Our Guest Jonathan Brill Discusses
What AI Can Never Understand: Futurist Jonathan Brill Explains
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With all the AI hype, is there still a place for humans in organizations?
Today on Digital Disruption, we’re joined by Jonathan Brill, the world’s top-ranked futurist by Forbes, advisor to Amazon, HP, Samsung, and an author.
Jonathan helps executives and audiences spot, prioritize, and act on the forces shaping the next five years – from AI to geopolitical disruption. As the former Global Futurist at HP and a board member of one of the world’s largest private intelligence agencies, he brings unique insights from decades of work in innovation, strategy, and emerging tech. His invention firms have developed over 325 products, generating more than $27 billion in revenue for clients like HP, Samsung, and Verizon. Jonathan is the author of Rogue Waves, praised by The Economist and Adam Grant, offering a practical framework for thriving through disruption. He shares his insights globally on stages like TED, at institutions like Harvard and CERN, and with media outlets including ABC, CNBC, and HBR.
Jonathan sits down with Geoff Nielson to explore what leaders need to do to survive and thrive through the next decade of accelerating technological disruption. They discuss why the traditional organizational model introduced in the railroad era is no longer equipped to handle the complexity of AI-powered transformation. Jonathan speaks on the concept of the "octopus organization," where intelligence, decision-making, and adaptability are distributed rather than centralized. He breaks down AI’s biggest shift, not just in task automation, but in decision-making and organizational design, and emphasizes the importance of psychological safety in successful AI adoption.
00;00;00;13 - 00;00;30;11
Geoff Nielson
Hey everyone! I'm so excited today to be sitting down with business futurist Jonathan Grill. Forbes is named him the number one futurist in the world, and he's been a futurist for organization like HP. He's been a board advisor for Frost and Sullivan and a strategic advisor from everyone from Amazon to IBM, Samsung to Pepsi. I want to ask him what organizations need to do to rewire themselves, to be more resilient in the face of the coming wave of disruption, whether it's AI or even disruptions that we can't predict.
00;00;30;13 - 00;00;36;21
Geoff Nielson
It should be a great conversation. Let's jump right into it.
00;00;36;24 - 00;01;08;02
Geoff Nielson
Jonathan, AI, thanks so much for being here. I wanted to jump right into it. And, you know, I'm really interested in getting your perspective and just, you know, what you see as being, you know, the current state of, you know, technology, especially in an enterprise sense in 2025. And I guess, like maybe I'll preface that by saying one of the things I'm seeing from my perspective and just hearing is that the world we're seeing right now in 2025, in this space, is just fundamentally different than we were seeing even in 2023, 2022.
00;01;08;04 - 00;01;14;05
Geoff Nielson
And I wanted to to get your perspective on that. Do you agree? And what do you see as kind of being the big differences?
00;01;14;08 - 00;01;50;22
Jonathan Brill
Yeah. So I think obviously AI is the big talk of the town. I think that the real enterprise plays are probably another 18 months out. But that's that's obviously the big thing. We can talk about what's going to happen, why what the limits are, that caused us to know that, the, the other issues, you know, are that CIOs, CTOs are being asked to move beyond the technology stack to start thinking about how it, impacts things like governance, how it impacts things like go to market.
00;01;50;25 - 00;02;16;21
Jonathan Brill
And so technology isn't just about technology anymore. It's about, the entire organization, how we structure our firms. The third thing that's, I think, going on, and it hasn't quite happened yet for most firms, but we're starting to see AI enable people who don't know how to code, do confirmation, conversational code. Right. Talk to write an interface that writes code for us.
00;02;16;21 - 00;02;47;14
Jonathan Brill
It doesn't really work yet. Right? But what we're going to see over the next 12, 18 months is that it does. And so much like the early 2000s, when we went from, you know, having people with master's degrees writing HTML, to all of a sudden, you know, blogger and now Squarespace and WordPress, the, those things that used to require technical support suddenly doubt that doesn't mean technical support goes away or that it's decreasing.
00;02;47;14 - 00;03;21;16
Jonathan Brill
It means that the amount of code that runs our organizations is about to go up geometrically. And that's really exciting to me. So we have complexity with that complexity. We have security issues that are going to go up geometrically too. We have the the more strategic nature of it, in organizations. And then we have AI really shifting the game and starting to see it for the first time, maybe in ten years, 15 years really start to become central and strategic to the growth trajectory of organizations.
00;03;21;23 - 00;03;45;17
Geoff Nielson
So tell me a little bit more, Jonathan, about that, that 12 to 18 month time horizon, because if I if I understand the implication of some of the other trends you're seeing is it that that's how long it's going to take for these organizations to kind of rewire themselves to get to value here that that take into account some of these, you know, low code, no code trends or, you know, expanded role of it.
00;03;45;19 - 00;03;50;28
Geoff Nielson
Is that the case? And what is going to separate the winners from the losers here? Yeah.
00;03;51;00 - 00;04;16;26
Jonathan Brill
So historically it takes about five years from something to get from research white paper to, you know, software business. Right. So we saw, the first round of this, 2017, we saw the transformer model, in a white paper, 2022 2023, we start seeing that start to build out, right. Lots of people are talking about AI, and they've put in stuff in chat bots in their organization.
00;04;16;28 - 00;04;41;27
Jonathan Brill
But looking at, you know, Salesforce. Right. Looking at, SAP, looking at Oracle, you know, they're starting to put out product. It's still early stage, right. It'll take that about 18 more months. And if you're an enterprise buyer you never want to buy the first version of anything. Right. So that's why I'm saying okay. Well, you know, we started building this thing out.
00;04;41;29 - 00;05;03;26
Jonathan Brill
There's a strategic priority in putting it in our organizations. These companies are now playing. The large players are now playing catch up. And then, you know, in about 18 months, there will be enough maturity there for for us to start putting this in our organizations and in a deep way. You were talking about change, right? So here's the reality.
00;05;03;28 - 00;05;16;22
Jonathan Brill
You know what's going to happen. And I talk to senior leaders, I talk to operational leaders, I talk to executional leaders. And everybody thinks the other ones are going to be impacted.
00;05;16;24 - 00;05;18;05
Geoff Nielson
Interesting.
00;05;18;07 - 00;05;40;01
Jonathan Brill
So the answer is probably all of the above. But what we look at when there's a recent, meta analysis by the National Academy of Sciences led by Erik Brynjolfsson and it said, you know, about 14% of the tasks, in professional services, will be automated by by existing AI tools. I think that's about right. You know what I'm hearing?
00;05;40;01 - 00;06;07;06
Jonathan Brill
You know, when I talk to, people who are selling the stuff is, hey, we're getting 50 to 70% efficiency bumps for software developers, and then they talk to my manufacturing clients and they're like, yeah, we're getting 15 or 20% efficiency bumps. Well, that's like that's that's nothing. Not nothing. Yeah, I that's that's investable. But we're we're seeing,
00;06;07;08 - 00;06;37;17
Jonathan Brill
Changes at the scale that will shift the nature of firm, into what I'm starting to call an octopus organization. And when you think about the way that organizations are structured today, we built them. The current architecture in the 1850s and 60s, based on the railroad. And there were several problems with railroads. One is you needed to get, you know, some box from this place to that place across a couple of different rail lines and all of the stuff needed to be synchronized.
00;06;37;17 - 00;07;07;03
Jonathan Brill
And the tools that you had to do to to do that were a pocket watch and a telegraph that went one direction. Right. So you didn't have telephones, right? You didn't have bidirectional. Right. And when you take a look at Thomas Edison, right. His big breakthrough was the bidirectional telegraph. The reason that he invented that was he was involved early on in his career working in the telegraph station.
00;07;07;05 - 00;07;40;16
Jonathan Brill
And because someone's pocket watch was off by four minutes. Two trains, I believe. I know there was a train accident of some sort. And so he said, okay, this I see an opportunity and and the, the kind of multiplexing is, what was was a result was invented as a result of that. So my point being we and we had that going on and we also had, you know, high levels of, of illiteracy, you know, and like almost no one going to college and no one having good decision making skills.
00;07;40;18 - 00;07;58;28
Jonathan Brill
So that's why we built the organization like it is today. You had to have, a leader who didn't know what was going on on the ground. Right. And people on the ground who weren't capable of making good decisions and had no context for what was going on up here. When we think about what's going on today.
00;07;59;00 - 00;08;23;19
Jonathan Brill
Right. Large language models are sucking up all of the information in the world. You know, I, you know, all of us have auto or transcription tool, hopefully. And in our businesses is a result, you know, we can build models and we can build agents that are looking at all of the new information every day and giving it to exactly the right people across a 50,000 person organization.
00;08;23;21 - 00;08;57;29
Jonathan Brill
So that context problem goes away. The second thing, and I think that we're getting where chat bots are going to be useful all wrong, which is we think we're asking these things to answer questions for us, and they're pretty good at it. And the new stuff like, you know, you look at one pro and you look at the, the new version of Gemini 2.5 that came out like 48 hours ago or something, you know, and and they're, they're pretty good, you know, compared to two years ago.
00;08;58;02 - 00;09;35;00
Jonathan Brill
But what they're all really good at and better than most humans at is empathy, creativity. Right. And frameworks. They have every business framework that has ever been developed. They have access to every code library and every every code pattern that's ever been developed. Right. And so they're going to be better. Not necessarily, I believe, eventually at making decisions in humans, but they're going to already be better at helping us make better decisions about coaching us.
00;09;35;03 - 00;10;15;02
Jonathan Brill
And so we're using these things, I think, for the wrong paradigm right now. They can dramatically improve our executive judgment instead of us trying to offload our executive judgment. That's massive. Yeah, right. Because we have this situation where all of a sudden, every person in your organization, every intern in your organization has context of the CEO or better today and executive judgment of a senior leader today that radically shifts the nature of an effective and innovative and agile firm because information, knowledge, decisions, governance doesn't have to come from the bottom.
00;10;15;04 - 00;11;02;26
Jonathan Brill
From the top down can start to come from the bottom up. And that transformation is profound, and it looks much less like the railroad, and it looks more like the neurology of an octopus, where instead of having one big brain, it actually has nine as a big brain that deals with executive function. And then for each tentacle, it has a smaller neural cluster that looks at it, that looks at that tentacle, directs it, gets all that information, and then a neural necklace that communicates with all of the smaller clusters to figure out what's going on to come up with an idea to take action faster than the big brain can even comprehend what's going on.
00;11;02;29 - 00;11;23;28
Jonathan Brill
And so I think we're moving into this world of what I'm calling the octopus organization. It's a radically different place. And the reason this is important for IT professionals, and for CIOs in particular, is all of a sudden we're being asked not just how to rack and stack servers and how to implement some SAP instance, but why?
00;11;24;01 - 00;11;50;01
Jonathan Brill
Why are we doing this? How does this impact our human resources? So on and so forth. It is the leaders of code, capability and organizations. We are going to get flattened first, and we are going to build a culture first. We are going to make the change first and culture change independent of what people might say. You know, it takes 5 to 7 years of an entire shift of a leadership team.
00;11;50;03 - 00;12;03;02
Jonathan Brill
And so if you are a year or two early in that shift, your potential to be a leader goes through the roof.
00;12;03;04 - 00;12;28;28
Jonathan Brill
We're moving into a radically different world, like you said, than 2022 or 2023. And it's not just technology. It's that CIOs are being asked about the architecture of firms, but the processes of firms and having to lead the culture change of firms. And this isn't what we've been trained to do historically. But it's our opportunity to lead now, right?
00;12;29;00 - 00;12;48;16
Geoff Nielson
Right. So lots of lots of things I want to add that's super interesting. And there's a lot of places I want to take that. I love the octopus model. And if I'm hearing you correctly, we need to change. If I can call it this, the physiology of the organization. Yeah, we need to we.
00;12;48;17 - 00;12;50;23
Jonathan Brill
Need to evolve. We need to evolve. Evolve the system.
00;12;50;26 - 00;13;08;12
Geoff Nielson
We need to evolve the physiology. And it sounds like that that re-architecting that, that CIOs that that, you know, what we previously have called the technology organization, we're going to be at the vanguard of that is that. Is that necessarily true? Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing?
00;13;08;15 - 00;13;20;02
Jonathan Brill
I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. It is necessarily true. Sure. Because you're you're the the demands on you are going to be far greater than, than than the number of people you have. So you're going to have to automate.
00;13;20;02 - 00;13;22;20
Geoff Nielson
First, right? Right. And and technology.
00;13;22;23 - 00;13;45;05
Jonathan Brill
And it's not about like you said. It's not it's not a bad thing. Coders are freaked out. Like every every professional services, you know, code integration shop I talked to is freaked out. The amount of code we are going to have to produce and qualify. Is is going to go up geometrically. I am not concerned about the future of coders.
00;13;45;08 - 00;14;09;01
Jonathan Brill
I am concerned about the security implications and concerned about the efficiency. I'm concerned about the amount of legacy code we're going to to produce and making sure that that we're able to either take it out of our organizations or figure out how does it not keep it running, because the energy cost is going to be massive, right?
00;14;09;04 - 00;14;27;24
Geoff Nielson
One of the things you said a couple of times now is that this 5 to 7 year time horizon, to really see cultural change and see this take off. I'm sure you're very aware, like one of the buzzwords we're hearing, you know, now more than ever is accelerated pace of change, right? Like, all things are moving faster than ever.
00;14;27;26 - 00;14;45;27
Geoff Nielson
Can large organizations afford 5 to 7 years here? Is there is there an existential risk that organizations that are wired from day one with an octopus model are going to come in and, you know, eat their lunch and, you know, or is that an overblown risk?
00;14;45;29 - 00;15;03;23
Jonathan Brill
I think it's highly likely. The question is how quickly you can move. So in 2012, I got a call from the Yellow Pages, and the Yellow Pages wanted to build a search engine that they could put local advertising on because they had, you know.
00;15;03;26 - 00;15;05;18
Geoff Nielson
It's what they do access through.
00;15;05;19 - 00;15;33;18
Jonathan Brill
They they had 10,000 salespeople across the country that could go and sell advertising to your mother's hairdresser. And they thought this was a really great plan. The only problem was this was a really great plan in 1986 or maybe 2006. But in 2012, it was too late. And so there are two things going on here. One is certainly, you know, in 2002, 2003, the Yellow Pages could have caught up.
00;15;33;18 - 00;16;01;26
Jonathan Brill
They could have maybe bought Google, right. Or at least, you know, and also ran and had the capability they could have, you know, and done something. They didn't they continued doing what made the money today. And so that's the bigger risk, is that we look at what our investors are asking of us and sort of remembering that what our investors really want is to know that our company will be worth more five years from now than today.
00;16;01;29 - 00;16;25;22
Jonathan Brill
Right. And so there's this incentive misalignment often at the sea level or the board level, that causes these, these challenges that, you know, if no one's being paid out ten years in advance, right? Which is what Tim Cook's I believe his at Apple. His, his big payout was, was after ten years after after jobs. Right. Well there's a reason Apple's done what it's done.
00;16;25;25 - 00;16;49;12
Jonathan Brill
Right. Has never been concerned about this quarter. Right. And that's a rarity. You know so so I think it's a big issue for for large firms. I think the second question is, you know, what moats do you have? Right. So if you are a law firm, guess what? You know, three quarters of the Senate or something are lawyers.
00;16;49;12 - 00;17;18;11
Jonathan Brill
They'd really love to have law firms when they leave the law. You know, when they when they leave Congress. Right. There are these moats that that companies have that will slow the pace of change. There is, you know, within law, the the, the bar, the American Bar Association has said that you can't, you know, the I can't provide opinions for customers.
00;17;18;14 - 00;17;38;03
Jonathan Brill
They said it is an ethical issue, independent of the fact that I think at this point it might be almost as good as my lawyer. Giving me advice. I also want to ask my lawyer. You know, it's just like. It's just like, you know, Intuitive Surgical, you know, they make the surgical robots for brain surgery.
00;17;38;05 - 00;17;58;18
Jonathan Brill
Well, the reality is, the robot is doing the brain surgery. The the surgeons there just to for for the liability. And in case something goes bad, I'm totally glad to pay for that surgeon. Yeah, right. Yeah. Like, may not make sense. Just like I'm totally glad to pay for my financial advisor for the three weeks. A decade. Right.
00;17;58;21 - 00;17;59;17
Jonathan Brill
He provides value.
00;17;59;23 - 00;18;03;12
Geoff Nielson
It's plus I it's not instead of it's not. Yeah.
00;18;03;15 - 00;18;28;01
Jonathan Brill
Yeah. And so and so it's it's really where's the value. And what we're going to see is the question moves from what are the tasks that I do to where is the value that I provide. Right. Right. So the one of the things I like to think about is in the last election cycle, presidential election cycle, Andrew Yang was talk going on about how truck drivers were going to go away.
00;18;28;04 - 00;18;49;19
Jonathan Brill
And what he forgot was we used to have stagecoach drivers and they did the same thing. Right. It wasn't that they spent 12 hours a day turning a steering wheel instead of a horse. It's that they predicted the gear, the people, the material and back when something went wrong. Right. The value has nothing to do with how you spend your time.
00;18;49;22 - 00;19;25;00
Jonathan Brill
So and so what we're going to become really clear about in the next five years is where's that value? So is a coder, right. Your value isn't encoded, right. It's an understanding the unspoken challenges that your customer faces. Surfacing those and turning those into code. I will not necessarily understand the unspoken challenges because guess what? There is, by definition, no data.
00;19;25;02 - 00;19;47;19
Geoff Nielson
So again, lots, lot, lots to think about there. But as we think about finding that value, as we think about rethink ING our business models in terms of how we get ahead versus trying to play catch up. You know, you started to answer the question of what what do we as leaders need to be doing differently? What do organizations need to be thinking about?
00;19;47;26 - 00;19;59;03
Geoff Nielson
And as you were answering that, you know, I was thinking about the kind of adjacencies with, with rogue waves. You know, some of the guidance in the book you wrote on this a few years ago.
00;19;59;05 - 00;20;00;25
Jonathan Brill
Is it the same playbook?
00;20;00;26 - 00;20;09;23
Geoff Nielson
Is it a similar playbook? And, you know, for those who haven't gone through the book, you know, well, what do you kind of recommend are kind of the big elements here?
00;20;09;25 - 00;20;15;11
Jonathan Brill
Unexpected plug.
00;20;15;13 - 00;20;43;22
Jonathan Brill
Yeah. So I, I think there are a couple of things to be thinking about. You know, the first and most important thing is that for any of this technology change to work. There will have to be deep psychological safety on your team. Right? Right. Like, what we know about transformations is people get freaked out. People don't use the tools.
00;20;43;23 - 00;21;08;20
Jonathan Brill
Yeah. Right. So you spend the money and you get none of the value. So how do we create a situation where we where we make sure that people feel safe enough using the tools to create the value? So I was talking to the, the CTO of a big four, consulting firm and he said, yeah, I had to just make my people use.
00;21;08;20 - 00;21;27;14
Jonathan Brill
I said, you know, in your 360 reviews, you know, you're going, you know, in your annual review, you're going to tell me how you used AI in your thing, where you will not have a job. Well, right. I don't recommend that. But he wasn't able to get people using the tools. So there's there's kind of that that stick part.
00;21;27;14 - 00;21;53;07
Jonathan Brill
But then there's the carrot part. And we did we recently worked with, the Harrison assessment on a survey of 2.7 million managers to figure out why some are dramatically more effective in times of uncertainty than others. And these are going to sound relatively obvious when I say them, but, they they were dramatically better at leveraging help from their peers than their peers.
00;21;53;09 - 00;22;18;23
Jonathan Brill
They made unexpected connections. They had much broader social networks than their peers, both inside and outside of the organization. So when they needed some informal advice, when they needed a new way of thinking about something, when they needed to short cut red tape, right, they were able to do it. In a world of optimization, neither of these things sound like things we want to be doing, but they're critical in the age of AI.
00;22;18;25 - 00;22;45;24
Jonathan Brill
The third piece was is about controlling chaos, and this is really what Rogue Waves is about. It's about when the world changes. How do you turn that into leverage? And the reality is that we build these standard operating procedures in our organization to manage risk. You know, for one of two reasons. One is the people in the organization don't have the context or the executive judgment.
00;22;45;26 - 00;23;05;21
Jonathan Brill
Or two, we're just too lazy to manage it ourselves. And in a world of significant change, when the ruleset changes, right, when the playing field changes, standard operating procedures will often kill us, right? Right.
00;23;05;24 - 00;23;08;24
Geoff Nielson
It's bureaucracy. Right? It's it's what holds us back.
00;23;08;26 - 00;23;39;24
Jonathan Brill
And. Yeah. And so and so how do you get to the situation where you're teaching people to thinking from a first principles perspective about their challenges, about the risk, and how to resolve it? Right. AI is going to be critical in helping people do that, right? It's going to be critical in helping us overcome our decision biases, overcoming our lack of knowledge of the situation or lack of history, or lack of contextual awareness, or lack of understanding of who else is impacted by our decisions.
00;23;39;27 - 00;23;59;03
Jonathan Brill
It's going to be incredibly important. And then the last piece, you know, is about taking the time to know what's missing, right? We spend so much time, right, like looking at what's right in front of us and solving for that instead of taking back and saying, okay, well, what's causing this? Yeah, right. How do I solve for that?
00;23;59;06 - 00;24;25;17
Jonathan Brill
Am I still creating value by doing the thing I'm doing because the world's changed. So when you take this, time to leverage help to create those unexpected connections, to control chaos and to know what's missing. You have this really nifty consultant acronym, Loc, but you also have a tool to rapidly teach your people how to create more in your organization.
00;24;25;17 - 00;24;40;07
Jonathan Brill
Because in a world of probability, if you can shift possibility. You create dramatically more luck for yourself, for your organization and your business in your life.
00;24;40;07 - 00;25;08;03
Geoff Nielson
Right? And I list that that list is so interesting to me because everything on it is things that are just they're not replaceable by AI today. And I feel like even the things we talk about I doing five years from now don't come close to that. And so it's interesting. It. Yeah. To me, it, it it's so interesting that that's the study came up with because it yeah, it highlights what's indispensable about us.
00;25;08;10 - 00;25;10;02
Geoff Nielson
Right. And about what we add to the equation.
00;25;10;03 - 00;25;32;01
Jonathan Brill
Yeah. It's what if it's in the database. You don't need to know it. Right. In five years if it's in the database you don't need to know it. And this is all about dealing with stuff that's not in the database. Right. Dealing with stuff. It's not in the system. And when you look at you know, I get to teach once in a while at the Army War College.
00;25;32;01 - 00;25;54;15
Jonathan Brill
And they have this great model where they talk about executional operational and strategic leaders. Right. The three levels of leadership and the things you need to know are essentially different. And when we were talking earlier about, you know, the new role of the CIO, right? It's historically been a relatively executional or operational role when suggesting is it suddenly a strategic role?
00;25;54;18 - 00;26;19;29
Jonathan Brill
And that is, you know, in layers below the CIO, right? Yeah, there are suddenly strategic roles because we're dealing with, architecture. We're dealing with process, right? We're dealing with culture. How do we put that, those new methods of governance in place to shape the firm, to shape its its agility, instead of just taking orders? And so it's very exciting time, but it requires this stuff.
00;26;19;29 - 00;26;27;23
Jonathan Brill
This is not, you know, kind of traditional project management, scientific management, you know, PMI type of stuff.
00;26;27;25 - 00;26;47;00
Geoff Nielson
So I'm curious in your mind, Jonathan, when we when we traditionally talk about like, you know, even in the realm of CIO, what strategic can we say? Oh, they're going to put together a technology strategy for the organization. We've talked about that cascading down from the high level business strategy. Is that going away? Is it just now?
00;26;47;02 - 00;27;12;14
Jonathan Brill
It is the business strategy. Strategy is the business strategy. You know? Yeah, absolutely. And certainly in five years. Yeah. You know, like this, this snarky thing people like to say is, you know, every, every, every leader is now a technology leader and every company is now a technology company. I don't know if that's true today. Yeah, right. But I take a look at, you know, we were talking about law firms, law firms and five years.
00;27;12;14 - 00;27;39;00
Jonathan Brill
Right. Like, look, I have a real strong question about is Westlaw, which, you know, owns the databases and the software side of things. The law firm and the law firm is simply a sales mechanism for, for Westlaw or, or what's the value add there? Because it's not the paralegals, it's the relationship right inside ability to deal with the things that aren't in the database.
00;27;39;02 - 00;28;01;15
Geoff Nielson
Yeah. And it it's really interesting to me that you brought up, you know, the snarky one line about, like, every cat that every company is a technology company because as we're talking like, to me, it's almost become the inverse. It's every technologist is now a business person, the absolute. Right. Like, like because when you talk about those, those, you know, big for traits.
00;28;01;17 - 00;28;22;23
Geoff Nielson
My one of the places my mind when we talked about it is like what's the inverse. What are now the commoditized skills. And are those the technology skills like it is the what's traditionally the technical skills being commoditized? And what does that mean for what's today or yesterday are, you know, technical organization.
00;28;22;25 - 00;28;56;29
Jonathan Brill
I think that's absolutely true. You know, the thing that, you know, and I think it was a mistake, for Jensen Huang at Nvidia to say the coatings are relevant. In the same way it was, a mistake for, for, you know, Jeff Hinton, the kind of the creator of the transformer model and, deep learning, or really deep learning, to say that radiologists were irrelevant because, you know, machine learning is going to solve this.
00;28;57;01 - 00;29;39;18
Jonathan Brill
Over. I think, you know, your average medical doctor does I think radiologists does over 40 tasks. One of them is looking at it radiology images. Right. The reality I think of learning to code is it's learning how to make really good lists. Really, really, really precise directions. They get you from one place to another. That skill is going to become incredibly valuable moving forward, because we're going to have to direct, you know, a thousand agents, a thousand chat bots, a thousand eyes to do something.
00;29;39;20 - 00;29;46;13
Jonathan Brill
And that ability to make a really good task list.
00;29;46;15 - 00;29;47;22
Jonathan Brill
That's the future.
00;29;47;24 - 00;29;58;12
Geoff Nielson
So, so when you say task force, I just want to make sure I understand correctly. This is like sort of like operational parameters or guidelines like what's the objective and what are the things you need to do to get there. Or do you see it differently.
00;29;58;15 - 00;30;18;28
Jonathan Brill
Sure. Well, I think I think it's being clear about the right level of, you're digging a little deeper than than I've. I've thought about it. It's a great way to think about it. So in in the military, they have a thing called an op ed and it's, you know, it's basically says, hey, you know, here's what we understand about the situation.
00;30;19;05 - 00;30;38;16
Jonathan Brill
Here's what we think might not be true. Here's what we think might change, here's the outcome that we want you to deliver on how here are the limits that we are giving you, that you can fire upon if fired upon or whatever. Here's what to do if things go wrong. Right. And here's what to do if I don't come back right.
00;30;38;16 - 00;30;59;21
Jonathan Brill
Like that list is incredibly powerful because you give people all of the information to be successful without telling them what to do. Right? Got it. Right. Yeah. And so that's one level of abstraction. But the next level down is okay, well, we want to put the processes in place. We want to be that operational leader. Right. That's the strategically or we want to be that operational leader okay.
00;30;59;21 - 00;31;32;23
Jonathan Brill
How am I going to execute this. Right. And what types of software what types of AI do I need to to execute this? What what amount of data center access, what network bandwidth, what, you know, whatever do I need to execute this? And then, you know, getting down to the next level, right about the execution of leadership, I think that's increasingly going to go away outside of the, you know, like the stuff about like, how do we get access to the to the software, how do we get access to the material, how do we get access to the data, or how do we get access to the energy?
00;31;32;23 - 00;32;02;18
Jonathan Brill
How do we get access to the data? How do we get access to the electricity? That's still a human problem. And it will be, as we understand that those are increasingly valuable things. But you're still need all of those skills. But I think that ability to say, okay, well, what is this person really asking for? Right. And then figuring out how to make it really impossible to go wrong list.
00;32;02;21 - 00;32;18;06
Jonathan Brill
Right. How parameters, as you were saying, how to deliver on this. Yeah. Hey, that's that's still a rare skill now. Yeah. And it's it's the thing we teach you as developers.
00;32;18;12 - 00;32;40;20
Geoff Nielson
Well, and that's exactly it, right? Like in, you know, having done a bit of development and worked with developers, I mean, my perspective is that's been the value of developers from the dawn of time. Right? Like if I think about your your trucker analogy, if you think that a coders job is two hands on keyboard, right, lines of code, like, yeah, you're going to think it's it is completely disrupted.
00;32;40;27 - 00;32;49;18
Geoff Nielson
If you think their job is to structure a problem and understand a scenario. Right. That's that's not necessarily going anywhere.
00;32;49;21 - 00;33;24;12
Jonathan Brill
Well and and I think the the problem structuring. May start to go away. Okay. But the elicitation and the looking at information that's not being given. I think that right that will continue. You know, I think about the, the, the big game that the AI kitties are playing right now is, you know, competitive programing is really good at competitive programing.
00;33;24;15 - 00;33;28;23
Jonathan Brill
It's like, well, yeah, but there was a really clear objective.
00;33;28;23 - 00;33;31;18
Geoff Nielson
Right, right.
00;33;31;21 - 00;33;36;10
Jonathan Brill
So that we could judge whether you did it or not.
00;33;36;13 - 00;33;39;07
Geoff Nielson
Yeah. What happens when there is no objective or the objective is unknowable.
00;33;39;08 - 00;33;59;20
Jonathan Brill
What happens when there is no. Yeah. What happens when there is no objective? And so I think there are two things here that we need to kind of keep in mind. One, you know, we've gone from, you know, a year or two ago, you know, chat GPT 3 or 3.5 was, you know, and the 60th percentile of programmers at a competitive programing.
00;33;59;20 - 00;34;23;21
Jonathan Brill
And then oh one Pro I think if you give it $1 million of of of of tokens, you know, is at, you know, in the top point 2%. Right, right. We can argue the economics. Yeah. That right. But let's ignore that for a second. What we have seen is that the software has gotten. Effectively better than most humans at this task.
00;34;23;23 - 00;34;56;12
Jonathan Brill
And the question is, did in fact get dramatically better or just better than humans? You know, it's it's one of the things I think about a lot is there are there are cognitive limitations. Right? So if I ask you to remember three numbers, you know, 200, 123, 624, right. You can maybe do that now 100 243 624 737 263,000.
00;34;56;14 - 00;35;16;01
Jonathan Brill
You probably lost the first 1 or 2 numbers. The reality is we can remember three, maybe four numbers at a time. You know that that we remember seven digits is actually not true. A whole bunch of psychology and psychological testing around that. We remember 3 to 4, and we can block that into chunks of, you know, a couple of chunks.
00;35;16;03 - 00;35;53;22
Jonathan Brill
And that's how we do it. My point being that there are cognitive mechanics, right? Just neurological mechanics that limit how well we can do. And so as these tools get just, you know, 1% or 2% better than us at some of these cognitive mechanics, they become dramatically better than us at whatever the downstream task is. And so what we're going to see over the next couple of years, that's just really exciting to me, is that there are these things that seem like, yeah, only humans can do that, and these tools aren't going to get 100 times better on an absolute scale than us.
00;35;53;22 - 00;36;12;17
Jonathan Brill
So going to get 1% better than on an absolute scale, but on a relative scale, you know, they're going to move from, you know, you know, 60th percentile programmer to, you know, whatever, 99.9, right, 8% percentile programmer.
00;36;12;19 - 00;36;14;04
Jonathan Brill
Just by getting a little better.
00;36;14;10 - 00;36;28;28
Geoff Nielson
Yeah. You mentioned the you mentioned coding specifically for that. Are there are there other use cases you've seen or you're starting to see emerge where this is the case, where AI is starting to enter that 99th percentile of human capability.
00;36;29;00 - 00;36;46;22
Jonathan Brill
I think was prompting, you know, it's it's getting pretty good at some things, you know, and I think that there there are a number of domains that we can judge that on. Right. Is it faster, you know, can I do 40 hours of work, you know, at the 80th percentile in five minutes? Well, that's.
00;36;46;28 - 00;36;47;19
Geoff Nielson
Good enough, right?
00;36;47;19 - 00;37;17;18
Jonathan Brill
Economically, really, really valuable. Right. Better than my intern in five minutes. Economically. Really valuable. Right. So, that I think is happening really quickly. So I'm working on, research. For, forging for the forging industry. Right. These guys have giant, you know, 2000 ton hammers. Wow. Bang. Massive pieces of metal. And they're trying to figure out.
00;37;17;18 - 00;37;44;06
Jonathan Brill
Okay, well, what does I mean for them? And, you know, I could have gone and read, you know, hunted down and read, you know, 5000 people pages of papers. Or I could have I go and hunt down 80% of those and point me to exactly the sentence that matters. And then I can make a job. Yeah, right. That's super valuable.
00;37;44;06 - 00;37;49;24
Jonathan Brill
And is it better than me? It's better than me that that I would never do that work.
00;37;49;26 - 00;37;50;08
Geoff Nielson
Right.
00;37;50;14 - 00;38;16;20
Jonathan Brill
Like economics, of course. Economically excellence. I could never do that work. And so it makes me dramatically better. I think the other thing we need to think about here is like the, the I kitties, and sorry if a listener, you're one of them. But the AI kitties are obsessed with trying to create artificial general intelligence, and I think that's a really bad idea to try and mimic humans.
00;38;16;21 - 00;38;32;03
Jonathan Brill
I think we should find the things that humans are terrible at, right? Or humans don't pay attention to and get better than nothing at those. Right. That's the easy way to get superhuman, right?
00;38;32;05 - 00;38;37;06
Geoff Nielson
The. Yeah, the kind of the negative space around humans versus just competing directly.
00;38;37;06 - 00;38;56;12
Jonathan Brill
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And I think to me that's, that's where the real power is. You know, we have all of these cognitive, you know, even within the things we're able to do, we have all of these cognitive biases. This is right. Like if it just checks those biases for us. Yeah. Totally able to do that today right.
00;38;56;14 - 00;39;24;04
Jonathan Brill
Totally able to say like hey research Daniel Dennett, here's my paper. Where am I biased? Like it's able to do that counterfactual thinking because there's a framework right? Right. Stuff where terrible at. And by the way I can do it for you. You can do it for me, but I can't do it for myself. Right. Because of the it's in my, because it's already in my brain.
00;39;24;08 - 00;39;32;18
Jonathan Brill
I am the system. Right. So so I can't it can't look at it. Right. So that kind of thing I think is going to be incredibly powerful.
00;39;32;20 - 00;39;59;03
Geoff Nielson
So, so on that note, you know, I'm thinking again about the interplay between AI and people. And we've talked about this an awful lot. And you know, there's there's some conflicting opinions here. And I've heard we've almost talked through implicitly both sides of it. But, you know, I've talked to a number of futurists in this space. Jonathan, and one of the one of the prevailing schools of thought is we're going to see the rise of the generalist, and the technical skills are going to go away.
00;39;59;03 - 00;40;04;02
Geoff Nielson
And it's rise of the generalist. Now you've got I think I'm hearing a little bit of a different perspective.
00;40;04;02 - 00;40;06;10
Jonathan Brill
I just I just made a phase,
00;40;06;12 - 00;40;07;01
Geoff Nielson
For anyone who's.
00;40;07;02 - 00;40;11;07
Jonathan Brill
Those that are radio audience.
00;40;11;09 - 00;40;17;19
Geoff Nielson
So. Well, so so why don't you know, why don't we respond to that before I even, you know, add any more color?
00;40;17;21 - 00;40;47;12
Jonathan Brill
So a kind of everybody cooks a little bit. Right? And what we discover when you read a recipe is that there is so much information that is tacit and never in a recipe. Yeah. Right about like, if you're baking, what's the humidity today? How does that impact my pie? The the way my bread rises right. And so the question here is the the generalist will be able to do a lot more.
00;40;47;15 - 00;40;50;16
Jonathan Brill
But they will never bake a great pie.
00;40;50;18 - 00;40;51;25
Geoff Nielson
00;40;51;28 - 00;41;21;13
Jonathan Brill
Because they don't have the feeling right of what's going on. Right. And I think that's incredibly important to understand that the, the having depth intuitive depth, in what you do is incredibly important. You know, when you take a look at, biology papers. Right. What's, what's the replication rate. Right. Like right, 50%, 30% of them can be replicated.
00;41;21;15 - 00;41;57;10
Jonathan Brill
Right. The either everybody is lying, or there's parts of the recipe that aren't right now. And it's going to be some time before the whole recipe gets written down. And so I think that's true for almost everything. And so I don't know that the power of the specialists is going to go away. But it's and it may be that once you get become specialist in one thing, then you can move that way of thinking to other things.
00;41;57;12 - 00;42;04;22
Jonathan Brill
But I don't know that just being a dilettante will.
00;42;04;25 - 00;42;08;08
Jonathan Brill
Create outsized value in the future, because everyone can do it.
00;42;08;12 - 00;42;18;22
Geoff Nielson
Right. So it's not it's not necessarily I is turning everyone into a great baker. It's I is making the great Bakers that much better.
00;42;18;25 - 00;42;52;04
Jonathan Brill
Well, it's making everybody into a good enough bake. Right. So so I think about PowerPoint. Right. So up until the early 1990s, you know, you had in many cases, you know, some guy who who would literally cut up graphics and, and paste them is called a paste up artist and paste them up. And then you had another guy who would shoot film of that thing, and then you had someone who would run the printer, and maybe someone who would run the ink in the printer.
00;42;52;06 - 00;43;21;28
Jonathan Brill
And then you had a graphic designer. Right. And then you had the customer. Today you're doing your own PowerPoint right now. Are you as good as all of those craftsmen stacked up? No, you. You just art you. You will never be Saul Bass. You will never be one of the great graphic designers in the world. In your graphics will never be, in the Museum of Modern Art, I guarantee you this.
00;43;22;00 - 00;43;52;06
Jonathan Brill
But is it damn good? Yeah, yeah. So. So I think the question here about the specialist is where is that needed? Right. Graphic designers. Right. We all we were becoming an information economy. We were all pumping out text for a living. And all of a sudden, like, good enough, graphic design became five. Yeah, but, you know, do I want a good enough brain surgeon?
00;43;52;11 - 00;44;23;08
Jonathan Brill
Do I want a good enough, you know, car mechanic? Do I want a good enough? You know, truck driver probably not like, good enough, you know, a truck driver that doesn't run into the the the the bridge, embankment, big bridge, embankment 99% of the time ain't good enough, right. So I think there's that that need for specialization and that need to have, cognitive intuition about the subject is continue to be important.
00;44;23;13 - 00;44;48;09
Geoff Nielson
One, I think that's I think that's incredibly powerful. And really interesting to me. And the reason I asked is because you know, you said something earlier about actually implementing this organizational change and the importance of psychological safety about bringing employees along with you. And, you know, my sense is there's still an awful lot of angst about, you know, are we being replaced by I do I still have a job.
00;44;48;09 - 00;45;13;26
Geoff Nielson
What is my value? Is this, you know, is I going to prevent food being on the table for my family and, you know, my senses as leaders, if we're going to move our organizations forward, we need to be able to, you know, address some of these questions and probably be truthful about it. But, I mean, do you buy that or is or is there a key piece of the conversation that we haven't touched on yet?
00;45;13;29 - 00;45;39;00
Jonathan Brill
So what you're asking about, you know, foundationally, is how fast will this happen? Right. And and, the kind of standard line is, well, these are generational shifts, and they happen slower than you expect, and everybody does fine. And the economy grows and, the reality of the 1980s and early 1990s is it this happened slow enough.
00;45;39;02 - 00;46;09;28
Jonathan Brill
The 50 year old plus. Right. All retired out and it was all right. Yeah. So if this shift happens in ten years, that will not be true. The second thing to think about is that unlike the 1980s and 1990s, we are not in a population boom. We are in a population bust. Right. So when we take a look in the next five years, I forget, what the boomer population dropping out of the workforce is, was like 75%, 80%.
00;46;10;00 - 00;46;35;02
Jonathan Brill
And so, you know, we're going to see that this generational knowledge, this generational way of working. Happen, goes away at a much faster pace than it did in the 70s and 80s. So that's happening. There will be a dislocation. These demographics will help us. The next piece is like, what do we do? And that's kind of the question.
00;46;35;02 - 00;47;01;23
Jonathan Brill
And part of my answer is, you know, our economy is so over productive at this point that I have a person who makes my coffee, I go to Starbucks and I have a person who makes my coffee and the hundred year that was in your historical perspective. Think about that right? I have a person in Jamaica that grows my beans.
00;47;01;26 - 00;47;23;03
Jonathan Brill
I have a person who puts that on a boat. They have a person who roasts that coffee for me, and then I have. Then I drive down in my car with 5000 parts in it. Yeah, that was made in Germany to go and get my coffee every morning from my person. That makes my coffee. And if I'm really lazy, that person.
00;47;23;05 - 00;47;47;15
Jonathan Brill
There's another person who will bring my coffee and make it to me. I don't do that very often because that's snotty. But, my point being, you know, we will come up with new things to do. I'm not concerned about that. In the US, where we are strategically trying to bring technology and manufacturing back to the US for, I think, some pretty good reasons.
00;47;47;18 - 00;48;10;26
Jonathan Brill
You know, there will be transferability into other industries and other roles. Moving forward, like I said, in tech, I don't think those roles are going away. I think we're going to figure out that there's value here. I think, like I said, in professional services, we're going to see a 15% or so efficiency bump in the next few years here.
00;48;10;26 - 00;48;39;05
Jonathan Brill
That's pretty massive. And an industry that doesn't really see efficiency bumps. And that's, you know, that's that's an outlier. But, we're going to see that in a bunch of other industries, too. You know, we are going to see dislocation and we're going to see the the job roles shift as as you know, one person is able to do one point, you know, you know, whatever one, 1.7, 1.07 jobs.
00;48;39;13 - 00;48;45;13
Jonathan Brill
But I think it's going to take a little longer than people think and a little longer than the CFOs are dreaming. Right?
00;48;45;15 - 00;49;04;08
Geoff Nielson
So I, I want to ask you a slightly different question about that, which is, you know, you're you're I think very doing something very important, which is you're debunking some of the, some of the hype around, you know, oh, this is going to change everything, you know, overnight or some of the, you know, some of the hot air that comes with.
00;49;04;10 - 00;49;24;24
Jonathan Brill
It will repeatedly change everything overnight. It's it's just the scale which Oregon large organizations can absorb, right? Is in the scale at which governments will allow that to happen because of the implications for their tax base and the monetary system. You know, there are governors beyond the technology.
00;49;24;27 - 00;49;47;01
Geoff Nielson
Right? Right there. There's the human pace of absorption and the societal and the, yeah. Yeah, I guess the, organizational pace of absorption. But like, can we control that or is the pace of change at some point just going to, you know, run us over and as consumers become, you know, more impressed with what this can do, even if it's not quite as good.
00;49;47;03 - 00;49;49;21
Geoff Nielson
You know, it just, you know, I mean, it's.
00;49;49;21 - 00;50;13;23
Jonathan Brill
Changed my life, you know, I mean, I was doing I was doing econometrics on this in 2018 or 2019 and I saw, you know, and we were in 2016, 2017 building transformer models or what need to be called transformer models. So, you know, I've been at this for a while and I knew exactly what was going to happen from, you know, a task efficiency perspective.
00;50;13;23 - 00;50;30;03
Jonathan Brill
And by the way, this is not a surprise. It's kind of like, tracked exactly what we thought in 2018, 2019. So it's not magical. Like, this was all very knowable. But it still blows my mind every time I'm suddenly able to do, you know.
00;50;30;09 - 00;50;30;29
Geoff Nielson
00;50;31;01 - 00;50;59;15
Jonathan Brill
40 hours of work in five minutes. Yeah. You know, it's it's it's pretty magical. So I'm not saying that's going away. What I am saying is that, you know, when Covid hit, the. I pulled all my money out of the stock market. I said, hey, you know, I don't believe this, this this, white House is going to be able to, to to to deal with this quickly enough things are going to go to hack and and pull all my money out of the stock market.
00;50;59;15 - 00;51;27;24
Jonathan Brill
And what I didn't understand was that the government and the fed can just change the rules. Right, right. Like every company in the United States should have gone out of business and they just changed the rules. Yeah. And and this is not the first time that's happened. They did in the 1970s, when we got off, you know, the late 60s and 70s, when you start getting off the gold standard, they did it, you know, in Bretton Woods and in the 40s.
00;51;27;26 - 00;51;50;19
Jonathan Brill
Right. We can literally just change the rules. Yeah. And the Trump administration is actively just changing the rules right now. Right? Right. That's what this is all about. Is like, you know, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, JD Vance, people who actually understand technology saying, hey, we need to kind of change some of these rules, right? You might agree with them or not.
00;51;50;19 - 00;52;16;21
Jonathan Brill
You might think that's great. That's the right answer or not, but that's what's going on. Right. And so what we need to understand is that. The game the playing field will shift along with the technology right. And so this isn't all going to blow up on Tuesday. Yeah. Just because you know, there's there's there's some AGI thing that wins Nobel Prizes every 30 minutes.
00;52;16;23 - 00;52;35;26
Geoff Nielson
Right. So I, I did want to ask you, Jonathan, you know, before I lose sight of it, one of the things you do in your role as a, as a futurist is you separate kind of the signal from the noise, if I can call it that. Yeah. What is some of the noise you're hearing right now? What what is some of the hype that you're like that is B.S that is not going to come to pass.
00;52;35;28 - 00;52;40;06
Geoff Nielson
That's on your radar is like we should be tuning out.
00;52;40;08 - 00;53;04;15
Jonathan Brill
We're starting to see some reality testing happening in, in the market. So, so the first thing that was happening was, hey, this is all going to just explode and it's going to be great. And that because we're seeing, you know, thousand times increase in efficiency gain over, you know, 18 months or whatever it is, that, that this thing's just going to run.
00;53;04;20 - 00;53;24;26
Jonathan Brill
And and the reality is that because we're talking to a mildly technical audience or, you know, a technical audience, I'll get mildly technical. You know, we were looking at transformer models. Now we're looking at reasoning on top of Transformers. Now we're looking at multiple shot on goal. Right. Like running the thing ten times and finding the middle ground right.
00;53;24;28 - 00;53;46;18
Jonathan Brill
Every time you do that, energy use goes through the roof. But what we're still doing is basically and we've got to eat it up. But this is a database search tool. Right. And searching a database, the second you get into a genetic AI and deep research, right. You know, you have an agent, a tool that's doing all of this stuff with its database.
00;53;46;20 - 00;54;08;28
Jonathan Brill
And, you know, pretty quickly going to another agent, a tool that's doing the same thing. And maybe those two agents say, hey, there's another database with some other information. And doing that again, you can see how the energy use goes geometric here. And no matter how efficient we get, we're going to see a dramatic increase in energy use.
00;54;08;28 - 00;54;39;08
Jonathan Brill
And that's going to be a massive limiter. And the reason it's a massive limiter is that a we hadn't planned on this in the US electric grid or anybody else's electric grid. Maybe the, gas turbines that, you know, people like Elon Musk are using. He bought he rented half of them in the country just to run his, his, his, new data center and I guess in Nashville, Kentucky, Tennessee.
00;54;39;10 - 00;55;03;05
Jonathan Brill
But, you know, he he took half of the stock just to run one data center. And then you look at those turbines of that class of turbine, and there's a 90 month lead time to buy another one. Wow. So we have some real limit. Yes, we have some real limits to how quickly we can increase energy use.
00;55;03;05 - 00;55;34;02
Jonathan Brill
And so that's a governor on what we can do and what's cheap. So you go out to 2035. Yeah. This problem starts to be solved. We have small modular nuclear reactors coming online. We have a ten year backlog of purchases of those things, you know, but up until 2030 or 2032, you know, it's going to kind of look a lot like what we're what's at the leading edge now in the enterprise space right now, what we're doing in the enterprise space.
00;55;34;02 - 00;55;53;19
Jonathan Brill
But you take, you know, you you take three instances of, of oh one and you get them talking to each other or you take, you know, sonnet 3.7 and oh one in Gemini and you get them talking to each other with different databases, you know, that that's about where we're going to be for the next five years, right?
00;55;53;22 - 00;56;08;01
Jonathan Brill
You know, and there will be government stuff and there will be, you know, hedge fund traders and yeah, like whatever they want to spend, you know, $100,000 a month and that'll be different. But for you and I that that's the outer edge.
00;56;08;04 - 00;56;27;03
Geoff Nielson
So you know, my natural response to that, Jonathan, is, and I've heard people say this before, that as, as the need for energy grows and it becomes, you know, a more and more valued commodity. You sure you can increase the supply, of it, which you're talking about as being, you know, kind of ten years out.
00;56;27;05 - 00;56;40;22
Geoff Nielson
But it could potentially also drive a race for efficiency within these models that, you know, can become, you know, not not geometrically more efficient, but exponentially more efficient is that on the table?
00;56;40;24 - 00;57;04;17
Jonathan Brill
Absolutely. What we're seeing, according to Sachin Nadella, and, you know, certainly one of the bubble blowers in this whole thing, but the least, the least smoke blowing of the bubble because, you know, he's saying, hey, you know, it where if you multiply out what he said, so say, I think there's about 100,000 times increase in energy efficiency between now and, 2030.
00;57;04;19 - 00;57;29;07
Jonathan Brill
And, you know, when you just calculate out, you know, in terms of performance improvement, that's about a ten times increase in performance, an improvement between now and 20, 30 or 100,000 times decrease in energy efficiency. So in that, you know, is is is the range of math. Right, right. So we'll we'll see things that are stunningly efficient that are ChatGPT 3.5.
00;57;29;09 - 00;57;51;18
Jonathan Brill
That will be free for or ChatGPT for maybe that will be free. And then we'll see more advanced tools that the AI, you know, I would actually use to do work. Right. That will be not free. Right. And, and that, that the, the cost of those will go up on a geometric curve. Right. How long will you know?
00;57;51;18 - 00;58;15;28
Jonathan Brill
ChatGPT is or, you know, OpenAI has been threatening to put out a $20,000, a month tool. How long will that stay? $20,000 a month? That's a really good question. You know, I think I think looking at how quickly, you know, everybody is nipping on their heels, you know, six months. Yeah. And then it's 2000 and then it's, you know, 200 in a year.
00;58;16;00 - 00;58;19;11
Jonathan Brill
I mean, that's pretty incredible.
00;58;19;14 - 00;58;24;11
Geoff Nielson
Oh, absolutely. It's yeah, it's it's it's exponential. Right.
00;58;24;13 - 00;58;50;09
Jonathan Brill
Yeah. Yeah. But but the demand for that tool will go through the roof and so that you'll be limited in your ability to access it. Right. Because because the value will I think the value of the tools I'm using now are so high, you know, and I'm spending, you know, hundreds of dollars a month and they'll get easier to use, you know, and every executive will insist on it.
00;58;50;09 - 00;58;55;29
Jonathan Brill
I mean, it's just kind of how it's going to work. And every technician technical person is going to insist on that. Right.
00;58;56;02 - 00;59;02;28
Geoff Nielson
Jonathan, I wanted to say a big thank you for joining us today. I've really appreciated your insight, and it's been a great conversation.
00;59;03;00 - 00;59;05;02
Jonathan Brill
Absolutely. Thank you. Jeff, it's wonderful to meet you.


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