-: And why don't you bring the students up to speed?
'Cause we were speaking a little bit before this interview
about the process you're at right now,
hiring on some people for your company,
and mention that again, of how you were using ChatGPT
and one of the different facets of something at OpenAI
to speed up that specific hiring process.
-: Absolutely. Yeah.
So, OpenAI, one of their OpenAI is if you don't know that,
for anyone who doesn't know,
it's the people who make ChatGPT the minds behind that.
And they have another a number of other APIs,
and one of them is a similarity scoring algorithm,
which is like, what it's doing in the backend
is like fairly complex,
but you can basically dump it a resume
or any given body of text and say,
hey, does it meet this certain criteria?
Or how similar is it to another set of criteria?
So, in my case, it's the job description
that I wrote for this job,
which I actually got help from ChatGPT writing
to make sure that I was compliant
in every way with the state and local laws,
because I'm not an HR person
who's an expert on those things.
So, ChatGPT gave me a little hand there.
I'm not a lawyer. (chuckles)
Must have the disclaimer in there, right?
-: Yeah.
-: Taking those similarity scores
between the job description and the resume,
that all happens just automatically
with my applicant tracking system.
There's a bit of software where you apply to a job.
It goes into something called an applicant tracking system.
It's like an HR tool basically
to manage applications to a job.
It just pulls those new resumes down,
compares them to the job description.
If it meets a certain level,
a threshold level of which they're similar,
it'll pass them on to the next stage automatically.
So, yeah, when you're hiring for a job,
there's a lot of people who apply,
some of them are very ambitious
and think they can handle maybe a lot more than they can,
which it's lovely to see and I love the confidence,
but the job that we're hiring for
has a very specific set of criteria
and we need to find people
who are really well-qualified
for the things that we're doing here.
So, yeah,
we need to find those edges -: Yeah.
-: where we can and save time,
because having to go through hundreds of resumes,
I also get fatigued, I make mistakes, I overlook things.
AI never gets fatigued.
AI doesn't, I mean, it makes mistakes,
but eh, for the most part,
it's gonna be better than me. -: Right.
-: Yeah, exactly. (Yan chuckles)
There's like hallucinations and things like that,
but it's not gonna get tired.
It's not going to take a lunch break,
which is very strange facet.
As it starts to work its way more and more
into the modern work life
and the ability to do more of our tasks
that have been reserved just for having
to have the human capabilities to do these tasks
is now so quickly getting taken over by technology.
How do you see it positioning yourself,
your company, in a field that is changing so dramatically?
It's kind of funny, before you answer that,
updating our courses specifically that involve AI,
we are having to reshoot lectures every week,
every other week,
because the layouts, the interfaces,
the capabilities and the functionalities
are all changing so rapidly.
Back to the question, how do you see yourself
positioning the company
that you're growing to surf that wave?
-: That's a great question
and it's something I think about all the time.
Something, me and my co-founder, Nate,
we talk about this all the time.
How do we use the tools
that are available to us to make sure
that we move faster than everyone else?
As an entrepreneur, I'm constantly thinking about the fact
that there's some amount of competi...
It's running a business you're always in the arena.
Like there's someone,
if you don't out-execute the next business,
they're gonna beat you and you're gonna be homeless.
So, you gotta find every edge you can.
And if there's an edge to be had,
it is an imperative that you take that edge
and the biggest edge we have right now
is this changing landscape of artificial intelligence.
So, part of my job, the way I see it nowadays,
is to understand what's possible, stay at the cutting edge.
Maybe some things aren't really there yet.
Logo design was one of 'em where I was like,
okay, we need to get a proper logo designed.
And I felt like all the tools I researched,
it was like, we're not there yet.
For whatever reason, typography isn't,
generative typography is just not,
there's like a lot of rules and the human eyes
expecting a certain thing that we're not there yet.
But I made sure to evaluate it
and it was in the conversation.
Should we try to find some type of AI service designer logo?
So, that's maybe an example
of where it's not a great tool,
but there's plenty of other things.
Like for example, all of our stock imagery, it's like,
I was looking through Shuttershock the other day,
funnily enough, a place I used to work
as a software engineer,
and I thought to myself, jeez, their days are very numbered.
Their business model is predicated on
it being somewhat difficult to find an image
that represents something you want to do.
Now, you can just say, Midjourney, hey, do this thing.
I don't care exactly what it looks like.
I don't have something exact in mind,
but I have a general idea.
Midjourney just kills Shutterstock every time.
And I can't imagine a world
where once that gets far enough along
and that's a mature enough product
that it won't be something
that everyone needs to use every day in order...
And if you're spending money on Shutterstock,
it's like a waste.
We'll see, but maybe I'll be wrong.
And there's always a blowback
and there's always certain edge cases,
but I think for the average business,
it's like, why would you not use Midjourney
or at least try it?
Give it a shot first before...
You reach for Midjourney first,
and then you go for stock imagery.
I think in every facet of our business,
that's something that's constantly on my mind.
Is there an AI tool that's becoming available
or an AI technique that I'm not thinking about
or don't know about yet
that could be a good candidate for solving this problem?
-: Got it.
So, you're finding new ones,
trying to put into the workflow and stay riding that wave.
Things are changing so quickly.
What would take 10 years is now 10 days, essentially.
Basically, 10 months sometimes.
But yeah, that's really when I started to see the impact
of what was happening was when I saw that,
exactly the Shutterstock is a perfect example,
'cause I went through this whole process mentally
as well of the old paradigm is I go
and I pay for something that's available online
that fits in with what I want.
Same thing with Netflix.
I get on Netflix
and I wanna find a show that's a comedy and it's fun
and there's a female lead role, whatever it is.
Now, what can happen with Shutterstock
is you type in exactly what you want on Midjourney.
You don't have to go get a stock image.
It's custom directly to you.
The future of what's gonna be happening
with generative video as well is that you're gonna type in,
I wanna watch a "Star Wars" movie
that has aspects of "Lord of the Rings"
with a strong male lead character.
And it's gonna go, (tongue rolls)
and instead of going through Netflix
for 20 minutes trying to find the movie you want,
you're gonna get generated your custom movie script,
character, styling,
everything in minutes and moments, essentially.
We're not there yet, but that's where it's all going.
And that's why it's an interesting conversation to have
of like staying on the cutting edge of that
is going to, almost need to hire a full-time person.
That's just the future.
They have that job at Samsung, I forget what it's called.
It has a really cool name -: Mm.
-: for the role.
But -: Yeah.
-: it's a really interesting space.
And yeah, I guess that leads me to the question
of the pros and cons
that you're seeing of being in this space.
What's been fun and exciting,
and then what's been also the downside?
-: Oh, it's a really exciting place to be, that's for sure.
It moves really fast.
I think that's the pro and the con.
If you're trying to build a business,
it's very shaky ground to build on,
because for a lot of the, you can see it,
it's like, mm, do I wanna build a,
spend a bunch of time to build something here
and invest in solving this one problem
with the existential threat looming that this gets,
something else, some technology, some AI technique comes in
and obsoletes all the hard work I put into this.
So, I think that is something of a downside
to be in this space and I do worry about that a lot,
but that's a small worry
compared to what I focus mostly on the upside, which is
-: Upside.
-: there's just so much cool stuff that's possible.
And if this technique doesn't work,
like if this business model doesn't work,
we can make a small tweak
and there's another way we might be able
to find a way to build a product that people love.