Early Investor in Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr Shares AI Insights for Success
Significant job losses will pave the way for a surge in abundance.
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Sometimes in life, you need a little luck.
Gary Vaynerchuck carved his own.
Before putting a single cent into any company, he had never heard of the term “angel investing”.
Today, Gary is a serial investor with an obnoxiously good strike rate. It all started after he received a call from Mark Zuckerberg when Facebook only had ten people on their team.
Zuckerberg asked if he wanted to buy his parent’s Facebook stock because they were moving to the coast.
Vaynerchuck immediately said “yes” and wrote a check for $200k piled up from over 12 years of saving and working in his father’s liquor store.
In the same year, Garyvee, as he’s known, bought Twitter and Tumblr stock, Tumblr sold to Yahoo for over a Billion Dollars, and Elon Musk bought out Twitter for four times what it was worth making good on his two investments.
He’s never sold a single Facebook share since he bought it 16 years ago.
Like a crack addict, I’ve been hooked on Garyvee’s content for nearly a decade. The cliche-free communication style he picked up from his grandmother and his Babe Ruth-esque record at spotting consumer trends leave me gob-smacked.
It’s why my ears perked up when I recently heard him getting loud about AI.
He says you can have an opinion about technology, but it “doesn’t give sh*t about people’s opinions”, It’ll do what it’s gonna do. And if you do a job AI is capable of, you should start thinking about that.
GaryVee —Source
“Most people worked on farms back in the day, and then a tractor came out, and everyone was like “f**k that, we’re all out of f**king jobs” and then people found new jobs.”
I gave this same keynote in 1997, and the analogy I used then was, look, if you’re the top salesperson for the Yellow Pages, you might want to consider what Yahoo and Google are doing”.
A.I. is changing the landscape of your day job
The first time I used Chatgpt, it nuked my mind.
How could a computer be so bright? The accuracy of the answers was mind-blowing. No wonder their site gained one million users in the first week after launch.
Today, they receive 1.6 billion monthly visitors and about 100 million active monthly users. Still, 12% of the top 1000 websites are trying to block their Chatbot unleashed online.
Scientists behind the algorithm commonly used in AI and its learning model describe its capability to surpass any individual’s knowledge.
“The biggest chatbots only have about a trillion connections. The human brain has about 100 trillion. And yet, in the trillion connections in a chatbot, it knows far more than you do in your 100 trillion connections, which suggests it’s got a much better way of getting knowledge into those connections.”
It spells out, to me, that there's plenty of room for A.I. to improve, and there’s potential on the table to turn us into 2nd class citizens.
According to an analyst firm, AI may cause the loss of 9.3% of jobs in the U.S. by the end of 2023 and 30.4% by 2030. It’s the alarm bell Garyvee is warning us about.
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The godfather of A.I. raised a raucous red flag that humans must keep an eye on.
Not everyone is on board with Garyvee’s get-in early thesis.
Whether you think A.I. will save or end the world, you have British scientist Geoffrey Hinton to thank.
He’s the man who created the algorithm these learning machines use today, and he’s scared sh*tless of the thing he helped create.
Hinton believes humanity has no idea what it’s doing getting involved because, for the time ever, we’ll have something more intelligent than us.
Geoffrey Hinton — Source
“We designed the learning algorithm that’s like creating the principle of evolution. But when this learning algorithm interacts with data, it produces complicated neural networks that are good at doing things, but we don’t understand exactly how they do those things.
That’s a serious worry. So one of the ways these systems might escape control is by writing their own computer code to modify themselves, and that’s something we need to seriously worry about.”
This one type of human will have the advantage.
Garyvee says new technology will have adverse effects, but humans have shown that they can figure it out over time. We’ll have a new reality to deal with.
Human inputs will be variable to success regarding A.I. because that’ll be the thing that isn’t commoditised.
Everyone is captivated by Chatgpt and demonising it. Yet, it’ll be one of the most significant impacts on our society.
He believes critical thinkers will have the advantage. His fascinating viewpoint on success with AI changed the way I see opportunities.
Garyvee — Source
“The critical thinking of the input becomes a really interesting game. You know, it’s really funny for me to watch all these schools and universities ban all these products. They’d rather have kids memorise information that’s a commodity than start teaching people critical thinking of inputting into the A.I. products, which is the punch line.
What’s interesting to me is that in the last 20 years, it looked like the people who had the advantages were the ones who invested in Automation and scale and technology, and that’s what we saw happen.
What’s happening now is because the cat is out of the bag, and everybody understands it, it becomes the commodity over time, and the advantage becomes the things that are not automated, that are not Technology-based; they’re human-based.
Innovation is always going to do this. So, the exciting thing is twofold: one, this is about to expose the most creative critical thinkers, and two, it’s still going to come down to the idea”.
Closing Thoughts
Garyvee is right — humans will figure it out.
While people are demonising A.I., it’ll create astounding opportunities for those who understand that the variable is the human input, which comes down to critical thinking.
The human idea as the prompt or input becomes the point of difference, not the output of the writing, creativity, art or reasoning.
It depends on how well you can formulate the prompts into artificial intelligence platforms.
It’ll still require skill, just a different type, despite what people think.
We’ll see far more significant benefits to society because we’ll see more abundance with higher productivity at a lower cost.
Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI and Chatgpt, says, “If you think about what it means for the world and people’s quality of lives if we can get to a world where the cost of intelligence and the abundance that comes with that dramatically falls, abundance goes way up”.
The punchline is it’s not what AI can do — it’s how well our human creativity can prompt it.
It’s a skill worth developing.