 7 on Monday. And OpenAI released deep research on a paid plan yesterday.

Georgie  Wow, breaking news guys.

Gareth Rydon  Yes, like that kind of stuff. And, but then I look at that and go, well, that can only benefit us in that context.

Gareth Rydon  So competition is so good for the end user and we're getting a, it's becoming cheaper. So a case in point is. You had to be on the 200 a month plan for ChatGPT to get access to, um, deep research and the more advanced reasoning models. Every ChatGPT Plus user, when I say plus, the people that are paying 32 a month, or a Teams user now has access to both those things.

Gareth Rydon  And it's not like three years later this happened, this has happened in the space of a couple of months.

Georgie  It's incredible. And I feel like, um, you know, when DeepSeek was released, the Chinese open source model with the reasoning built in, it really forced the other companies to reexamine their pricing models, because why are we paying when we potentially don't have to?

Georgie  DeepSeek specifically, Gareth?

Gareth Rydon  I love what it's doing in terms of forcing that open source approach. And It really calls into question, well, it's OpenAI, but it's actually really close AI because their initial view was we would be open source. And a lot of the speculation is will models like DeepSeek and what's coming out from, you know, other big models in, in China, really championing that open source approach.

Gareth Rydon  Does that change? So that side of it, I think is really, really good. But the fundamental thing for me is, and for the, the, Average person that's going to use these things is, it still is about trust. So, the average person using a Gen AI tool is not going to be, you know, loading the code, running it open source on their laptop.

Gareth Rydon  They're probably going to have the app on their phone. So, when you've got those apps on your phone, and DeepSync is really, really clear. And it's probably, you read, and it's astounding how few people read privacy terms and conditions. I, I'm forcing myself to more and more now, but.

Georgie  I don't think I ever have in my life.

Gareth Rydon  Yes, a lot of, and that's the case for a lot of people. Um, but to your question on how I feel about it, I think love that it's pushing the open source approach, significant amount of caution if you are using the app that you've downloaded from the app store, just about where your data is stored. But that comes down to the individual's choice about where they trust.

Gareth Rydon  So OpenAI, that data is stored on servers in the US. versus DeepSeek where that, that data is going to be stored on servers in China. So I think it's up to the individual about what choice they want to make of where they trust their data being stored and used.

Georgie  Yeah. Um, what's that expression? Something like, if you're not paying, you are the

Gareth Rydon  The product

Georgie  you're the product.

Georgie  Yes. Yeah, it probably comes up a lot in like social media channels and things like that. So this really brings me to my absolute tangent that I am really keen to do five minutes before we started recording. I was like, let's give each of these models a celebrity personality type. And maybe we could start with DeepSeek.

Georgie  It's one I don't actually have a celebrity already picked out for. Maybe a celebrity that's like, seems really open and friendly, but might have an ulterior motive. Like, like maybe we can't pick them.

Gareth Rydon  Well it's going to be, I don't know if this one really works, but it's kind of like where you've got one persona.

Georgie  In, when you're in front of camera versus another, well,

Georgie  yes,

Gareth Rydon  would be, um, a Tom Cruise or

Georgie  something. Maybe, right?

Gareth Rydon  Yeah. Tom Cruise. Like it's, that's a really good one because yeah, like that's good.

Georgie  Like so charismatic, so engaging, friendly, great with reporters. I feel like maybe there's something else. Yes.

Gareth Rydon  Yeah. Yeah.

Georgie  Okay. OpenAI's ChatGPT models. I actually asked Gemini to give some predictions and Gareth, I'd love you to tell me if they're on the mark or not. Arnold Schwarzenegger, powerful and focused on performance. What do you reckon?

Gareth Rydon  For ChatGPT?

Georgie  Yeah.

Gareth Rydon  Yeah, I might disagree a little bit there. I kind of think, um, But ChatGBT, it makes me think of it's like the first one, the most successful, everyone knows that person.

Gareth Rydon  Cause I'd, I'd, I'd almost try and compare the celebrity of ChatGBT with Claude.

Georgie  Yeah.

Georgie  So I'm thinking, what if we had Claude and ChatGBT, I'd say ChatGBT is Matt Damon and Claude is Ben Affleck. Because Matt Damon's like, yeah, he's in, he was like the born supremacy and like, he's the guy, but Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, they sort of worked together for ages.

Gareth Rydon  They wrote a lot of screenplays together, like Good Will Hunting, but Matt Damon got a lot of the credit and he's like the, the one that's held up in higher esteem. Even though Ben Affleck is a fantastic actor, very clever. He puts out a, there's a really interesting video of him talking about the impact of AI in, in screenplays that people should watch.

Gareth Rydon  But. But I take Claude as Ben Affleck and maybe Chat GPT is Matt Damon.

Georgie  I am obsessed with this, Gareth. This is my favorite thing you've shared all episode. Love it. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are the, the, the Claude Bianthropic. And the ChakGPT by OpenAI, Obsessed. I've got two more to run by you. And Gemini gave these predictions.

Georgie  So they're so biased, right? Guess what they said about themselves? Neil deGrasse Tyson, vast knowledge, ability to explain complex topics, super helpful personality.

Gareth Rydon  Was that Gemini?

Georgie  Gemini said that about themselves.

Gareth Rydon  That's just not biased at all. I think, I love this celebrity thing, because I, I think of it from the average person, because how they perceive these brands, almost, and then the model that sits underneath them.

Gareth Rydon  I would almost think of Gemini as Nicole Kidman, and hear me out on this one, so Nicole Kidman. She's been a very successful actress for a very long time, but she's had these dips in her career where she sort of became invisible. But then she comes back and does these amazing performances and you're like, wow, she is a brilliant actress, great range.

Gareth Rydon  I kind of think about that as Gemini because, you know, about four or five months ago, Google made a few pretty solid missteps. Like they were they had those shocking cases of where they had so much bias in the image generators And then they went really extreme and put way too hardcore guardrails and the more wouldn't do stuff and they had a lot people like well they're releasing stuff too early, but now they've had that bumpy patch and It's massively caught up and it's a really, really useful tool.

Gareth Rydon  So that's how I think Gemini more like Nicole Kidman.

Georgie  Yes. And, and to, to really like visualize this, cause I forgot about this Gareth, in their early models, they had, I mean, let's call it exactly how it was. They had, you know, if you type in like someone from World War II and it would be like a person of Asian background in a Nazi uniform and things like that.

Georgie  And it was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And it was like trying to. Improve their diversity, but in a way that just wasn't historically accurate and things like that. I actually forgot about that because the Nicole Kidman of LLMs has been so great with her latest movies. That's such a great one. And, um, I couldn't agree more.

Georgie  What about XAI Rock 3 is Elon Musk. On track with who owns the company, right? Pushing boundaries, bold, but often controversial. What do you reckon?

Gareth Rydon  I think that's pretty good. And this is my personal view. So I played around with grok. I don't use it as much just because of a different value alignment. My values don't align with some of the things at X.

Gareth Rydon  And that's just my choice. So I think that's, that's a really good one. The, the only other person that I might, I might say that X's model Grock would be, is a bit more like a Joe Rogan. Very outspoken, like a very huge following, massive podcast. A lot of people contribute to, you know, smart move by Trump getting on his podcast in terms of reach and that kind of stuff.

Gareth Rydon  But some of the narrative. Doesn't align with a lot of people's beliefs. So that's sort of what it feels like for me, like me personally, not that I would ever be invited, but I, I wouldn't, I would. Not used to go onto that podcast. I'm just like, I'm not choosing to use, um,

Georgie  I feel very flattered that you go on my podcast.

Georgie  It must mean that we have great aligned values, Gareth. And, um, yeah, like I completely agree with you. Like XAI might be great. I also kind of not a big fan of Elon Musk. So it's like with all these amazing models out there, I don't have to. Choose that one if I don't have to, um, amazing. I think we are ready for our final AI tool for the listeners to try.

Georgie  And this one is a little bit more advanced, right, Gareth? This is for people that have already played with LLMs. They're already probably a fan of using AI for productivity. What have you got for us?

Gareth Rydon  I think it's such a good point when you say choosing model, and this is like kind of like within a model as well.

Gareth Rydon  And I totally get it if people are feeling overwhelmed because those users of Chat GPT Even if you looked in Chat GPT at the moment And I don't know if people have done this but when you open the app or when you're in Chat GPT, you can actually choose Which chat GPT model is actually answering your question.

Gareth Rydon  So if you look up the top of your screen, most of people would see Chat GPT 4. 0 or 4. 0 Omni.

Georgie  That's the default, right, Gareth? That's the default. It just does

Gareth Rydon  that.

Georgie  Yep.

Gareth Rydon  And it's, it's great for 90 percent of tasks. But if you click on that, you'll see this drop down. There's all these other models. And I was having a conversation with someone yesterday.

Gareth Rydon  And I'm like, what are these? What are they all? Do I need to even care? Do I even need to know what they are? And one that I found that helps me massively, so where I would select off GPT 4 Omni, I go to GPT 03 Mini. So a very, very high level explanation. You see 03 or 01 in your model selection. These are what's called the reasoning models.

Gareth Rydon  And when we say reasoning, when you put a request in, when you type something in and say, "Hey, I want you to find me a great place to eat for lunch." If you put that request into a reasoning model, the tool actually starts to think through your request and it thinks through how it's going to answer your question, which is kind of cool.

Gareth Rydon  And you can actually watch it reason. So if you're using 03 mini and it starts, it has this little word that says thinking, press on it and you can actually see it talking to itself as it's thinking. But back to your question. Um, I, um, Love online shopping, even though I've got a very strict and online shopping in terms of cycling products, and I've got a very strict budget set in our household of how much I'm allowed to spend on cycling products each year.

Gareth Rydon  But O3 mini is a fantastic online shopping assistant. So the shift why it's fantastic is because it's a reasoning model. So it's going to think through a little bit more of your request. And also it helps you really actually put in all the things that are important to you when you're shopping. So I use that and a couple of tips.

Gareth Rydon  Select the model and then press where you're going to type in your request. If you press the search button as well. So what that means is when you click that button and it goes blue. The model is now live searching the Internet. So you've now got your own personal online shopping assistant.

Georgie  Okay. I am obsessed.

Georgie  I have been playing with this. I only started this yesterday cause I wanted to be ready for the show, Gareth, and it's dangerous. I'm glad I didn't do it a week ago cause it is fun. So everyone you go into, you know, openai.com you go slash GPT or whatever, and you need to be a paying member at this point.

Georgie  So they've got the, what you said before the 32 a month plus account, you definitely don't need to spend 200 for the pro version for this. And in the top left, there'll be the dropdowns and you're going to go to Oh three mini, like you said, and then you're going to click the little button. Near where you type your, your prompt and you're going to click search.

Georgie  Something I played with yesterday was, you know, I don't know where this comes from, but I'm very cheap. Like I love shopping, but I love, love, love a bargain. And so I asked it to go through eBay for vintage Dolce and Gabbana. And I. Even told it, I want it to be under 150. I need it to ship to Australia and it searched the entire internet for me.

Gareth Rydon  The other, the other cool thing there that you can add in, which I do, cause I'm like you, I like a bargain is.

Gareth Rydon  In your request, I ask the type of product I want, and then I say, find me current discount codes for the product as well. So you know how there's always like at checkout, enter this word, but it's like, I always find I only find them too late. Like I'll be listening. Like I've already bought that thing. I didn't realize it.

Georgie  Yeah, you get an email after you've bought it. Here's 10 percent off your first order. And you're like, I just, what?

Gareth Rydon  Yes. So ask it. And I, I then ask it, I say, Can you give me the results in a table because the other thing is you can ask these tools to do is ask it to produce everything how it's best for you.

Gareth Rydon  So me personally, I don't like scrolling through lots of text. So when I do my online shopping, I say, find me the top five of these products that are the best value for money. Um, that to your point, I can get shipped to Australia. Also have the best Reddit and other reviews, Google reviews, because then it finds five star reviews.

Gareth Rydon  And then I say. And then I want you to prioritize the products that have the best discount codes, put those discount codes in the table for me. It's been like so helpful.

Georgie  Oh, Gareth, can you do a screenshot of this for the pod listeners? Maybe?

Gareth Rydon  Yeah.

Georgie  Um, I would love to see the output and your, your query because I'm going to copy, because I've just been playing around and I definitely didn't put it in a table.

Georgie  I definitely didn't use discount codes. That is so incredible. Are there any downsides to doing this? Have you ever, you know, being given a bum steer, or anything that, you know, you're like, Oh, I got so excited, but it actually led me to a place that doesn't ship to Australia or I can't get to.

Gareth Rydon  And that a hundred percent.

Gareth Rydon  And I've clicked on a link that just doesn't exist. So I think that's, that's really important. And I, and you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation is that think of it as an assistant that's getting you almost there, and then you're going to do the last sort of 20%, um, and there's always, I, the example I use is.

Gareth Rydon  There's terrible, there's horror stories of lawyers going to court with made up legal cases. But what's really interesting is we did a bit of work with a couple of law firms and we asked them a question and we said, okay, so you had a paralegal that's worked overnight, prepared you, got everything you need to go to court.

Gareth Rydon  Would you just take their work and walk straight in the courtroom? And they all looked at us like we were fools and said, of course not. And we said, okay, so what would you do? Well, I'd sit down, I'd go through it, I'd double check, I'd give the paralegal some assistance, I'd give them some feedback, I'd correct stuff, and like, well, why don't you do that with an AI tool?

Gareth Rydon  And they're like, ah, okay. And even in our experience with these online shopping assistants, same thing. And I also find what really works for me is if it does give me an output, and there's something that's quite right, I give the feedback, I say, I've just checked and the first two links don't exist, please, can you go back and check your work?

Gareth Rydon  It's like, Oh, my apologies. Let me go back. So I think to your point of some people try it, they don't get the result. Well, it's not a one-off thing. Think of it as that conversation. So when you're doing your online shopping, really work with your online shopping assistant. Say, I actually don't like your first product recommendation because of this reason.

Gareth Rydon  I like recommendation two. Can you find me five more items like recommendation two? So that's where it just gets really, really helpful.

Georgie  I love this, this iterative approach guys. You don't have to write the perfect prompt upfront either. It's not your fault. I don't, don't get disenfranchised.

Georgie  If you type something and you don't get the perfect result, keep playing with it, keep going back and forth. You know, if you choose to, you can see your history and you can just kind of. Have a play around with, I asked this prompt before and it gave me exactly what I wanted. What if I just change one word?

Georgie  What does it give me? Um, this should think of it as playing. It doesn't have to be work, does it, Gareth? It can be fun.

Gareth Rydon  Yeah, it can be, and it should be fun. And there's a hack there as well that I use probably more, more so now is don't stress that you're not a prompt engineer and you need to have, you need to save all of these like long lists of the top 10 best prompts.

Gareth Rydon  And a funny story is. I've lost count of the number of people that I meet and they say, yeah, I've, um, if I showed you my desktop, I've got these 10 tabs open that have the top best prompts for XYZ. Like, how long have you had those open for? And they're like, oh, like six months. I haven't read it, but I don't want to close it because I don't want to lose it.

Gareth Rydon  I'm like, okay, so let's take a step back. And what I get them to do is, why do you ask the model for it to prompt itself? So when I say that, I, I would say to people, give the tool, like ChatGPT, tell it what you're trying to do. Say, I'm trying to prepare for a presentation and I'm a really nervous public speaker.

Gareth Rydon  I want to talk about this topic and I want to get your help, ChatGPT's help for this. Can you suggest some prompts that I might use with you to get this task started? That can also be a really good way because what you do is you start to see the prompts it suggested. So you can learn about how to prompt, but also it takes the pressure off to say.

Gareth Rydon  Well, I haven't done this specific structure to what we said at the beginning. If you're really good at coming up with questions, ask those questions of the model, say. I want to use you to help me with this. Tell me how I can do that. Suggest where we might get started. The first step.

Georgie  I have never tried that.

Georgie  That is amazing. It's like, help me help you. Gareth, you have been so generous. I feel so lucky and excited that you kind of gave all these. Incredible secrets around how to play with AI tools. You've used them all and you've given us two of your favorites. I'm so grateful. We're about to jump into the rapid-fire questions to finish the kind of spicy or hot takes.

Georgie  But before I do that, um, listeners, this is the first time we've used this kind of format, wherever Spotify. Give us a comment. If there are other things you want us to chat about, if there is anything in particular that we should try in future episodes, if you liked the product recommendations about AI tools, we'd love to see it.

Georgie  Wouldn't we, Gareth?

Gareth Rydon  Yes. Yes, please. I love that. I learned from that as well. So it's.

Georgie  Yeah.

Georgie  Good chance to constantly learn.

Georgie  Yeah. Me too. Um, I'd love to know if there's anything people have tried and failed as well. Maybe there's something we can have a chat about in future. Okay. Gareth, the rapid fire. It's a weird title.

Georgie  We need to rebrand it. It's really just the spicier questions. Are you ready?

Gareth Rydon  Yes.

Georgie  Personality wise, Sam Altman or Elon Musk, who do you hope wins the AI race?

Gareth Rydon  Um, I'm gonna say I actually don't want either of them to. I'd rather, um, ia, uh, a confidence last name. The person that left OpenAI who started his own AI company.

Georgie  Amazing. I tend to agree. Uh, if you could have 10 minutes alone with Altman Oron Musk, what would you ask them?

Gareth Rydon  I'd ask, I'd probably prioritize having a conversation with Sam Altman and I, I'm genuinely curious. If he's going to make the choice to go open source and why, and if he, and if it was a private conversation, I didn't ask him if he said, no, I'd, I'd really just want to understand why.

Georgie  Yeah, especially because, you know, that was the whole vision at the beginning of the company, wasn't it? As you mentioned earlier. Is it greed? Is it something else? Yeah. Fascinating. Is there anyone you would, you think should avoid AI tools? Like, you know, they've listened to this pod and you're like, you know what?

Georgie  None of these are for you.

Gareth Rydon  No, I don't think so. And I can tell you a really quick story is that I met with a really awesome business. I own a pest control business and. It was in a networking group and he's got his guys and girls are out spraying and they did our house did a great job dead cockroaches everywhere.

Gareth Rydon  It's like our agent for me, but then I spoke to him and it actually is. So it's like when you're, if you're anyone that on a Sunday night that you think about your week ahead and if there's any task that makes you feel heavy and you're like, Oh, I don't want to do that. Then you should think about experimenting with an AI tool to help you do that task that makes you feel heavy.

Georgie  Yeah, that's such a great point because, you know, the burden of figuring out a new piece of technology, well, you're already burdened by the task. It's worth having an explore, right? Is there any great example of something that used to be a huge burden for you that now you are happily no longer doing due to AI?

Gareth Rydon  It's the smallest thing, but it is absolutely such a difference to me is I love, you know, writing and I've got my notebook and I, I, when I meet clients, I'd like draw a bit. I love that part of, I love that in the meeting and we're sketching out and we're like, Oh, this is what we're thinking. And then I go back to my desk and I'm like, oh, I've got to put all these notes, I've got to type them up.

Gareth Rydon  Oh yeah. So now what I do is I take a photo, I give that photo to ChatGPT and I ask ChatGPT to take my notes and create the diagrams for me. And then I'm able to work with it in a format because the thing that I hated doing was taking those handwritten things, sitting, same with post-its, love workshops.

Gareth Rydon  I can have a wall of post-its, and I'm like, Oh boy, the rest of my day is like, tapping away. Instead now I take a photo, and all of that gets transcribed, and then I can start working with it. So that, for me, That's just taken away something that I, the task, I just really didn't like doing.

Georgie  Yeah. It's so mindless that just transposing.

Georgie  Yeah. As an ex-consultant, that speaks to me deeply. Okay. Last question. You've got an incredible following on LinkedIn, Gareth. Who is another highly underrated person in AI today?

Gareth Rydon  So a person I would recommend people follow is. I won't pronounce it right. D, it's David, so D A V I D, Nord, N A U D E, he just writes about current challenges for business and what you should think about doing so clearly and he speaks from the experience working with businesses.

Gareth Rydon  I would absolutely recommend people, people follow him. And then probably, I'm a bit fanboying.

Georgie  Yeah, you can be a fanboy, that's okay.

Gareth Rydon  Is um, Ethan Mollick, so he's a really incredibly brilliant mind. He's one of the top sort of professors, um, but he talks, he writes so clearly and simply. And his blog, oneusefulthing.org. If you've got five or ten minutes, every couple of days, I'd read some of his blog, because he translates. It's highly technocomplex stuff for things that someone like me can understand. So couldn't, couldn't speak highly, highly enough of those two people.

Georgie  Gosh, you are bringing the RECOs today, Gareth. Thank you so much for joining in the Blink of AI. I've absolutely loved this chat. I feel like I've got a little toolkit of things to play with now. Is there anything else you'd like to shout out to the people listening before you go?

Gareth Rydon  If you're starting your journey, this is something I still do every day, I think of four things is step one, get curious, then start to notice where AI can help.

Gareth Rydon  Then set yourself a goal to experiment one or two times a week on that thing. And then the fourth thing is start noticing the things that couldn't you couldn't do before and rinse and repeat that. So those four steps help us in myself, Ben and Charmaine and a lot of other people, when they start doing that, just rinse and repeat those four things.

Gareth Rydon  And then you'll be surprised at. You'll look back on a month or two down the track and you'll be really amazed about what you're starting to do with these tools.

Georgie  Thank you so much, Gareth. Have the best day. Thanks for joining.

Gareth Rydon  Thanks Georgie.

Georgie  Thank you 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.

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