Understanding AI
The business news that matters
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Off to Lunch…
Video games and social media offer an insight into how artificial intelligence will change industries, Caspar Lee writes in his latest column for Business Leader.
Video games have provided the opportunity to play against the computer - effectively an AI bot - for years. However, this has “paled in comparison to the experience of competing and playing alongside real people”, Caspar Lee writes. Meanwhile, fake social media personas created by AI that are trying to take on real content creators have “failed to gain significant traction”.
Caspar Lee is the co-founder of Influencer.com, a marketing agency, and Creator Ventures, which invests in consumer technology businesses and content creators. He has published videos on YouTube since 2011 and has more than 6.5 million subscribers. Forbes has named him as one of the most promising entrepreneurs under the age of 30 to watch in the world.
In his latest column for Business Leader he offers a fascinating insight into how artificial intelligence is changing the industries he works in. He says that AI “isn’t just a trend; it represents the next fundamental shift in humanity”, adding:
People follow the majority of creators because they’re interested in the individual, their life, and their opinions. However, for creators who circulate information, such as pop culture, headline news or commoditised content like top 10 lists, this dynamic changes and audiences are usually less interested in the actual human behind the content. This type of content is already getting replaced. Sometimes by the human creators themselves.
None of this should be misconstrued as denying the impact AI will have on the creator economy. That ship has already set sail. Creators are now editing 10x faster, dubbing videos into all the languages, and creating limitless content to enhance their videos using AI. This is incredibly exciting as it continues to level the playing field with traditional media companies – another leap towards the democratisation of media.
Am I biased? Of course I am. Most of my friends are creators and I don’t want them to lose their jobs or for society to become inundated with synthetic content, but I also believe that in this beautiful multiplayer game we call life, playing with bots pales in comparison with real people.
You can read the full piece here.
Podcast…
The latest episode of our Business Leader podcast looks at learning from failure. We speak to John Stapleton about how he co-founded two successful food businesses - New Covent Garden Soup Company and Little Dish - but also suffered failures with a business in the US and with a promising athletics career before he went into business.
You can listen to the episode on Substack here, Apple here or Spotify here
Other stories that matter…
1. The John Lewis Partnership, the owner of John Lewis and Waitrose, has returned to profit but staff will miss out on a bonus for the third time in four years and more job cuts could be on the way. More here
2. The Groucho Club, the private members club aimed at the arts and media industry, is expanding outside London. However, rather than go to the US or abroad, it’s heading to Yorkshire. You can read a story by The Guardian on this here
3. Casual racism is allowed to go unchallenged in boardrooms across the UK because they lack diversity, according to the latest column by Sir Trevor Phillips in The Times. You can read this piece here
4. Nvidia, the chip maker, is now worth more than $2 trillion (£1.6 billion) and is one of the most valuable companies in the world. Jensen Huang, the founder, has just given a talk to the Stanford Graduate School of Business in which he spoke about the importance of entrepreneurs having “low expectations” and being resilient. “Greatness comes from character and character isn’t formed out of smart people —it’s formed out of people who suffered,” he said. More from Fortune here
5. The latest annual letter from Patrick and John Collison, the Irish co-founders of Stripe, offers a fascinating insight into their approach and the business. They write: “Charlie Munger described a two-part rule that works wonders in business, science, and elsewhere: 1) take a simple idea and 2) take it very seriously. Stripe’s mission is to grow the GDP of the internet. The core idea behind the company—one we endeavour to take very seriously—is that we’re still early in the journey of software-driven innovation, and Stripe is an applied exercise in thinking through some of the corollaries of that.” You can read the letter by clicking on the image below
The new Business Leader…
The new Business Leader website and magazine have now launched. We are building a new inspirational, aspirational and agenda-setting business publication for the UK. You can read our analysis, interviews and expert columnists on our website by clicking the image below. Our new magazine is on its way to shops and you can subscribe to your own print or digital version by clicking here
And finally…
Following on from our new podcast episode about learning from failure, I recommend reading Amy Edmondson’s book Right King of Wrong, which explains how to make sure you do learn from failure and don’t make the same mistakes again. We summarise the book in the latest edition of Business Leader magazine (you can find that piece here) and I also recommend listening to Amy Edmondson in the latest edition of the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast, which is produced by the Stanford Graduate School of Business…
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