FridAI - GPT vs. Perplexity, Zoom AI and Bluesky

Business brain, episode 633 for Casual Friday, March 21, Twitter Day. Also National Common Courtesy Day. Yes, 16 years, I believe. Twitter as of today, 2025. That's cool. Greetings, folks, and welcome to. Welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas and we crunch them and use them to better tune our business brains to keep on living those charmed lives. Our sponsors for this episode include shopify.com businessbrain, where you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period, and selectquote.com businessbrain where you can get the right life insurance for you for less here in Durham. We'll talk about those more in a little bit here in Durham, New Hampshire. For now, I'm Dave Hamilton and out.

Here in Northern California still, I'm Shannon Jean. Happy Friday.

Happy Friday. I figured Twitter day was a good day to talk about Blue Sky.

Yeah, I don't know anything about it other than is it Jack Dorsey's thing or is he just. It's different.

So yes and no. Okay, but yes, more yes than no. So Blue sky is a. Well, it's become a social network. It was not conceived to be that way. A lot of people see it as the Twitter alternative. Open Twitter, free Twitter, whatever.

Connects to. What is that?

Yeah, so I don't know what they. Where it's. It started inside of Twitter. The idea was Jack Dorsey said, hey, we need to build a new platform upon which Twitter can run, okay? And we believe he, you know, he sort of, he was just posting something and he said it needs to be open, like open source and you know, federate able. And that's what I was thinking about, extensible and all those things so that the platform isn't like beholden to like the company or whatever. And this woman, Jay Graber, who is now Blue sky CEO, was on board as a programmer at Twitter, started her career as a digital policy advocate and got into building decentralized social protocols. So she replied to this, this, you know, post of Jackson, said, yes, I'm interested, and was joined a group of people that were talking about, you know, about the, this concept and kept talking about it and they decided that it should be owned separately from Twitter. It should be broken off so that the platform again, isn't. In order to keep the platform from being influenced by the corporate direction of Twitter, the platform should be its own thing. And Twitter for a short period of time, had a board seat at Blue sky, but that doesn't even exist anymore. So it's, it's, you know, it's its own platform.

Yeah.

Yep. Obviously, Twitter has yet to or X Now, like, things changed in terms of how Twitter was owned. Obviously it was taken private by Elon Musk. Right. So, yes, it's not. Elon Musk's ex is not using the Blue sky platform.

Got it.

Whether they do someday or not. I mean, the current direction would be surprising if he chose to do that, but who knows, you know, Never know. You never know, right? Yeah, exactly. But the app that we know of as Blue sky was really just built as sort of a placeholder, a test bed to test the platform that they were building. And then people started joining it and it was like, oh. And then the things happened with Twitter and the people that weren't happy with what was going on at Twitter is like, well, maybe Blue Sky's a good place to go because Jack Dorsey is behind it. It's got some legs and there's 30 something million people on it now, and it just keeps going. So there was this keynote. It was an interview. Jay Graeber was being interviewed by Mike Masnik from Tech Dirt, who has been a big Blue sky user and was part of that sort of working group. And initially, as people were sort of throwing out ideas and all that stuff. But yeah, it started in, in December 2019 when Jack Dorsey said Twitter is funding a protocol that Twitter will run on eventually. And it, it's, it's. It's interesting, right, because yeah, it is this federatable network. So what does that mean?

Explain to our listeners what that means.

Right, so what that means is everybody can run their own Blue sky server, instance, if you want.

Ah. So, like, what do they call that game? Roblox or Minecraft, you know, or, or you, you get a virtual server, so to speak.

No, no, no. You would run your. I mean, you could get a virtual server, but you do it however you want. And it's like, it's like what's happening with Mastodon. And they're similar in a lot of ways and different in some. But what it means is like, you could run your own Blue sky server. I could run my own Blue sky server. And I could say, I want to run a Blue sky server that is for musicians, and you could run one for, you know, people in the auction world. And then you and I and everybody else that runs servers gets to decide do I want to federate with Shannon's people? And if, if I'm okay with what your people, who your people are, it's like, okay, no problem. Right?

You're as the admin can decide to carry it or not.

And. Right. And the idea is everybody federates with everybody else that they want to federate with, which in for the most part is everybody else. And, but there's no one sort of truth. And that means if you decide to take your server down. Well, those people could move to another server.

Yeah. And yes.

And still communicate with the infrastructure. And that's the big deal. And Blue sky is built out that way too. You, you control your own content. You can, you know, move it somewhere else if you want to. And, and, and they're doing interesting things with the platform. The moderation on it is, is kind of one of the most interesting things. And I've had a Blue sky account for a while and I never quite realized this moderation. And when I say moderation, I mean the, the filtering of posts. Right. You know, what, what you see, what you don't want to see. It's all done by plugins, essentially. I don't know that they call them plugins, but you know, they call them labelers. Right. Where you build an engine that will look at the content and label it. You know, this has expletives in it. This is pictures of cats. This is whatever you want to do. You can build these labelers and there's tons that are sort of pre built, but there's also. Anybody can build a labeler. That's fine. You know, you could have a thing that labels content that has politics in it. You could have one that labels, this appears to be AI generated images versus pictures that people have taken or whatever. And then you can turn on and off these labelers as you see fit. So like Jay Graber was using the example. She's like, sometimes if I just am using the platform to test it for things that we're doing, she's like, I turn on the politics filter because I don't want to get sucked in. She's like, I like, you know, getting sucked into the politics, but not when I'm trying to work, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

So she'll, she'll filter it down to things that are more in, you know, for her mundane. Right. You know, so that she can actually just test the app without getting distracted. Sure. And she says sometimes on like a, you know, a day off or something, she filters it so that the only thing she sees is, what did she call it? Cats or something. It's just like pictures of cats. There is. And there is this filter out there.

So I seem to recall Jack Dorsey talking about how you should Be able to select the algorithm. That's this, this sounds like this, that's action, right?

Yeah. These labelers are just algorithms and you're picking which ones you put in place.

And, and I would say, and I, I, I mentioned this before, like I couldn't use X before until you were like, look, here's how you do it. Mark these posts not relevant. You had to train the algorithm too because like I don't see like on my feed. All I really see are business related entrepreneurship and that kind of thing. I see nothing else. Now I have another account that I go and log into. That's like the crazy town.

Crazy.

Yes.

That's the only way to do it on, on X.

Because otherwise I, it makes it. You're trying to go get some work done and, or do some things and you, it's just overwhelming. So that's, that's awesome. It sounds great.

It's interesting. And, and you know what Jay talked about because Mike asked her, how are you dealing with toxicity? And she said, well, that's it. It's a. Choose your own adventure. You define who can interact with you, who you can interact with. And you can, even if you wind up in a quote post, which was like a reply thread that gets off the rails and is you can extract yourself from those, which is great. And so, and if you're dissatisfied, you, you build your own alternative. Yeah, that's part of the thing. And so that forces Blue sky to be incentivized, to keep incentivized, to keep serving users because they've made it easy for you to leave.

Yeah, I like that.

Right. It's baked into the business model, which I love.

Yeah, I do too. And it allows you to decide what's toxic.

Huh.

And you to decide what you, you know what?

Right. You decide what's toxic or enjoyable. You and I might choose polar opposites and that's okay.

Correct.

Like, correct.

And, and maybe that solves for the, you know, polarization right. Where people are arguing so much. It's like, hey, why are you arguing? You don't have to see this.

You get to pick. Not to see. Yeah, you get, and you actually get to pick in the moment. Not like I, like I trained you or told you to train the algorithm. Like, this is going to take some time. But you know, it's like you just literally flip a switch and no one's there trying to intuit. Well, I know they flip the switch, but maybe if I. Are there ads.

Can you buy ads on Blue Sky? I don't know.

They didn't talk about the revenue model at all. So I don't know. They have a 21 person team right now serving 32 million users.

Crazy. Which is nobody's answering the phone when you make that call.

No, probably not. Not. But you probably, you know, just get support on.

Yes. That's awesome.

On Bluesky. All right, folks, look, you know we're all about protecting what we build, right? Our businesses, of course, our families, obviously, and yes, even our craft beer supply. But here's the thing. If something unexpected happens to you, will your loved ones be financially protected? And that's why our sponsors select quote exists. Selectquote isn't some one size fits all insurance machine. No, they've been helping people for nearly 40 years find the right life insurance policy tailored to their needs. And with their network of top carriers, you can save. And I could save up to 50% compared to other companies. Need up to 5 million in coverage today. If you're in good health, you can get approved. No medical exam required. Shannon and I spend a lot of time talking about living that charmed life, don't we? But a big part of that is making sure the people we love are taken care of, even when we're not around. Get the right life insurance for you for less@SelectQuote.com BusinessBrain Go to SelectQuote.com BusinessBrain today to get started. That's SelectQuote.com BusinessBrain and no, they don't offer life insurance for goldfish, but I check just in case. And Our thanks to SelectQuote for sponsoring this episode. So, look, you know I love talking about smart ways to grow our businesses. And if you've got something to sell, our sponsor, Shopify is the tool that makes it happen. I use Shopify for merch with my other businesses and podcasts. And candidly, it's so seamless and that I sometimes forget I even run an online store. It's true. Shopify gives you the best checkout experience on the planet. And with shop pay conversions can jump by 50%, which means more sales, fewer abandoned carts, and a whole lot of ka ching. Whether your customers are scrolling, strolling, or making Impulse buys at 3am while eating leftover pizza, Shopify makes sure they can buy wherever they are. So if you're ready to start living that charmed, entrepreneurial life, upgrade your business and get the same checkout we use with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com businessbrain all lowercase go to shopify.com businessbrain to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com businessbrain and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. Happy Friday, AI Shannon.

Friday. I. It's that time.

It is that time.

Yes.

It's that day.

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm always interested in seeing what you're doing with AI. What I'm working on as it's. I. I heard a comment that I thought was really valuable to frame AI. Is that. Not that any industry or any person will be replaced by AI, It's. They will be replaced by people who use AI.

That's currently true.

I think that's true.

Yeah. I mean, I think here's where there's a nuance to that. There are many jobs that will be replaced by AI. Right. That doesn't mean AI is replacing people.

Correct.

It is replacing the job that you are doing, and that will allow you to do a different job, and probably part of that job will be better because you're leveraging AI to do it. And that, to me, is the right. It's the only mindset. I mean, I say it's the right mindset. It's right or wrong. It doesn't. It's the world we're in.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, it's. It's like any sort of productivity revolution that we have had. Right. Where, you know, we had machines to build stuff instead of people, but we needed people to run the machines. This is that we need people to. To prompt the AI and guide it and all that stuff.

Exactly.

And to build the AI too. Like.

Yeah, that. Build it, implement it and, you know, do. Do better with it.

Yep. I mean, look, our jobs have changed because of AI. We, like, dramatically. This segment exists because of AI, and the way we do the show exists because of AI. It has replaced some of the functions that we used to do, and now we're doing them. I think we're able to produce more content because we're not spending the time. Like, we didn't use.

That's correct.

We didn't used to do bespoke images for every episode. Right. And even when we did, we were pulling from, like, Shutterstock, and they weren't. They were kind of kludgy. Yeah.

Always appropriate.

We were punching the ticket. Right.

Yes.

And now we get to tweak them a little bit because we're literally, you know, we're coaching this AI through it. I've had some people say, well, you know, you're putting an artist out of business. Like, no, I'm not. Because when I'M publishing a podcast. I know you publish this podcast where you basically do the same thing that I do for my other ones. When I'm publishing my podcast, I have exactly four minutes from the time that I have the idea in my head for what I want the episode image to be and the time that I am finished creating the episode image, it's done. So I don't know any artists that can be on my beck and call for a four minute job a few times a week. That doesn't exist.

It doesn't exist. Yeah, it wouldn't work. Yeah, I agree.

So I, so I wouldn't use it in the past, like that was. The difference is I never used an artist to do this because there's no time in the workflow for that.

Yes, correct. That's.

Nobody's job got replaced. My job just got better because of it.

Yeah, I like it. That's good. I'll mention one of the AIs. It may be kind of boring, but for me it's. It made my life so much better. When working, if you have to take like. I use Zoom all the time.

Sure.

Okay. I have calls, I help, you know, I do, I host groups, I do different things. You know, whether I'm advising people or just trying to connect and trying to meet people or trying to help them out some problem. Zoom has a built in AI called the AI Summary, which is great. And you can interact with it during your meeting. Like if you miss something during a meeting, you can query it and say, oh, did Dave say. I thought Dave said this 20 minutes ago. Sure. So you can go back and forth and you can make it available to everybody in the group so you can keep things going and it can highlight, you know, what's going on in your meeting. But for me, one of the most powerful things part of the AI summaries, Zoom has a thing called docs like Documents Y and it will create eight. It's like a transcript on steroids.

Right.

And there are lots of different, you know, apps that do this. Otter, Fathom, you name. There's a ton of them that do that stuff. And we've used Otter and stuff was great.

Yeah, yeah.

But what, but what the Zoom doc does is it understands the nuance a little bit more and good enough to where if I meet with a client or someone and we talk about, hey, we're going to do this and this is. Okay, your next, next step here should be this and I'll. I'll this deliverable for you or whatever, it creates a very Detailed list of action items. And so much so that, like, with my, my content manager that I meet with every Tuesday morning as we start, you know, get going, it, it creates the tasks for the week that each of us are going to do.

That's excellent.

It's, and it's, it's. I don't even think about it. It just, we talk, we have our thing. It's very natural interaction.

Yeah.

And at the end, I say, hey, go, go. Pull our weekly the call and put them into Slack. So we both have these to work.

So we have them, right?

Yeah, so we have it. So you just have, it's like a, you know, I don't want to say to do list because I don't like those, but no, I, I, I've been.

I, I've been changing my, my internal monologue to use reminders instead of to dos.

Yeah, the reminders is great. That's what they are. They're reminders.

So, yeah, it never bothered me before, but once you said it, it was like, oh, I like that. But much better because it is, it's me reminding myself later. That's correct. I'm offloading the task. That's it.

Yeah. And so I think you have to have a paid account to use the AI. Some, I'm not sure, but they have various levels. But if you're, if you're meeting with remote employees or, I mean, anybody, it. I'm always, they're like, hey, can I call you? I say, well, let's do a quick zoom because then I can focus on this.

Yeah.

And I don't have to remember anything because I'm not remembering.

You could even do it without, without video. Like, you could. Oh, yeah, Just have a secondary analog or an audio call. Correct, but just have an audio call. Be there.

Yeah. Pulls it up. It works really well. It's definitely worth every penny that I pay for it.

I got to start using that more. Yeah, Now I see the light.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

It's amazing.

Yep.

Amazing.

I like it.

How about you? Any new AI in the last week or so?

Yeah, I, you know, we do Mac Geek Gab, and we had somebody write in that said they like Perplexity better than Chat GPT. They're like, I know you guys keep talking about Chat gbc. I moved from Chat GBT to Perplexity. I'm now paying them every month because it just works better. And so I did some experimenting this week a being the two. Now I'm, I don't have a paid Perplexity account. I Have. Okay, right. So it's not an apples to Apples comparison, but for certain things it was really interesting. I was standing in the airport waiting for my luggage to come at the beginning of this south by Southwest week, and for some reason I was thinking in my head about, like, when is Mint Mobile gonna support. Or when is Mint Mobile gonna support RCS on the iPhone? This whole move from SMS to rcs, right? And I was like, when is that gonna happen again? Like, I know they said Q2, but, like, is there a date? And So I asked ChatGPT and it said, oh, yeah, as of March 2025, it supports it with iOS 18.4. And I was like, wait, what? How did I miss this? And it was just very nebulous to the point where it sounded like a chatgpt hallucination. There was enough detail missing. Now it turns out it was correct, but I was like, let me ask Perplexity this question. I'm just standing there in the airport. So I pull it up on my phone, literally the same question, copy, paste the prompt, and it's like, yes, Mint Mobile is currently supported on the iPhone. For people running iOS 18.4 beta 2 or later, which came out on this.

Day, the complexity had much more nuance to it.

It was more detailed and it was more convincing. And then of course, I was like, well, it doesn't matter that I'm traveling. I. I'm updating to the iOS 18.4 beta because I want to get this RCS mobile. And I did. And it was correct. It absolutely worked. And it. Like I said, it turned out Chat GPT was right about this too, but directionally, but not. But it was just like, it was too nebulous. It was like, no, I want, you know, it was. It was so. And I did a few other things throughout the week where I asked both of them things and there is a Perplexity was giving me more direct answers for things like that I wasn't using it as much for, like, the deep things because I would have to pay Perplexity for that night. I just aren't. Not yet. But like, you know. Yeah, it's interesting.

So it is interesting.

Now I'm keeping my eye on. On Perplexity.

I'm curious about it too. Yeah, I don't want to get. I love GPT, but I find that some of the. Yeah, I don't want to miss out on something else that is. Is, you know, taking that.

I mean, they're going to keep leapfrogging each other. All of these engines you know, and so at some level, you got to pick whichever one is going to be your, your primary. But don't just live in that bubble. I guess is is the right advice is to, you know, test, test things occasionally so that you know that whatever you're using is the best thing for you. And then you can go.

So it's awesome.

Yeah, I think it's great.

We'd love to hear about AI you're using in your business to solve problems, increase productivity, whatever you're doing. Feedback at BusinessBrain show and be sure to go leave us A review at BusinessBrain show reviews and we'll get you entered to win a MacBook. Love it here from you.

Yeah, great. We want to give that MacBook to you. BusinessBrain show review. Keep living that charmed life. We'll see you next week.

Have a great weekend.

Later.