AI Scouting Report: NOT Investment Advice Edition

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hey, everyone. Every week, I sit down with investor and writer, Byrne Hobart on Turpentine's show, The Riff.
Byrne is the rare individual who can synthesize information from tech, finance, and history into fluid narratives that simultaneously capture the big picture and deliver fresh insight. Byrne is revered in Silicon Valley, and you can get an hour with him each week. To see for yourself how Byrne's thinking can upgrade yours, go check out The Riff.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:23)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence.
Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. In today's episode, I'm excited to share an AI scouting report that I recently presented to a group of retail investors.
This fast-paced, high-level overview is obviously quite different from our usual deep dive format, but I definitely think it's worthwhile for all of us to occasionally take a step back to review the fundamentals and survey the current AI landscape.
I also hope that this can be a compelling introduction for intellectually curious people who haven't been tracking the field and who need a fast on-ramp to understand where we are with AI today.
Because I was told that the group was made up primarily of doctors and lawyers, I opened this presentation with a walkthrough of the current state-of-the-art in medicine. After that, I gave a brief overview of what I consider to be the most important concepts in AI, including what goes into these systems, how they learn, and what we can say about what they really understand, their strengths and weaknesses relative to humans on a practical level, how one might think about investing in this space, though, of course, this is not investment advice, and most importantly, how these developments might affect society at large.
Before we dive in, I wanted to mention a few other things as well. First, I am available for more speaking engagements along these lines. So if you have a sophisticated audience that could use some help catching up on AI in general, or on a certain focus area in particular, drop me a line and I'll see if I can help. With three little boys at home, I will be far more able to accept remote invitations, but for the right audiences, I am open to occasional travel as well.
Second, in addition to my ongoing work at Waymark and as an AI advisor to Athena, I recently got involved with a new AI advisory and implementation firm called Stellis AI. This company aims to serve small and medium-sized businesses, you can think 50 to 1,000 employees, with a mix of guidance and solutions that drive AI adoption, efficiency and productivity gains, and ultimately business growth.
I love that we're really getting into the weeds with this work. One of our very first projects is for a plumbing parts supply company that has decades worth of old part catalogs currently sitting on a giant bookshelf and is really struggling to help people find what they need.
We're working on an AI solution to make this information far more accessible, and that could create major new opportunities for them as a business.
If you would like to explore being an early customer of Stellis AI, please be in touch.
Finally, I'm considering starting a very niche Cognitive Revolution job board where past guests and other companies I believe in can post their open positions. Right now, for example, Illicit is looking for seasoned software engineers to join their team and help scale their systems. Athena will soon be ramping up a hiring process for a number of AI and other technology roles. And Stellis will be hiring both AI engineers and AI advisors, whose responsibility it will be to translate AI technology into practical results for businesses.
If you're interested in any of those roles, please contact me and I'll help you get connected. I am super curious to see how many audience members are interested in such opportunities, and obviously your response will help me determine whether or not this is a worthwhile project.
If you have any roles that you'd like to advertise, you can ping me about that as well.
As always, we appreciate it when folks share the show. This episode is more accessible than most and could be a great starting point for any friends of yours who've been sleeping on AI. So if you know someone who fits that description, please consider sharing this episode with them.