Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome RVA to Inspire AI, where we spotlight companies and individuals in the region who are pioneering the development and use of artificial intelligence. I'm Jason McGinty from AI Ready RVA. At AI Ready RVA, our mission is to cultivate AI literacy in the greater Richmond region through awareness, community engagement, education and advocacy. Today's episode is made possible by Modern Ancients driving innovation with purpose. Modern Ancients uses AI and strategic insight to help businesses create lasting, positive change with their unique journey consulting practice. Find out more about how your business can grow at modernagentscom, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in today. If you or your company would like to be featured in the Inspire AI Richmond episode, please drop us a message. Don't forget to like, share or follow our content and stay up to date on the latest events for AI Ready RVA. All right, welcome back to Inspire AI.

Speaker 1: 1:15

Today we have an open conversation with Vic Rogers from Sustainable Growth Creative. He's a regular on the show. We've had him talk about his company, his role in AI Ready RVA as a board of directors and his enthusiasm for AI agents, which is the future of artificial intelligence, autonomous nature, and here we are to discuss some of our recent findings and to create a space where this is just an approachable share out of our latest thinking, so we want to talk a little bit about what's the latest in the technology, not so much in a deep dive of technical components, but how does this stuff work, where is it used, and we'll get into some of that. So welcome back and it's great to have you on Vic.

Speaker 2: 2:10

Oh yeah, man, Looking forward to it. I think this is good Pre-homework before the event on Tuesday, with the AI agent session going on, so I'm looking forward to getting a little bit stronger in this subject matter.

Speaker 2: 2:22

Oh, yeah, tell us a little bit about that, yeah, so, depending on when this comes out, I'm not sure which cohort that's coming under, but there's going to be, on April 29th, an AI agents what they are and what they aren't session going to be ran by a corporation called Rise and Scaleai and it's going to be a Dominion payroll from 530 to 7.

Speaker 2: 2:48

It's one of those things where, if you're interested in just understanding what AI is, we got a heavyweight coming in, a young lady by the name of Jessica Clark who's a senior solutions architect at NVIDIA. She's going to be doing a lot of education. I think it just goes well. This is just a pre-work before that, or, if you listen to it afterward, you know same deal. You know lock in with what they got going on over there support, support the sponsor, rise in scale, and you know if you can, if you ever get a chance to talk to somebody from NVIDIA about this stuff. You know I think right now they're at a pace center when it comes to like being ahead in a market with it's, with this information. So I've been doing a little research just to make sure when I go in and this doesn't go all over my head good, yeah, well, uh, dominion payroll.

Speaker 1: 3:32

Tuesday evening, nvidia's architect, jessica clark, be giving us a great presentation. I don't have any guarantees that this episode is going to come out before then, but get your tickets. Yes, sir. All right, follow us on LinkedIn AI Ready RVA for the latest news as well as events. So let's get this conversation started, vic. Let's talk about what AI agents really are. What do you think they are, vic?

Speaker 2: 4:06

I think it's software that perceives reasons and acts towards a goal. It's a little bit more than what you see with the actual LLM. You know, when you think of LLMs, you know they're taught in their power from an external database. You know a lot of these agents. They're going to be rules-based bots and they're going to have scripts and those agents are going to be able to adapt in real time, which is amazing, right? So I personally am looking forward to like this year being the year of agentic AI. You know that term just sounds funny, but that's what the Zeitgeist is. You know, using agentic AI. You know that term just sounds funny, but that's what the Zeitgeist is using agentic AI. And you know, when I did my research, that's how I came up with it. What about yourself? What are your thoughts?

Speaker 1: 4:54

Yeah, I think agents are advanced autonomous systems, right, like. You have an LLM that is kind of the brain of the agent, and then the agent is the program that leverages the LLM and it'll leverage other tools Maybe we can talk about some of those tools as well to autonomously, like you said, reason about the environment. So it observes and then it reasons and then it takes action, right, like. I think that's what the at the at the end of the day, the crux of the of what an AI agent is, it's able to observe, reason and then act upon that, and the thinking part of it right is is really just about, like, giving it context. So the LLM itself, the abundance of information in the internet, right, can be used in the agent's observations and reasoning. Right, it can think about what kind of information it's available to leverage and how it might take what it's observed and think a little bit more strategically or tactically about what its task is. So there you go.

Speaker 1: 6:10

I think those are the types of things that jump out at me when I think about it. I think there's a lot of applications to AI agents. You know you got your robotics, you've got your customer service support centers and what else? Where else might you see agents these days, vic?

Speaker 2: 6:31

Customer care, 100%. You know I think that call center work is going to be replaced pretty soon with a lot of agents. And I know, don't quote me on this one I can't remember the actual fast food company, but it might've been Wendy's actually, or I might be confusing Wendy's super side note, like with Palantir. I know Palantir and Wendy's are working one another and that's kind of weird. But just having, I think at one point that there was a goal to try to use ai to take drop to take menu orders, you know, and it didn't work out. But like I think they're they're refining that a little bit better. But then also with like marketing, like right now, you know, um, you can have a one person news crew where you know you can use the ai agents to create blog posts and then just make sure the seo is where it needs to be and then poof, you know you're out there with some good content.

Speaker 2: 7:28

I think the one that's probably the scariest, especially for, like time spent in the space, software development.

Speaker 2: 7:34

Like you know, if agents can start coding, like you know, it's kind of, like you know, tough for, like you know, developers, coders, architects, who have been in the space for a long time to have this technology come through because, like, what's going to happen is like I don't know if I say one in four or you know it's a nice jump, but like you won't necessarily need to have the staff to hire as many of these architects and coders anymore because you could just have an ai agent paired with a human to do the same amount of work 10 times faster. Right um, weeks turn, turn into days when you're looking into that Finance too. You know just a lot of different use cases and you know, I would say you know picturing like nonprofits, getting into leveraging. You know these agents without having to hire, like data science teams, you know. So there's a lot of good and a lot of displacement, but if used properly in the right industries, the right use cases, I could see a lot of positive happening.

Speaker 1: 8:26

Yeah, yeah, I think we'll have an opportunity to talk about AI autonomous human replacement versus augmentation. I think that we're on a path to augment right now. Full replacement isn't so much in the short term for us right now, because I think that there's still some concerns about the reliability of its outputs Right, and nobody wants to be put on the front page for, you know, last week releasing an autonomous agent and then this week, you know, blowing up their industry, right? So I think there's there's still going going to be some work to do before full replacement. But, yes, augmentation, as we say, is definitely very approachable for companies and they are considering that at full speed. So we've gotten to the point where we know what an AI agent is, you know, logically speaking, and we know how it's being used in companies, industries. What about the building blocks of AI agents? Let's click on that one a little bit. What do you think are important components to creating an agent and making it successfully operate?

Speaker 2: 9:48

I guess a couple of things. I think a good analogy I saw one time was that you know AI agents are like Lego sets, like LLMs are leveraged for thinking and then tools for acting. You know memory for learning and then planning for strategy. So like that's a good kind of like way to you know, think about it. Or even when you think about the building blocks, you know you got a brain, you got a toolbox, you got a diary, you got a whiteboard and then you wire them all together and bow, you got this beautiful AI tool right. So just broken down and like a layman term, I think that's that's the easiest way to kind of like fill it out when it comes to like the building blocks of.

Speaker 1: 10:26

Okay, there are some, definitely some tools out there. Let's let's take, for instance, an agent that can scrape any website and help formulate an opinion of you know what a company does, how your business can support it, that sort of thing. When I think about that use case, this agent could be using a, you know, browser type search tool, a scraper, something that will pull information from specific website or web pages and then some sort of summarization capabilities with the LLM, then use some sort of RAG-like so retrieval, augmentation, generation, RAG-like thought process to review, based on your company opportunities or service-level opportunities for your company to help with and possibly make a pitch for. So all of that is the types of tool sets that agents can use in just that one circumstance.

Speaker 1: 11:53

I think that I want to talk a little bit more about how it does that. So humans use memory to observe and reflect on things. Agents do the same thing, right. Agents do the same thing, right. So in that case, how do you think that the memory would surface and be of support in that structure? What do you think about that, Vic?

Speaker 2: 12:19

Vector DBs such as Pinecone and Prestigious can keep past calls so the agents can actually remember your specific use cases, like if it's like organizational policies and things of that nature. I think from a memory standpoint, you know that's ideal Persistent storage, just enabling agents to recall past interactions and improve over time and like build over time. I think both of those are um examples of how like memory is going to be leveraged. When it comes to using these um ai agents and actually I was gonna say in the future, but like now, currently like there's some tools out there that we'll probably talk to eventually I haven't seen a lot of like no code easy to use ones yet I've been playing trying to figure out some for a client of mine. But um you, it comes to memory. That's what I'm seeing some of the best speak to.

Speaker 1: 13:16

The Pinecone one I've been using recently in building a chatbot, just testing it out and seeing how scraping a website and storing it into the vector database, which is PinecCone right, how that works, being able to access that memory, if you will, from the chatbot's interface, asking the bot to recall what it learned by just submitting some basic questions about the website that it ingested, see what it knows, and so far it does really really well. So a little bit of exploration there goes a long way, for sure.

Speaker 2: 14:01

How long have you been doing that too? That sounds kind of cool. So you're already in there, kind of coding an AI agent.

Speaker 1: 14:08

Well, actually I used Claude Claude 3.7, Sonnet, I think it's what it's called and just the free version if you, if you know how to instruct it to create something like that's. What I've been doing lately is just testing out its capabilities for producing an entire application like that. I'm happy to give you a demo after the podcast, but it's pretty amazing to be able to see what it can produce. And the problem with it is that if you have it build something that's extravagant and you actually get it to work right, but you don't really know how it's working, then you can't really update it right, you can't maintain it. You ask it to do something else again, to try to like adapt it or create a you know, a new feature or something like that, and it'll go back through and rewrite the entire code, which changes things right, and you have no idea what it's changing. So that becomes one of the blockers for it these days.

Speaker 2: 15:18

But I'm happy to talk with you a little bit more about that after the episode Definitely one of the benefits of being a co-host getting cool stuff like that man. So look forward to that conversation.

Speaker 1: 15:30

Yeah, definitely getting getting cool stuff like that man. So look forward to that conversation. Yeah, definitely, um, it was. It was kyle. Uh, johnson from our platforms, who you know shared with me his insights into claude and how he was using it and I was like I need to go try that. And so there you go. Um, tell me what. What are your thoughts on the agent versus assistant debate? When I think about an agent, you've got a completely autonomous service right and then you can have an assistant which helps augment, like I was talking about a few minutes ago. What do you think about the differences there?

Speaker 2: 16:13

at control versus productivity. So, like, assistance are safer for, like, um, compliance, um, you know, I think, capital, you know, uh, dominion, like, you know those big fortune 500 companies, you know I think you're going to probably want to use assistance with that, so there's some augmented intelligence in there. But agents unlock efficiency by reducing human oversight. So you know, I think, again, with the companies, I just with assistance, just to make sure they can turn on and off the autonomy. And then, you know, as this technology gets a little bit easier to refine, you know, um, and the guardrails are situated. Then you know, I think, uh, it's a little bit easier. But like, yeah, assistance is like, um, you steer, it replies, and then agents are hey, I want you to book this trip to maui for me and my wife and uh, make sure that we're on the beach.

Speaker 2: 17:18

You know, I think salesforce is really have. They have a really big pitch right now to get their agent force out there. So, like, from, from a practical, currently in the market kind of thing, if you're an enterprise looking to kind of, you know, use, use, agents in particular, I know Salesforce is a, is a company that's really pushing a lot of time and attention. And then you know a lot of these other companies are going to get there as well. But you know, I think I see a lot of when I'm watching you know market stuff. I'm seeing a lot of agent talk come from Salesforce in particular.

Speaker 1: 17:47

Yeah, I remember having this discussion with Will Melton, who's a board member of AI Ready RVA. In one of the earlier episodes he was telling me about Salesforce, and this was several months ago, but they really had a huge push, like you said, and they're super disruptive in the market, so that was a really good example. Yes, so now that we've gotten our audience to think about you know what the agents are, how they're being used, supporting knowledge, workers in their roles and some of the differences between what an agent is and what an assistant can be. That leverages agentic AI. What do you think about some of the risks and challenges, maybe even some ethical considerations when thinking through how to use these agents, or maybe even where to start?

Speaker 2: 18:44

I mean when you think of ethics, you know you already talked about them earlier, so I'm going to shout them out. Hopefully they can sponsor our episode. I always go with Anthropic. You know their whole entire ethos is to like, not train on your information, you know, and they want to make sure that you know everything is designed and constructed to reduce, like, hallucinations and misalignment. And I always like, when it comes to ethics, when I hear that word, I think about anthropic 100%. But you know safety frameworks are there. You know OpenAI, for example. You know they have. You know, tools like moderations for APIs to filter harmful outputs. But you know you still got to make sure that you know you're watching out for hallucinations.

Speaker 2: 19:30

I've seen stuff where you know, like I said earlier, I said, hey, book a flight for me and my wife to Maui. But when they book it, they book a non-existent flight and you know you fly from, like you know, richmond, virginia to Henrico and it's like, oh, that doesn't even make sense type of deal, right. So you know, stay on top of it, just from a risk mitigation standpoint. But if ever there was, you know a company that I can always, you know, give their flowers in the moment. When it comes to ethics, I always say Anthropic Very good.

Speaker 1: 19:59

Very good. So they're like the Volvo of the car industry.

Speaker 2: 20:04

That's a good one True story about me. My first car was a Volvo 960 at high school. You know my mama still, she still gots a Volvo to this day. So yeah, shout out Volvo, yep.

Speaker 1: 20:17

Those marketing agencies train us well, don't they? Yeah, all right, man, let's talk about agent-to-agent interaction. We'll call it multi-agent systems, when agents can talk to each other. Tell me, what do you see in there?

Speaker 2: 20:36

So I had to do some research on this, just so I can have something to speak to, because that's the first time I heard about it, so I'm going to read from it and then we can kind of speak to it.

Speaker 2: 20:44

But apparently Stanford's Smallville showed 25 independent agents forming social behaviors like birthdays, restaurants, meetups, without any script from a business angle, fleet scheduling, supply chain bidding and even decentralized finance bots that negotiate spreads in real time, which is I'm hearing that if I'm, if I'm getting pitched a job and I have to negotiate against a bot to get more money, that's, that's going to suck, man.

Speaker 2: 21:16

I need that human interaction. Even, um, outside of that, I'll say that, uh, decentralized finance, so DeFi bots, you know, trading autonomously, um, like multi-agent, and that's actually, you know, you know I'm a I'm a big finance nerd, you know, once I can get that going like that, that's a really good use case to follow the market, especially with this month. Whenever this comes out, you know, I think April is going to probably be one of the more volatile months that we've seen in the market in decades. Easy, so like having an AI agent, you know, to work simultaneously with one another to kind of, like you know, follow trends, definitely definitely a good way to leverage multi-agent systems about that because I think it's the pinnacle of agent-to-agent interactions.

Speaker 1: 22:15

Right? You said that there were 25 agents that were put into this virtual environment called Smallville and, from my research, each of those were given a personality and a little bit of direction of how to start their role. And then, when placed into this environment, right, imagine a little township, if you will, where there are multiple buildings and 25 little avatars running around, right? Like, just think about what they could be doing if, given the autonomy to go and, you know, just live out their day however they wish, right? So they'll wake up and observe their environment, right, like we talked about, and then they'll figure out, you know, do they have a job, so should they go to work? That's their reasoning, right? And then they leverage the memory of their previous day's context in making those decisions as well.

Speaker 1: 23:23

So was yesterday Friday? Then they don't have to go to work on a Saturday, right? Maybe not anyway, do? Do they want to go call up their friend and get some coffee and meet at the coffee shop? That sort of thing is really interesting about observing this environment. Let's just take a look at it real quick. Go to Smallvillecom and take a look at that demo. Here you go, screen share. Go to Smallvillecom and take a look at that demo.

Speaker 2: 23:54

Here you go screen share. Actually, that's a good idea, you know. I mean I'm trying to find this so I can speak to it in the moment, but I promise there was a Black Mirror episode just about this man.

Speaker 1: 24:09

Oh, my God, yeah, so I watched it last night.

Speaker 2: 24:13

Oh, yeah, okay, so you're talking about the one with the guy with the sound at the end, or whatever.

Speaker 1: 24:17

Uh-huh.

Speaker 2: 24:18

Yeah, I'm trying to find the name of it. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1: 24:29

He's talking with little agents that are running around living their life in an episode like this, and then they're speaking to him. They tell him how to build a computer system that allows them to become more powerful, and I don't want to spoil Spoiler alert right.

Speaker 1: 24:47

Yeah, I know, if you like Black Mirror, don't listen to this part, but the little agents that are running around are given autonomy to escape into the world through some anomaly at the end of the show, and then they can project their sound across all the humanity and start controlling them. It looks like that's where the episode ends, so you have to kind of use your imagination, but they look a lot like this. You know, you see all these little guys running around. They have purpose, right? They've figured out how to give these agents purpose, so you click on one of them and you can find out where they are. It looks like the demo has ended here. For me personally, because I've been running it for so long, I see out here that they're selling NFTs too, which is always fun.

Speaker 1: 25:46

And shout out to my Web3 people.

Speaker 2: 25:48

I'm a Web3 guy man, but you can never not have an NFT hustle right. This is amazing, though, and then it's just crazy, because whenever I watch Black Mirror, it's crazy how cinema sometimes is reality. I remember a couple seasons ago where they had like a social score episode oh my god that one was crazy.

Speaker 2: 26:11

But if you look at some communist countries in the world, they have that going. Yeah, exactly, and I won't say the names because I don't want to get demonetized over there. I hope y'all listening from over on the other side of the world, but that's a real thing. So it's like, yeah, like that, that episode, this is literally the framework of it, and you know what it reminded me of? I don't know if you're a old school PC gamer, but like doom and like Duke Nukem, you know it. It.

Speaker 1: 26:35

I love it that I was raised on Doom.

Speaker 2: 26:39

Oh man, Like the user interface looked just like it. So it's like it's funny how stuff comes full circle.

Speaker 1: 26:43

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Okay, where were we Having fun talking about tech stuff, all right. So Smallville, black Mirror, some really exciting but can be scary stuff let's think about the future, right, like, let's be practical about this. Let's think about the future, right, let's be practical about this, not have to spend as much time doing X, y or Z. So tell me what are your thoughts on personal AI agents?

Speaker 2: 27:43

statistics they're suggesting and they're predicting a quarter of digital tasks are going to be done by personal agents. I guess this time next year I think it's interesting If I could have my own personal chief of staff that just takes over scheduling emails for me and, again, finance and meal prepping and just making sure that I give my mom an excellent Mother's Day gift, because I'm terrible at that stuff. I think that it's awesome. But there's two sides to that. Right, I'm a white hat kind of guy. Black hats though I mean it just makes it way easier to scan. You know the way easier to use. You know technology for war.

Speaker 2: 28:22

Know it's a lot of a lot of stuff going on, whether it's in um in gaza. You know everything that's going on over there. And then you know I saw russia um just retook some um land that ukraine um had held for a long time, right. So, like you know, when it, when it comes to these agents, it's like a, it's a double-edged sword because you know, I think you and I we're pretty when it comes to this stuff. Like you know we're white height kind of guys, but like protecting from that um, it's going to be something that I think whoever could come up with a good use case to kind of make sure that we don't blow the world up with this type of thing.

Speaker 2: 28:53

Man, um, I think it's gonna be good, but it's like you know, I always think um two sides of the coin. You know, personally it's going to help me be a lot more efficient, but it's just like where I'm at in my life 20 years ago, victor. I'm thinking something different. I'm like, yeah, how can they help me cut the line to get into the next big party, or stuff like that? I think it's going to adapt with all the users and this is going to adapt with scale. Palantir again, company, you know, check them out. Um. Wouldn't surprise me if they start um using um, you know, ai agents for defense, or if they're already doing it now. So I mean, the future is, uh, it's wide, open, man, wild, wild west out here when it comes to this. I think.

Speaker 1: 29:40

Yeah, I think companies like Rabbit are close to making it more available scalable Rabbit but for those who don't know what that is, there's a little device, much like a mobile smartphone, that can execute agentically execute tasks for you. So giving more freedom to people through personal assistance, in my mind, is creating packaged agents that are specialized in doing things right, like I'm sure it's going to be really challenging to create agents that can do anything for people right, like that's just a lot of coordination and extremely expensive to create generalized agents like that, but I do believe that people are gonna be able to pick and choose agents in the future to be able to. You know, maybe it's like a subscription. You know, I want an agent. I want to pay monthly fees to this agent that will write all my emails for me, or I want this travel agent, agentic AI, to be able to book all of my work and my personal vacations for me.

Speaker 1: 31:03

Those are just some things, but I do think that they need to be specialized, at least right now, because we don't have artificial general intelligence to be able to think through and piece together on its own everything that it needs to make choices in a world as complex as ours. But the next iteration is somehow packaging up the next Alexa right and making it a personalized assistant to whatever suits your fancy. Whatever you think is going to support your needs the most, and I think that's where the scale is going to come from. I think companies are going to support your needs the most and and I think that's where the scale is going to come from I think companies are going to be finding ways to package those up and ship them off and make lots and lots of money from them um cognition labs is actually doing that.

Speaker 2: 31:53

They're a sas platform. I guess it's like an agent as a service as opposed to sas, but like um, that's that's a good use case. And then um always follow the money. You know, if you're you're looking at the sequoias and the vc um trends right now, the angel investors you know, agent startups are attracting funding um at a pretty pretty high rate right now. Um, so you know, check those out.

Speaker 2: 32:16

And then another thing too like solopreneurs are going to be able to really take advantage of this. Just like, imagine like a, a one-person startup in richmond that can have their own digital workforce. And like fix stuff that needs issues like the water system. Like for for those listening from the other side of the world, like at the start of 2025, richmond and ryko and the surrounding areas had no water right, what if there was an individual that can get ahead of stuff like that to anticipate, you know, water droughts or what ended up happening with that situation? I think there was like a machine function messed up and then it flooded something somewhere and then it just messed up everything right. But like, I think, the AI agents and individuals with the passion and the energy to kind of really, you know, take that thing and run with it are going to be able to do it by themselves one person and then come up with some great solutions to really have a positive effect on the community. Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2: 33:15

And just because we're here, will Milton shout out RVA Water. You know he did a lot of good stuff when we were short on water in the richmond area. So if you're ever in richmond and you see a cool little uh aluminum bottle, that's one of our uh founders. Uh, out here they already. Uh will milton um giving uh giving water. And great guy, great, great company. The water's way better than the stuff that you would get out of aquafina or a designing. So so you know. A little. Public service announcement.

Speaker 1: 33:43

All right Go Will. All right man.

Speaker 2: 33:51

What do you think the next few years looks like for AI agents, if the trajectory is going to go like the same hype cycle with, like just AI in general, I say what OpenAI released, release chat, gpt in November of 22. And then by the end of 23, for the early adopters, I was in conferences listening to AI and then at the end of last year I mean everybody is aware of it so like in two years, if it took us to get there, I think AI agents probably get there in six. I think you know assistance with you know agents is going to start to really affect a couple of industries. So if you're in these industries, try to figure out how you can show your employer that you're using AI to help you be more efficient. So, marketing, coding, technology, all that, and then customer support, I think I know some call centers are already starting to introduce call center agents and things of that nature. So, like you know, make sure that you know. You just kind of you know, get a little bit of knowledge underneath your belt so you can be ahead of the competition. You know, because if they have to cut staff, you might want to cut the staff who has no understanding of what's going on with AI agents versus the person who's always talking about hey, I saw this researcher. I'm thinking this solution is better, right? So I think, in about like six months, what's the April? Yeah, about the end of the year it's going to be a lot more plug and play, no code, easy to execute and implement AI agents, and I think it's just because when you looked at where just artificial intelligence came, it took about like two years for it to just be like. I mean, like you can't go anywhere without anybody talking about ai agents now, and I think that they've been talking about ai agents for the early adopters at the end of last year, for sure, and it's starting to kind of pop up a little bit more. So, six months, for sure, and then long term, like five years from now, the aging ecosystem is going to be like um, that's a different conversation. You know that we should have, but like, I think it's is going to be like that's a different conversation you know that we should have, but like I think it's just going to be a different use case for people to work.

Speaker 2: 35:47

I look forward to seeing how I can compete in that market. You know like I'm trying to stay as knowledgeable as possible. So I'm going to the event on Tuesday and you know anytime that if you're interested and want to get a cup of coffee, you know, check me out on Sustainable creative. You know, I love just having these conversations. I love hopping on with jason you know it's early, he got, he got to get the garage knocked out, I got to cut the grass. But it's like whenever you take time out to like, you know, just be humble and have conversations like this, you just get better. So I say, um, you know, six months, it's going to be a little bit quicker mass adoption, but in, like you know, five years, um, it's, it's going to be hard to predict. I mean, different administration, different world, it's going to be interesting.

Speaker 1: 36:25

Yeah, maybe different administration. I like it. Look, I would love to have that conversation. We're not having that conversation. 2028 is very unpredictable.

Speaker 2: 36:37

Yeah, but.

Speaker 1: 36:38

I do think that you're right on. With the vast change that's coming, it's hard to tell what agent to agents are going to be able to do and what big tech is going to do with these things and how they're going to mass produce them and roll them out into society. Right, it's like you're absolutely right. It's like do what you can today to learn and grow with these technologies, because there's no getting around it. They are in our world and they're going to become more prevalent, more available. Get to know them and don't be afraid of them. Right, don't be afraid of the technology and trying new things with them and seeing if you can explore different means of leveraging them so that they're very approachable in your work and life. And when your company decides to start leveraging this stuff internally, you're ready for it.

Speaker 1: 37:31

But we're here to help AI Ready RVA. That is our mission. We want to support this community. So let us know how we can Reach out to us in LinkedIn. Reach out to our friends at Sustainable Growth Creative. Reach out to them and let them know how they can help you. That's their business model. They want to bring people up to speed. We also have a really good platform that we're developing at AIReadyRVAcom. It's going to help educate folks. So become a member today and we will be contributing in great force to the growth and scaling educational opportunities for our cohorts and everyone, all our members. So join us online and get to know AI today, because the future is not coming, it is already here. Thanks again, vic.

Speaker 2: 38:25

Well, actually, can I close this For people who stay to the end of this podcast, I got something bonus. Can I do a bonus thing real quick? Yeah, do it. Have you heard of Manus AI yet?

Speaker 1: 38:35

Yes, yeah, it's a Chinese startup, right.

Speaker 2: 38:39

Yes, it is Just like DeepSeek, and that's another thing. I think that the um you know, the chinese are um, really like what they did with leveraging older um. They weren't even blackwell gpus from nvidia, what they actually did, and it's super in the weeds um, and I'm open if somebody in the comments can correct me if I'm wrong but like all those GPUs from NVIDIA, they use CUDA as like their programming language. Apparently, deepseek figured out how to get around that and that's how they were able to get those chips to function so effectively. But saying that, to say this that Manus AI is just as disruptive as DeepSeek. If ChatGPT is an assistant, manus is a project manager that actually does the project work for you. Check them out. They're a state of the art GIA agent benchmark and all that is is just like measuring success, like they benchmark all these tools and like Manus AI apparently scored pretty high on that. Check them out. And then, from BC's 75 million, what a $500 million evaluation. So it's not like they're a tool or a company that is not turning heads. That's a pretty high evaluation and that's. You know. You follow the dollars. You know I was able to use it to come up with I'm doing a score three-part AI series coming up.

Speaker 2: 40:12

I should probably pump that, but I ain't got the dates yet. But it's a great tool. It's using a whole bunch of different AI agents at one time and it helped me come up with a good curriculum and it took me maybe like 10, 15 minutes to get in there. And then I just you know, took that information, put it in gamma and I got I got a hell of a presentation right. So if you're looking to try to see like what's the example of what an AI agent can do right now, in the moment you can download Manus AI and they got a beta version. But just be particular, because it's just like Deep Seek.

Speaker 2: 40:42

That stuff is going to be on a Chinese server. And if you don't want your stuff on a Chinese server, there's a multitude of reasons why you wouldn't. I'm not going to get into them. Just make sure that you're kind of particular about what you put on there. I'm asking it to help me with educational information and the stuff they give back is legit. I'm telling you there's going to be a Chinese Coca-Cola coming out if you do that. So don't do that right, because I mean like this is the end of the podcast and, like I always like to reward people who listen to the end, give them some you know little Easter eggs to kind of go back and, you know, hopefully talk about the stuff in the comments.

Speaker 1: 41:15

Awesome Thanks. So you have a wonderful rest of your weekend and I look forward to catching up with you again soon.

Speaker 2: 41:22

Yes, sir.

Speaker 1: 41:26

And thanks to our listeners for tuning in today. If you or your company would like to be featured in the Inspire AI Richmond episode, please drop us a message. Don't forget to like, share or follow our content and stay up to date on the latest events for AI Ready RBA. Thank you again and see you next time.