Maximize Efficiency with AI (Without Losing Your Voice) with Trey Griffin from Raptive

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Hey everyone, welcome back to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This is the second episode of our Raptive series Can't Be Automated, where we talk about scaling, standing out, and the importance of authenticity as a content creator. This week, Bjork is sitting down with Trey Griffin, who is the Senior Manager of AI Industry Analysis at Raptiv, to talk about how AI is reshaping the content creation sphere. The reality is AI is here and it's getting better every day. It's bringing a huge wave of both opportunities and threats to the creator space. And if you're not thinking about it, you're already behind. This episode is your playbook for how to approach AI not as a replacement for your work, but as a powerful assistant. You'll hear Bjork and Trey talk through how you can use tools like custom GPTs to boost your efficiency, letting you take on bigger creative projects and focus on your core strategy. The big secret they unpack is that as digital noise gets louder, your personal brand and unique human touch are actually becoming your most valuable assets. You'll definitely want to stick around for this episode if you're looking to learn more about how to leverage AI for growth while making sure your content remains uniquely yours. Be sure to tune in next week for the final episode of this series with Raptive. And now, without further ado, I'll pass it over to Bjork.

Trey, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me.

I'M going to start with something that I saw recently on LinkedIn. So OpenAI had this. They have this big presentation. You know, it's a developer day. They release all this information. And I think about stuff like this, like when Apple does a big release, occasionally they'll show like, here's the update on itunes. And they'll show like artists. And it will be like a certain artist that they show for this OpenAI one, they were like, here's the power users of ChatGPT. I think it's.

ChatGPT is the API.

The API your name was like on the. It's like presented as somebody who had used like a hundred billion. Yeah, like tokens.

So that's. I was actually just the person that was there for Raptive. I didn't use all 100 billion of us. I think I could maybe only account.

For 90% of them, which is amazing. And I feel like it is a great little piece of evidence as to the amount of time and energy and focus that you are putting into the world of AI, specifically around creators. And if I remember right, you know, I saw the post that it was actually Paul Bannister, who's been on the podcast before, mentioned it, but it sounds like that was related to a project that you had worked on with Raptive to help ingest a bunch of data and kind of sort through things.

Yeah, just a way to more quickly expand our leads, really. Like, who are good creators that could be part of the Raptive network. We took the amount of time that it takes to do that and decrease that from about nine months to a week. And then we took the cost and reduced that by 97%.

It's because my guess is now instead of somebody, an individual doing it, instead of people, hours, it's a computer that can look through stuff, you know, a thousand times faster, 10,000 times faster, a large set of data. Great use of AI within the context of Raptive. One of the things that we're going to talk about today as we're doing this series with Raptive is this idea of like, okay, that is obvious, that has made the business better. There are a lot of examples for creators of how we can be making our businesses better by using AI. Also, there's a lot of things with AI that are really scary for a creator who has a business. An example is. And maybe we can start by talking about this, I spent maybe like 15 minutes on Sora last night. Like I finally got an invite and got in. It is bonkers. It's quite good. It's really good. And the thing that was weird to me was that that was, you know, 15 minutes, 30 minutes. Now the app is on my phone. There is at this point an equal likelihood that I would open Sora and scroll through. It is all AI. It's not even like randomly come across an Instagram reel and be like, oh, that's AI.

You can't even upload a video that's not AI generated.

It is strictly AI created content. And my time otherwise would have been used in that instance on Instagram or, you know.

It's fun. Isn't it though?

It's fun, but it's also scary. Yeah, I think. And I think what's. And not like fear inducing scary, like actually feel it physically scary. It's scary from a business model perspective.

Yeah.

Because for somebody it's an opportunity. Right. So like that's attention. People are going to learn how to create in a way that gets attention on a platform like Sora and they'll be able to create a business out of it. But for somebody who's not used to that model and would need to like reinvent ourselves in order to build a business on there, that's the part that I think is not even so scary, but it just feels exhausting potentially. So tell, tell me, have you used Sora A little bit. And what has your experience been with it?

So I think Sora is pretty fun. I think that would be sort of my. I don't. One thing that I kind of find with it is that like after about 30 minutes I'm kind of like over it. I don't fall into like those, like, if you've ever had like a, a rough day and you're sitting in your bed at the end of the day and you just like scroll Instagram Reels or TikTok for two hours like Sora. Definitely. Like the application anyways, is not engagement maxing the same way that I feel like an Instagram or a TikTok does. So I'm not sure actually, like that could change in the future.

Yeah.

But I'm not sure actually if there will be. It will be a big deal, but I don't know if there will be many businesses that are built on top of Sora.

Sure.

Where the business, the whole thing is built on top of it, like Instagram influencers and stuff like that. I doubt you're going to have many accounts that are able to turn it into like, I make money with this now. Simply put, it's really expensive computationally for OpenAI to make those Videos.

Yeah.

So it's a great attention seeking moment for them. But the reason they didn't roll it out to everybody is because it would melt their servers and they wouldn't be able to put anything else out there at the time. Right.

Specifically like you put a prompt in and the prom prompt creates a video that is six seconds long or whatever you're saying. That is a super expensive process.

Super expensive, yeah. So in their API, the cost to do 12 seconds of video with the highest end version of Sora, which is not what you get on the app, costs $6. Sure. So for 12 seconds of video. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's insanely expensive for them if they're charging us that much. Because typically like, you know, the AI game is like, get the price pretty much as low as you can get it because your product, you can't really guarantee your product will be dumbassed for very long. And we actually saw Google respond to Sora today with VO 3.1, which is their own video model.

Yeah. But like, point being, things are changing very quickly within the world of video. One of the, one of the threats as a creator is the, as a creator that exists in the current forums that we are creating today is there inevitably will be a shift to where not only will content creation become easier because you can do it from a prompt, but also people will be consuming potentially more AI content. Again, there's opportunities there, but there's also a threat. The other piece is, you know, this idea that like these LLMs are being trained on creator content. And so within the context of like, hey, is AI a friend? You know, is it, is it a foe? Is it a frenemy? What is it? We have all of these different instances. Yeah, let's, let's look at the category of like foe for a little bit. So, you know, not only is it potentially something that is going to be taking attention away, but also it's, it's trained on creator data. Can you talk a little bit about that and how we should be thinking about that within the context of creators who are publishing stuff to the open web.

So I think there's like the business thing, right. And then there's like almost a sort of spiritual part of it, which is a weird thing to come out of my mouth, but I guess that's what we're gonna roll with today. So like the business aspect of it is like you've got sort of two angles to it. The first is like the SGE AIO perplexity ChatGPT search. You know AI powered search tools, right? So like SGE and AIO or Google.

SGE meaning like a search generative experience.

Generative experience. And now it's overviews. They've. Yeah, so same thing.

So you do a search on Google and it like pops up, gives you an answer.

Here you go. Right. And we thought that was going to have like a huge, huge impact. The impact of that's been like kind of muted compared to our expectations. But then you look over at some other stuff like Pinterest, right, where you have a pretty significant flood of content. So this is like the other business side of it, right? Which is that it has already become really easy to make content. Pinterest kind of tends to reward stuff that's newer. So if you can just jam a million articles out there, like p. Pinterest kind of likes that, that moves, you know, fully AI generated stuff towards the top of a lot of Pinterest keywords that are like really important for a flute creator.

Because people are just like crushing AI images, AI text.

The whole thing is like the whole pipeline. They just like click the button.

That stuff isn't super expensive. And so then people are able to do it in mass.

Yes, exactly. I mean, you can. If you don't really care about the quality of the content you're putting out into the world. I mean, you can generate hundreds or tens of thousands of articles, you know, in hours, relatively inexpensively with the imagery and everything associated with it. It's not very hard. So like, those are the, like, those like the, the big faux points that I would say. And then, you know, like when we talk about training, like Ilya Sutzkever, who is like kind of in the early days of OpenAI was one of like the key research members and he's like a big believer in that. Like you can do what these LLMs do under the hood as like next token predictors, right? You can pred. You could predict the next token. You could do almost anything. Is like basically his idea is like if you know the ending of a sentence, right, you necessarily understand all the component parts. Like, we know that like LLMs are just predicting the next token, just like your keyboard and your phone. But it turns out that like when you scale that thing up to like a relatively large size, it does begin to understand what it's actually saying, right? Like we know that's true, right. It's not really like that up for debate. Like it depends on how you can get a really philosophical argument. But if it can predict the next token with a Hundred percent accuracy. And like, we're probably not, probably nowhere close to that with like modern LLMs, but you may not need to get to 100% before it starts to become a problem. Then if you start writing an article in your style, in your voice, and it's trained on all of your content, it should be able to finish that article in your exact voice if it's able to predict the next token. It's almost like a sort of like hyper technological impersonation that these LLMs are going to be able to push out. In fact, one of the things that's really different about GPT5 is they've spent OpenAI in particular spent a lot of time basically hammering its personality to death with reinforcement learning specifically so that it wouldn't do things like write just like you or write just like this person. Right. And there's like a variety of like hypothesis as to why OpenAI would do that. But like, you know, there's sort of like the business things where it's like, okay, it's, it's going to take eyeballs away from us, tension away from us. I'm going to have like these more competitive moments. And then there's the sort of like fear that I have that you could have 100 little robots running around impersonating your exact speaking style all over the Internet and nobody would be able to tell the difference. And I think that we're actually maybe closer to that second thing than a lot of people are ready to realize.

Yeah, that was the thing for me with Sora, which I know is different with this, but maybe not exactly was. They had the. Jake Paul did the partnership with Sora so like you could use his likeness. And it's like, I don't know Jake Paul that well, but when I watched videos of Jake Paul, I'm like, that's Jake Paul. Yeah. And the, it was the first time that I thought, oh, we are now at a point or like the Queen of England, like, yeah, we are now at a point where it's, it's going to be hard for people to distinguish the difference.

I mean, I think the voice cloning technology, which like OpenAI doesn't let their models clone people's voices. You can't go but like 11 labs which another will let you do it. They don't care. The voice cloning models are good enough to where like with, you know, 10 or 12 seconds of audio from this podcast, somebody could go out there, clone both of our voices and have a say pretty much whatever they want. Right. And it would be, you know, if you've used one of the higher quality providers, it's very hard, very hard to tell that it's AI generated right off the bat. So.

Especially if it's not somebody you know super well.

Yeah. So quite soon you will have AI models that aren't from people's. Like, we like to give OpenAI a lot of guff and I think that they deserve it. But there are a lot of people out there that are way less concerned about this kind of stuff than OpenAI is.

Probably people who are incentivized for these to perform well. Like, if you are working on Sora, you're probably not as concerned as somebody who is a content creator who makes their money from videos. Yeah.

When you've got your OpenAI stock and it's $500 billion valuation or wherever they are right now, I think then you don't really care whether or not one particular product at your company. You just got to stay there long enough for the stocks to dust. But I'm thinking more like foreign actors. If you look at the Chinese AI market, there's basically no censorship, there's no limitations on what you're allowed to do with their models. They're normally six months to a year behind the US but they always catch up. So there will be a Chinese version of Sora that will run for a fraction of the cost that will let you completely clone, you know, Bjork and Trey having a podcast from like a 15 second clip and then put it up like it's actually you. And.

And there's no trend. There is not going to be like copyright because it's. Yeah.

It's impossible.

Yeah.

But like really our brains don't have a defense for it. Like if you see an AI generated clip of the two of us talking and it looks just like this.

Yeah.

You don't know, your brain goes. Yeah, that looks real.

Yeah. So as somebody who is a content creator, who has built a business that is based on content, how do you suggest we. How do you suggest, like, we approach this? Like, what is the mindset? What have you seen people talk about? Because it is changing in a really significant way and there are always opportunities which we're going to talk about some of the things that are really great about AI and how they can be used in super helpful ways within our business.

Definitely.

But just looking at the category that is, that maybe feels like there's a threat there. How would you recommend we categorize that as we process it in our brains? Like. Yeah, I mean, what does that look like?

I think that it's like very case by case, which is not super helpful. Right. Like, some creators will find immediate, wonderful uses for AI that are. They feel very good about. Right? So, like, if you're trying to do some basic, like, fact verification that. Where you kind of know, like, what it's supposed to be. Right. You know, and what's wrong, and you could send the AI out as like a second pair of eyes, that's fine. Right. You know, like, that can, that can be something that's really beneficial to you, especially as like, newer models are much less prone to make things up. It'll still happen, but it's nowhere near the one that it used to be at even like six months ago. So, you know, like, that's like, great. But then there's like other sorts of content creation, like in particular food, where it's like, are you just going to generate a recipe on a whole cloth without like even bothering to cook it? No, probably not.

Right?

Like, so, I mean, it's probably not a good idea to do that anyways because, you know, AI doesn't have a tongue and doesn't know what tastes good. And, you know, there's all sorts of issues associated with that. Like, I think that it's kind of a tricky little bit of a minefield where you have to think about your own risk tolerance around it. My viewpoint when it comes to using AI in your work is if I took something that I used AI to help me create and I put that in front of somebody, could I stand behind it and be like, I'm proud of this work, I'm proud of what I've put out into the world. And if you're standing behind a piece of AI generated content, or content where you had the assistance of an AI and you're like, I'm going to put it on my website. And you don't. If we feel like you would be embarrassed if somebody called you out on it, like, maybe don't do that.

Sure. Yeah. It's like a filter that you have as a creator around what is helpful and what isn't. So that would be in the category of like, let's say, okay, you're using it as a brainstorming tool and. Or maybe it's like, hey, there's a. This is completely different industry, completely different company. It was a real estate company working on core values. Um, and the person who did them ran them by me. I took what he had drafted and then said to ChatGPT, hey, here's the intent behind this core value. Here's the current statement around this core value. And I think what I said was just like, can you clean this up? And just to see what it came back with. And it essentially, like, cleaned it up. It just made it easier to read, made it a little bit more simple. Then it was like, hey, we actually want to include something related to, you know, the importance of trustworthiness within it. What would that look like? So it was kind of shaping. And that was one. An example where I sent that back to them and I said, hey, just so you know, like, my refinement process with this was intentionally putting it through ChatGPT to see what it gave me back. But that's. That's kind of in the category of, like, okay, you know, how do we as creators use it positively? How about just like, do you have. I guess my question is like, do you have any predictions on the future of content consumption and that shifting?

I hate being in the predictions game.

Yeah.

Okay, so. But I will. I'm happy to. I'm happy to make one. I just want to have the caveat that I have no idea if it'll be accurate. I will say this. I'm pretty good on predictions about where the technology want. I said we'd have video models that were, like, good enough to do at least some cinematic cinematography work. And this year, like, I feel pretty good about that one. I didn't feel that great about it, like, two months ago, but I feel pretty good about it now. Like, the first useful agents, I was like, I think we're going to get those this year. Like, if you know anything about, like, the coding agents that have come around, those have become, like, incredibly valuable and useful.

Yeah.

As for, like, where content consumption is going, I don't think that they have a plan, these AI companies, like, at all for, like, how content consumption is going to work.

Yeah.

In a world where you can just flood the Internet with not just, like, content, but, like, content that has been highly optimized for aesthetic, beauty, interestingness, capturing your attention. I mean, like, you think that Instagram Reels and TikToks are bad for you. You ain't seen nothing yet. It's like, I mean, you have sort of this approach from Facebook, which is like, quite literally, we're going to train the AI to make Facebook more addictive.

Yeah.

So, like, that seems bad, right? It seems like there's not a whole lot we could do about it, though. So, like, it's not that productive to talk about. And then you have on the Other end of the spectrum, OpenAI who's like, we are going to release this thing and we're going to try to kind of make it like not that engaging because we're worried about what might happen if it's too engaging. And you know, folks like anthropic over here on the side, which are like the Claude people and they're just not even interested in this kind of like social media building AI around content creation at all. They're just like, I need more tokens to make more code because that's my primary client. Right. So like it's, they don't have a plan and like until, until they sort of like lay out what they think the future will be like then I think you're talking about taking these AI generated systems. Right. Like these AI generated, putting them into the existing engagement algorithms is what we have like in the near term. Right. So you're, if you've scrolled Instagram reels, I'm sure you've seen a bunch of videos at this point with the SORA watermark bouncing around, right?

Yeah.

So the great thing about that is like there is a Sora watermark bouncing around. So like you can kind of tell, Right. The question is, are people going to start having a preference for that content?

Yeah.

And like, what does that mean for content creators if, like the market, if the market comes out here and says, we want AI generated content, that is what makes us happy. That's capitalism, baby. We're going to have to adapt, we're going to have to change. Right now all the evidence points to there's a slight favoritism towards human content, but it's actually quite narrow. It's quite narrow and a lot of the times you have to tell them which is which first.

Sure.

Soon they will not know in order.

Yeah, yeah. And soon you won't know. And I think that's the piece that is really fascinating to me and to your point, like, if what we start to see is that AI created content is more engaging on these platforms, then these platforms are probably going to favor AI generated content. And it's a little bit morbid. But I think of this, the first, the guy who like learned how to jailbreak an iPhone. I don't remember what his name is. George Hot.

George Hotz.

Okay. Yeah. I was listening to an interview that he was doing and this was like four or five years ago. This was before I knew about, you know, OpenAI or any of these platforms. He had this prediction that he said, I think there's going to Be a time when these algorithms are going to get so good and these algorithms will be able to create their own content. The thing that changes from the algorithms today we talk about algorithms as being like, gosh, algorithms are so good and they keep us addicted. But the one thing they don't have today is the ability to create content.

Yeah.

Like they have to use other people's content in order to create a sticky algorithm. But just imagine if you had a algorithm that not only could optimize for what content to show you, but then could also create the content for you.

That's my nightmare scenario. Like, people worried about, like, the meteor is going to hit the earth. I am worried about everybody's brain being vacuumed up by opening TikTok.

And it was kind of one of these, like, wall E moments where it's like everybody has those screens and they're just floating around. His prediction was they, the algorithms will get so good that, like, you will start to look at a phone and you won't be able to look away.

Yeah. And you just die of starvation. Yeah. That's like one of the nightmare scenarios. Like you, you optimize the AI's ability to entertain you so much that, like, it overrides the brain. It produces so much dopamine that overrides all of your brain's other, like, survival functions. Basically accidentally hack yourself. You ever seen like the Dark Mirror episode? Yeah, the most recent season where it's like he sticks the thing up against the wall. Like we're treading into science fiction territory too much. But like.

Right, But I think the, the point that it comes back to is that the world of content creation as a business is inevitably changing. And so if your business is content creation, that means you have a lot of questions that are probably floating around right now. What I would say, as somebody who creates content within the context of Food Blogger Pro, it's the podcast courses, you know, forum conversations within the context of Pinch of Yum. It's food and recipe content. I would say the question for us then becomes is, what does that mean for our business? And I think I'm going to put something on the table and would love to hear what you have to say about it. The options really are do nothing and continue to see how that plays out. There will always be some place for people who are creating content, food related content, to show up to serve people. And maybe the business actually looks really similar today in five years than it does today. I don't know. I kind of doubt it. So that's one Scenario. Another scenario is you go super deep on AI. You say, I'm gonna become an AI forward creator. And that's what your focus is like. You are becoming an expert on AI tools. You're creating AI content. That's your kind of specialty and expertise. I would say for people who listen to this podcast, probably doesn't make sense, but there will. I think there will be those people who create really entertaining content, that it is somehow a business for them. I don't know what that looks like yet, but I think that will exist. The third piece is this kind of hybrid pie. How do you use and leverage these tools in a way that allows you to do what you're trying to do better? And I think it's you. You have to be a little bit indifferent as to how you get there. The purpose just has to be, what am I trying to do and how do I do that as best as possible for an audience of people? And I think that's the one that's most fascinating to me is just how do we. What's our mission? What's our goal? What are we trying to do? What are the tools that we have at our disposal to do that and how do we do that as best as possible? That's the one that I think is most interesting to me. I'd be curious your response to that. And then we can dive deeper into it.

So I'll give you an example and we'll posit a hypothetical workflow. This would require a little bit of work to pull together, but this is within the realm of possibilities. The technology exists today. You just might have to actually spend a little bit of time writing some software. But let's imagine for a second you're creating a new recipe with fenching yam. Instead of going through the process of taking a bunch of notes in your recipe, you just kind of have a scratch pad that you've written down the ingredients on, and you're just going to narrate to a phone while you do the recipe. And then it takes that narration and it transforms it into an article written in your style, right? And you take a couple of photos, and then you touch those photos up in Photoshop or whatever your process is, and then you use an AI filter to go through them. That makes them more appealing looking. And then let's say maybe you don't do video, but you'd like to do some animated gifs of the food being picked up and eaten or whatever the case may be, but process for taking those pictures. Kind of the food's not very appetizing by the end of it. So you kind of maybe don't have a chance to actually take any images or any video of people eating and enjoying it. So what if you took a picture of that food, you'd plop it into something like Sora or VO3 and you just AI generate somebody eating and enjoying the food. There are different levels of tolerance that people will have to allowing AI to involve itself in each stuff. Right. So like the most aggressive right. Is like you're taking the dictated notes and then like it is like you have some bespoke, you know, fine tuned model that just like writes the whole article and then you're just like basically placing it somewhere. I think that's maybe like a little too extreme for most people right now. Even if you felt like this AI actually does write like me, it does represent me in some way.

Right?

Like even if you feel that way, I think that that's like a bridge too far for most people. And I understand that. But like some of this other stuff, like I could take a picture and I could like clean it up with AI as opposed to having to learn Photoshop. Like that's really doable. Now like I. If you haven't played with Gemini 2.5 flash image, also known as Nano Banana, play with it. It's super fun. And you can just like edit up.

A photo image tool.

Yeah. In like two seconds. Like you can just like completely swap the material of the bowl but while preserving everything else in the image. It's great, super fun to play with. And then like if you turn that into like a moving video that played at the top of your channel, I think that's probably okay too. I think most people would be like, oh, that's a nice add on. It's another way to grab attention and eyeballs. Look, there's some video content that's associated with this, even if I'm not a big video producer, can help you branch out into maybe some areas that you haven't done before. Can help with velocity a little bit. But I don't think that we're yet at the point to where it's going to be this thing where everything is handed over to the AI. You're going to have to pick your pieces of that beginning to end flow that you feel comfortable with and focus there and then move your way up that ladder of comfort.

That's great. I love the idea of having specific examples that you're sharing and I think the core piece that's important within what you just Talked about was, like, the recipe is still something. We're talking about the world of food. Obviously this is different as you get into other content categories. Yeah, but like, the recipe is still something that you are in the kitchen and you are developing. That is like the core component of, like, what is the important piece of a recipe post is the recipe itself. Everything around that is how do you help people have the most success in creating that recipe? And if you can have an image that helps because suddenly there's ingredients information on it, or it's explaining a step on how to do a step that's kind of hard. All of that can be additive. And if an AI tool allows you to get there quicker to create something that is additive, that will increase the success, like, great, all the better. Another thing that I think about is, like, what are the things that you are currently outsourcing to another human to do that you aren't doing? And would there be an opportunity instead to outsource that same thing? If you're trying to get from point A to point B, would there be an opportunity for some tool to do it instead of a human to do it? One of the ways that you're starting to see that manifest itself is within the writing. I'm curious to know what, how, and this maybe isn't your department, but like, for Raptive, because I know Raptive is outspoken around like, hey, we don't want like a bunch of AI slop sites are really intentional to make sure it's like human forward content. Where is that line?

And I know there is one that is not my department. You're going to want to talk to Jasmine. She's the person in charge of policy. I would say this. I mean, this is not Raptor's opinion. My opinion is that if you can stand behind it a piece of content that you could create and you feel comfortable and confident about it, then that's fantastic. However you got there is cool with us. What Radcliffe doesn't want to see is like, hey, I generated 10,000 new articles today. There's no way that a human being read all of this. And I posted it all in one day. And I'm spamming the Google results. Like, absolutely not. We don't want to see that.

That makes sense. And so for you, as an artistic. I had the same conversation with a friend who's a musician. I'm like, what do you think of this idea that I could go to one of these sites and say, write a folk song about traveling to Lake Superior in Minnesota in the fall and seeing the leafs and it's like, oh, it can do that really quick. And he was like, honestly, I don't love it. I was like, okay, that makes sense. He said, but AI has been really cool for sampling certain sounds that I want to put into a song. And I feel like that's a little bit of what we're getting at right now, which is like there are ways that you can build component parts, but it's different than building the entire thing. And I've seen a handful of these sites. I can think of like three or four on one day on Pinterest. And I looked at the site map and it's like these were all published on June 11th. All 700 of these posts were published on June 11th of 2025.

There are out of the box tools that you can get on GitHub that will just do this.

And it just like populates the site.

And so it just populates the site and hosts it and everything. You just gotta go slap your credit card in or whatever. There's like, there's like people out there that will do it for you. So I mean like, I think a portion of this is like very like the sort of like AI spammers, like sort of like these sort of technical people who are like, I saw on X.com that I can make a quick buck doing this. I'm gonna take a swing at it. I don't think they stick around super long. I think the people that are just sort of pers are people who are maybe not that technical, but understand the game of running a website.

Yes.

And they are using third party services. Like I think I actually won't say the name of it, but there's one that I know that's out there that allows you to do stuff like this.

Like spin up a site.

Yeah, spin up a site and then like it gets blacklisted from Pinterest or whatever. And like, you know, who cares? Because you could spin up three more and if they, if they all make $10, you know, and you're only spending two bucks to make them, that's an A great. That's a 5x profit margin. I think almost anybody would take that.

Yeah. And I think the thing that's interesting for me is like, okay, that's inevitable, like what you can try and figure out, like how do you combat it? But it's like, ah, genie's out of the bottle, like Pandora's box. There's no way to combat it. So then what do you do as a business owner and I think the answer is you differentiate. Like how do you show up in a way that is different, that is unique, that's novel. It's a little bit of like what the past 15 years have been for us. Yeah. You have to continually find a way to show up that is novel and unique. Considering the current reality of the landscape, I. I'm curious to know like ways that you have seen that happen potentially. Like, how can we show up and be novel? And part of it might just be like leaning into our own story, our own humanity.

Yeah, I mean, I. So I think that. But the way that many of our top creators are differentiate themselves is like they have a personal brand. It's not just like this is website.com and we do recipes. It's like, you know, we are a pinch of yum and we are these two people and we do recipes. Right. There's like more to it than that. Like they put a little bit more of themselves in it. So like from that perspective, like the perspective of like the human perspective, what people actually want to read is they want to read stuff that's written by a person or at least that's had like a lot of care put into it by a human being at a minimum. But I think that from a business perspective, the specific tactics that I can tell you to do, like I want to appear on Pinterest more. I think we're all kind of figuring that out together right now. Right. You know, we've got stuff I can't get into a ton of details about, but like, we're definitely looking at like how do we get raptive creators back at the top of interest? Like we used to be, you know, we're interested in sort of like how do we if AI. So search results have grown from ChatGPT in like the last year by 800%. How do we make sure that you guys show up in the search results? Right? Like, yeah, and a lot of it comes down to kind of simple stuff, at least initially. Make sure your site is really well structured and just stuff that you've been told to do forever.

Make sure this practice, it's website hygiene.

A lot of it's really basic stuff. But I think we're going to probably over the next six to 12 months start to learn some more interesting stuff. I will say I don't think that there's anybody on our side anyways that is actually trying to do any real original research around this. And a lot of the original research that's been done around the AI's impact on the Internet has been not very good. You'll hear of Generative Engine Optimization, which you have people hold up as if a lot of SEO people will say this is the future. And then when you actually go into.

That, how do you show up in.

In. In generative chatgpt.

Yeah, as a link when somebody's searching for like, best, you know, snickerdoodle cookie recipe.

Yeah, exactly. Right. So it, it's super funny that that is like, I'm like, I've seen. I see it everywhere and I. Every time I see it, like my eyes roll almost completely out of my head. That paper was written like late 2023, early 2024. Like it tests like GPT 3.5. Any advice it's giving you is correct only by accident.

It might be correct, but it's just by chance that it still applies.

Yes. Because you're talking about the Gulf between a GPT 3.5 and GPT 5 as far as its ability to accurately find information on the Internet is an ocean.

Well, even within. So for those who aren't familiar. And there's the releases of different ChatGPT versions, 3.5 was the very first one ever released.

Yeah.

So that was the one people were used to. I think even at that point it was like it had data up to like September of 2021 or something.

They can make it read 2022, but it wasn't much more than that.

Like, you couldn't query something that was.

Like, yeah, Internet access at the time.

And you know, and the current version that most people would be using when they're just using ChatGPT would be 5.0. So it's these different releases. Similar idea to like you get an iPhone and you upgrade it to the next os. It's like a new version that does things differently. And so your point is the paper that people often reference around geo, generative experience optimization versus SEO, which would be like the 10 blue links is on an outdated piece of information. And so people don't. Your point is people don't really know how to show up within these interfaces yet.

We have some ideas, but like, as far as, like here is like our 100% bulletproof. Like we could publish it in an academic journal. Evidence with. I think that a lot of that basic research has been hard to do because of the exact. This is like, so the people who wrote the GEO people had all the best intentions. Like the people who actually publish it. Like all the best intentions in the world. But there's never been Geo2. Like they don't have Geo2 where it's like, now let's look at the models as they are today, which could give totally different advice. Right.

And.

And because there's not that much out there about what can we do to show up in AI search results. A lot of the conversation has been based around this paper and a lot of hoodoo, for better lack of a word, just wish thinking.

Yeah, that makes sense. And point being, it's hard to know if you are trying to optimize to show up in these chat interfaces. You don't know if it's possible or not. So one of the things to kind of go back to this idea of like, so what do we do as creators? It's leaning into the things that differentiate ourselves. Personal brand. One of the things that I think about is speaking very broadly, the more transactional your content is, the easier it is to replace. And so how long do you boil an egg? Like, how long does chicken, raw chicken last for? Like, you know, like, yeah, if you've.

Been hit on how long can I keep chicken in my freezer for the last 10 years, it may be time to think about updating that article totally.

And but the more that you become somebody that people want to follow along with, and I think that would be even like an interesting prompt for ourselves to think about, like, who, who do I, who, who am I interested in checking in on? Who am I interested in following? Who am I interested in hearing from? Chances are, part of that is they're creating a thing. It might be transactional, but part of it is probably because you want to follow that person. You have a curiosity around. You know, in our world right now we're doing a kitchen edition, a kitchen remodel. That's not something we're going to rank for on Google, but it is something that I think people are interested in following along with. And that's story like, that's, you know, there's a human component to that where we're naturally curious about that type of stuff. And so what feels like it's kind of difficult right now as a creator, is that we're walking this line between what has worked, which is like, it.

Continues to work at a lot of.

Times and continues to work totally, which is like, you create a piece of content, it ranks, people go to it because they use a keyword or they find it on Pinterest. And that is generally transactional. Like, you created a thing, you rank for it, people discover it, but it feels like less and less that's going to happen. And more and more people will go to these LLMs, ChatGPT, Claude, even like a generative experience or like a AI overview within Google. The thing is, we just don't know how quickly that will happen and to what degree that will happen. And so we're kind of in this like middle ground where we're seeing it kind of happen a little bit, but not to the point where it's like, okay, we need to completely rebuild this.

So, you know, there's been a lot of like one of the. There's a couple of things that have been sort of holding back LLMs from like being the dominant search paradigm. Like the first thing that has hold them back is this idea of like context rot. And basically this was originally called like the lost in the middle problem. That it's like they've came up with a better term that gives like the idea of a little bit more easily, which is context rot, which is basically when you're typing to a model, like you put the words in and the model isn't reading the words. The model is reading a string of numbers that represent tokens in latent space, which you don't need to know what any of that means, but what you.

Need to know is predictive around.

Exactly. So it translates those into words, splits them up in a specific way. So it's more efficient for it to read. Right. So you only have a certain number of those splits that you're allowed to have, and those are called tokens. As you add more tokens to your prompt. Right. The less the model is able to accurately remember what the prior token was because it's not able to accurately recall it from its attention mechanism. So as a mechanism for what parts of the sentence are actually important. So like the dog ran to the beach, dog ran, beach. That's all the AI probably actually cares about.

Right.

All those words in between that link things together, it can kind of guess that those are probably there. So like with search, you go and you put in your query. Well, I can't just take your query. That's not the only tokens that go in. It also has to go and grab token, go and look at every website that might be relevant to your query. So you have to have some system to prioritize that. And then it has to go and pull all that information in. It has to like read all that information and then it has to take the actual pieces of information from those sites that would answer your question and construct an answer that is then given to you as the end user. The problem was if it makes any mistake during that whole process where it's like doing a lot of different. There's a lot of points of failure you can get back the famous, you know, like, here's how much glue you should put on your cheese pizza from AI overviews. Right? And basically the context rot problem is like pretty close to solved. So like that was like a big thing that's holding it back. So like the other thing that's holding it back right, from being more relevant is like the speed and cost right now it's like just more expensive than giving you 10 blue links. It's not that much more expensive anymore. But especially like, you know, a year ago when we first all started thinking about that, it was really expensive.

And this is expensive for the context within the company itself. OpenAI vs Google Expensive for Google.

So they got to make money somehow. They can't just burn money all the time.

And so you're saying there would be a disincentive for them to lean too heavily into this because of the cost, Right?

I would say disincentive like Google, if anybody can burn money, it's them. But if they don't eventually get to a point to where they've reduced the cost significantly, they will stop doing it because it won't make them any money. It doesn't matter how brilliantly you present the information to somebody. If it costs you more money to do that brilliant presentation then it would if you just left things as they were and people Google searched, then you're cooked.

Yep.

I think that the first thing, the context route is pretty much solved. You have to use like there's like one model where it's solved, but like it's proven not OpenAI's model GPT5, if you're using the thinking mode, so there's like three settings for it. You have GPT5 Auto, which just picks a model and then gives you an answer. And then you have GPT5 thinking, which always uses the highest tier GPT5 model, except for not the pro tier, which.

Is like, takes longer, but it does a better job thinking through it.

Right. So it basically over its context window is very close to 100% accurate. It will still make mistakes, but the frequency of those mistakes is very rapidly approaching like 1% of the time. And I imagine a year from now it will be well under 1% of the time that it makes mistakes. It's slow, so that's a problem against it. Right. So it also needs to provide the answer quickly. But we know that Google has Like pretty quick models already. If OpenAI has figured out the context route problem, Google will figure it out. And the pricing of these models collapses every year. It's genuinely hilarious when you see how good the existing models are versus how much they cost. And then you go look at these outrageously expensive models from three, four, five months ago and you're like, this is so much better for half the price. So I think that you can expect the AI powered search stuff, long story short, is going to impact us and soon because it's going to be very good relatively soon.

That makes sense. So those two specific problems will be solved. Number one, the internal costs or number, I'll do them in order. Number one, the ability to accurately interpret the prompt. Is it within the context of the prompt that you're giving it?

Yeah, you can sort of think of it this way. Like I want you to imagine for a second, I give you 10 website articles and you have to remember every single detail from all 10 of those articles correctly. Other words, you get an electric shock. Would you be able to do that?

No.

And like, neither can the AI, but they're getting very close to where like they, it will be able to do that like relatively soon. Yeah, I would say, I would argue GPT5 can already do this. Like you can go load in 10 articles into its context window, even on your ChatGPT. Keep like for, you know, plus plan or whatever. Right. Like you just load them all in, ask a question. It's probably going to get it right more often than not.

Yep. And, and I've done that even with PDFs. Like, okay, yeah, please thoroughly review. You know, you give it prompts to like, cause it to tip into thinking mode if you don't manually select it. Thoroughly review these documents and then you can like ask prompt, you know, prompt it based on those documents. So that, that's getting better. That makes sense. Cost is going down. Your point within that is like, like we've kind of been in this in between of like, when does this really impact us in what significant way? And what you're saying is it requires some of these things to potentially get to that point where it does tip over. People start to use it a little bit more.

Yeah, because I mean, you have to have the customer trusts that whatever the AI is telling it is probably correct. If they, if you, the first time you get a wrong answer from a robot, you're going to be like, it's so funny because I can give you a wrong answer five times during this podcast and nobody you're human, not a big deal. AI gets it wrong. Once, like we're all up in arms, it has to be perfect. So they have to get pretty close, I think. And I think Google, if they're not there, it will be soon. I would imagine we will know within the next eight days.

Yeah, that makes sense. And so even more so as your information that you're creating, if it is transactional information, that is a vulnerability within the context of LLMs. And so, you know, as we talk about this idea of being human or leaning into story, one of the reasons why is if your business is content, content creation and it was purely transactional before, that's going to be a huge vulnerability. But the more that you can tell your story, that you can have a personal brand, that people are following you, they aren't just getting information, the better. I think that's the general point. As we move into this, like next decade of being creators, that's going to be something that I think will ring true, especially within the context of search, which for this industry is especially important. Different for fashion, like, fashion is like visual. You want to see people wearing clothes, like, interacting.

There's still the ability to like, how much longer though.

Yeah. And it's all vulnerable.

So, like, if you, if that image editor I was telling you about, you can go take a picture from like Amazon.com of address, you can take a picture of your wife and you can say, put the woman in the dress.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen some of these come together.

Instantly and you can see exactly what you would look like in this dress, or at least what it thinks you'd look like. So, like, you know, how much longer are is it going to be before like, fashion starts to get, like, pretty majorly disrupted? I mean, like, if you even look at Pinterest right now, like, so much of like, what's on Pinterest is like, is AI generated. AI generated fake clothes that don't exist.

Yep, yep. And then you order them and they take two weeks to get shipped over and they're like seven sizes too small. Perfect. Yeah.

A plus.

Yeah. That's speaking from experience. Let's talk about some of the uses of the tools that we can be thinking about as creators. And let's start with ChatGPT. I've used both projects and custom GPTs. Can you talk about the difference between a project and a custom GPT?

Oh, I would say like a project's a way of sort of organizing a bunch of different chats or a bunch of different documents that you're going to be coming back to on like a pretty regular basis that's kind of just for you, right? Like, if it's, you know, just you that's interested in this stuff, then like projects are great because they're really easy to manage and like you just click on them and you go. Right. It definitely feels like of the two features, it's the one that OpenAI wants to push a little bit more and definitely gets updates a little bit more frequently. Custom GPTs are like, if you have like a team of like six or seven people and you're like, I have this great prompt that helps me do this one thing and I want to make sure that everybody else is using this great prompt. You can kind of set up a custom GPT super quickly, throw those instructions in the configuration, you know, test it a few times to make sure it's doing what you want it to do and then you can quickly share it with all the members of your team. And you know, they all have that exact prompt set up exactly the way you want with all the contextual information that you need. So it's super great for that. We have one at Raptive that helps like rewrite stuff and the raptive corporate communication style that are our comms officer Brent came up with and fantastic.

So it looks through and it's like if raptive isn't capitalized, then it's like capitalized raptive or like if there's a word, if you use influencer, it might say, hey, we use creator internally.

Exactly.

Right? Yeah, yeah. And so that would be for anybody who works with a team, you want to have them all have access to that projects would be something more internal. An example of a project I have is I have this idea of like doing a family road trip where we go to like national parks. And so it's like I'm kind of brainstorming within that project. One of the things that I've done and I'd be interested if you have some use cases of either custom GPTs or projects that creators could use is I've created one for sponsored content, like to help me quickly analyze and come up with some ideas for not like the actual what this branded partnership will be, but just to help get quicker to a conversation that I've had with a brand and a conversation that I've had with Lindsay and then how we work with brands to say like, here's what the potential pairing of those could be and if I have like data for all of those. This is, this is a great video Moment. This is a cat cameo for you. I love this. You need to do a quick explanation of who your cat is.

This is Wally. He has swimmer syndrome, so his back legs aren't very good. So he likes to hang on your shoulder and then you pick up, hold his legs up for him.

It's the ultimate AI and cats, this could not get more Internet based than.

Yeah, right. If overly online was one picture.

So anyways, that's one of the ways that we're using it. I remember a conversation that I had with my friend Alex from a couple cooks. He talked about building one kind of similar to the comms example that you talked about, which reviews a recipe to make sure. Okay, are we talking about the ingredient in the same, like in the same place as instructions? So like, let's say the ingredient was the last one listed, but then it's the first thing in the instructions. Okay, that should probably be looked at. But do you have other examples for ChatGPT, like projects or custom GPTs that we could be thinking about?

It's pretty good with SEO advice, actually, like shockingly quite good with SEO advice. And obviously SEO is kind of always in flux and it doesn't know what it doesn't know. So you should just bring your own knowledge to the table. Of course, with anything around this. But I found that it's pretty decent, especially if you can give it a little feedback and guidance to go the direction you want it to go. I think generally speaking though, right now a lot of the best use cases are allowed. Taking huge swaths of unstructured information and pulling structure out of it, which is kind of hard to do from ChatGPT. I mean, unless you really are patient, you have a lot of free time.

Hard to do in what way?

So like you, I mean, the way that you would want to do it is like you'd want to orchestrate it like programmatically via an API. Right? Like you'd want to like code to do it. Whereas if you try to do it through ChatGPT, you're like, all right, let me grab like this recipe and this recipe and this recipe and we'll do these three and then we'll do the next three in another chat window. And you know, yeah, there's a lot of pretty manual. It's pretty manual, right? And then you're like, am I actually saving time at this point or actually gaining that much? I think that a lot of the stuff when it comes to custom GPTs that is actually super useful inside of ChatGPT is stuff where it's like pretty bespoke to what you're doing. The way that I sort of look at it is this. If you're going to ChatGPT and you're writing a prompt to do something more than like three times in a month, you should probably be making a custom GPT for it so that you can save that time of writing that prompt.

Yeah.

And if you're uploading the same six files right. Every time, put that in a project. You should probably throw that in a project so that you can just ask questions about those files. Like, it's more about time savings rather than like custom GPTs give you any sort of superpower or like all that much more powerful than just like writing your question in a prompt. It's about like, if I execute this thing 5,000 times a month. Right. Like I want to make sure that I don't have to go and write the whole prompt to do it.

Or my team does.

Or my team does. Right.

Yeah. That's great.

It's also a good way of diffusing knowledge. Like if you have somebody who's like really good, good with these tools in your organization, like, and they have like a bunch of great custom GPTs that help them do stuff that other people in your organization could benefit from, they can share that stuff with those people and then they can kind of like drift off of this one individual's AI skills and you don't have to worry about everybody developing a bunch of great AI skills. Right. Because like this one person's going to.

Kind of like carry the tool that then other people can use simply by prompting. Yep.

Yeah. I mean, we have hundreds of custom GPTs are wrapped up, hundreds, maybe thousands.

Like that people have created for their teams for. You know, there might be three people that are working on a proposal document and it's like, how do you create a custom GPT to like accelerate that process or.

Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean there's a lot of just like double checking work. I mean, just getting a second pair of eyes on stuff can be like enormously advantageous.

Yeah.

And AI is pretty good at offering good suggestions and advice and feedback. Just custom GPTs to review a specific kind of document that you did everything right is an enormous time saver. But I think it's hard to just be like, you use custom GPTs for this, but it's like, I mean, you can kind of use it for whatever you want. So maybe that's not super helpful. No, that's great.

I think the challenge for anybody listening, if there's a takeaway. It would be to just go in and create one. Like, that's what it was for me. I heard people talking about it, I heard conversations around it, but it wasn't until I went and created one where I was like, oh, cool. Like, I can see how this would be really helpful, and I can see some other instances where I would probably use this. But it wasn't until I actually did it that was the hard part, is just, like, going in and doing it.

Getting in there and doing it. I mean, that's something I'm learning for everybody, I feel, right now. I mean, and as far as technologies come, like, new technology, like, this isn't the cloud. You don't have to have a cloud engineer to, like, get in there and get value out of it, you know? Like, this is one of the most approachable new pieces of technology. If you can construct a sentence in almost any language on Earth, you can get value out of these models.

Yeah.

So it's really just like, get in there and, like, get your feet wet. And I think that is probably like, the hardest hurdle to overcome. I think once people do a. A lot of the fear goes away because, like, you see. You start to see the brittleness a little bit. Like, there are. These models have weaknesses. The Terminator is not around the corner. Probably.

Yeah.

Like, probably.

I noticed that you weren't 100% definitive with that. Probably.

Yeah, well, you know, it's one of those things where, like, not to get too far off track, though. I mean, we are. I guess we're getting off track. Time. It's now, right?

Yeah. We can go there. If you have time, we can go there.

Yeah, absolutely. I blocked out extra time before and after. So these conversations always go long. Whatever the person wants to do. If they want to do an hour, it's like, all right, let's block an hour. So, you know, like. Like, I think that there is a compelling case to be made that what a lot of these AI CEOs, like, utopian scenario occurs could happen.

Sure. Right. Like. Like, AI that is all knowing, essentially.

Yeah. Yeah. Basically, you create, like, a caretaker robot that takes care of the entire human race and keeps us from smacking each other in the head with fly swatters or whatever. Right. Like, I feel like that's. Sure, why not? I also feel like, in the same breath, if you're a listener of the Ezra Klein show, people like Eliza Yudkowski are not totally crazy.

A little bit of background. Explain.

Yes. So Elizar Yudkowski is probably. He's been doing this since 2003 is the AI doomer. If you're looking for somebody to give you nightmare to keep you up at Nightmare Fuel, a great resource for that.

Number one provider of nightmare fuel.

Yeah. His most recent book that he published, which he was promoting on this podcast to listen to, was if anyone builds it, everyone dies. So that gives you the idea sort of where he is. I would say that I am not anywhere near as pessimistic about the technology as he is.

Isn't there a site where it lists every expert's opinion on AI opinion on when they think the end of the world will be?

Oh, yeah, the probability of doom. P. Doom. Right. Which like. Like you start to hear. Some people are like, I listen to, and they're like, well below 1% as of right now. And then you have Eliza Lenkowski where he's like, it is 100% certain we will all die if we continue pursuing this technology. But, like, the median sort of response I see from people is like between 15 and 20%, which is crazy high. If I told you there was a 15 or 20% chance that if you turned on your computer today that it was going to explode and kill you, you'd wait till tomorrow.

Right. And that's what a lot of these people are saying.

Yeah, a lot of them. They're essentially saying, one day you'll turn on the computer and it will kill you.

Yeah.

And they're still turning the computer on, which is like a kind of insane thing, if you believe that's true. Now, like, there is some evidence that, like, we will skedaddle into, like, science fiction fantasy land. Right. Like, there's some, like. I wouldn't say the evidence is incontrovertible or overwhelming, but GPT5Pro solves about 20% of the questions correctly on the Epoch AI Frontier Mathematics benchmark. Sure. Which are these?

Highest of the high.

Yeah. It would take a PhD to solve even a single problem. A PhD in mathematics working as a tangent professor. About an entire day. Sure. So getting 20% of these questions correct means that, like, functionally for the average person, most language models at this point that are released by the top three labs, which is anthropic. Google OpenAI are better at math than you. They just are. So it's already mastered this critically important domain for scientific advancement. But not only that. We've seen with one of Google's systems called Alpha Evolve, it has come up with original new algorithms that saved Google 2%, I think, on their global compute costs, which for Google, that's like an enormous sum of money. And like the AI basically did this by like throwing spaghetti up against the wall until something eventually stuck. But like, that's evidence that it could produce a new piece of novel information that's outside of its training distribution and wasn't in the training data, right? So like sort of this argument that like, oh, it's just regurgitating stuff, like it's not capable of like real creativity, like maybe, but like also. And like, maybe this is just luck, right? Like you just like you basically rolled the random number generator until you found a better way to do matrix multiplication, which is what they did. But maybe it's not and maybe it's figuring it out. Yeah, yeah. It actually may be getting to a point to where like language models start becoming more and more significant. And when you talk to professional mathematicians, right, and like, you know, Terrence Tao is like probably the most, most well cited example and he's considered by a lot of people to be the smartest person in the world. They're using these models to help them do high level research in mathematics. So could we get to a point to where these models are so good at writing code and doing math that largely what the AI researchers are doing is standing over the shoulder of these models and double checking their work every once in a while? Maybe. I mean, like, it seems well within the realm of like things that could.

Happen, especially when you pull it out 20 years.

I mean, I think that most people when they're talking about this are not. If you say within 20 years, if you're going to pull it out that far, almost certainly we will get there by accident within 20 years. Even if you didn't have like, just the amount of investment in data centers and energy and the resources needed to build these like, more complex AI systems is enough to where, like we should just get there by accident with 20 years, I'm talking like five, right? You know, like, what are the odds of this happening within the next five years? I think that's where like most of the industry's mind is. And definitely when you're looking at the valuation of these AI companies, you do not value a company with 700 employees like OpenAI at $500 billion, unless you think that what they are going to achieve, the thing they say they are going to achieve, that makes sense. So like, you have all of that in one corner. This is like, this is my optimistic case for, like, why we will achieve a generally intelligent system at some point in the relatively near term. My pessimistic Case I think is much more drawn from a worldview where you don't think about the technology very much and you just kind of think about what these actors are doing. If you're trying to build a self improving artificial intelligence system that will be smarter than any person, you probably don't waste money on AI. TikTok.

Sure. Yeah, right, yeah.

If you are trying to build an artificial intelligence system that is smarter than any human, you probably don't focus on how well it can write. Claude 4.5 seems pretty tuned to be a great communicator and writer, but if you really believed that this was possible, all you would care about is math and code. Math and code, math and code, math and code, math and code. That's all you'd care about. Why do we have video models, why do we have audio models? Why are all these, if you really think you've got a pathway there, you would behave differently than these companies are behaving.

Your, your point is such that like if somebody's worried about these becoming all knowing and you know, getting to the point where they can communicate better than us and like one of the indicators would be the focus for these companies and what you're saying is like if they Release Sora Like TikTok AI, like you said, that maybe is an indicator that they're not putting all their resources towards.

They're not putting all their eggs in the AGI basket, that's for sure. I think that OpenAI will be around 10 years from now.

Right.

Regardless of whether or not they have AGI within the next five, I think.

They'Ll still be around because Artificial general intelligence, right? Yes.

Even if they don't achieve that, I think they'll still be around, but that's largely because I'd see them putting eggs in other baskets. And I think that like this is a little bit of, like a little bit of OpenAI's behavior in particular has been hedging. Yeah, right, A little bit.

Because your point is like as a company, if you did think that you could create AGI, you'd want to be the first one to do it. You'd want to do it as quickly as possible. Most important thing, because of how valuable that would be for a company and you probably wouldn't be spending time like partnering with Jake Paul.

So like just take it from a purely cynical perspective, if you have a machine that is smarter than any person, what is the number one determinative value of how powerful military is on this planet right now? It's their technological prowess.

Yeah. Sure, yeah. How smart?

It's not how many soldiers you have. The US military is not the most powerful military in the world because they have the most soldiers. It's because we have 11 aircraft carriers that are like powered by nuclear reactors that nobody else knows how to make. So if you take it from a purely cynical perspective, I mean, if you put this model, this supposed model that they say they're going for in somebody's hands, that person becomes like one of the most powerful, influential people on the planet overnight. Why would you bother with this stuff? That's what you think you're headed towards?

Yeah. Interesting.

So that's sort of like my real politic answer as to why I think that AGI is probably not right around the corner. But I also think that in order to have a drastically different world, you do not need to get anywhere close to a general intelligence. You just have to have an intelligence that is superhuman in a certain few key categories. Whether that's drawing connections in data or whether that is drug discovery. Think about with AlphaFold, which is, if you're not familiar with that, that's one of Google's, you know, sort of like AI things that they were working on way before language models became their primary focus, which that was able to discover all folded proteins. Like they just like solved the protein folding problem. They've discovered every protein that's underneath there and it's going to like drastically accelerate the field of biology, but it is useless for anything except that. But like, you know, it's going to change drug discovery completely. Like you will probably have like endozynthic level discovery in drugs every year for the rest of our lives.

Yeah. Because of like a tool that is able to do it with.

Yeah. Super quickly. Right. Like just basically it did a billion years of PhD level protein folding work in like a year.

Yeah.

So it's like completely upended the field of like life sciences and biology and. And yeah, go ahead.

I think the interesting thing within that is like all of these, you know, this is within the field of science. As an example, you also have that within the field of video, we talk about Sora. So it's, you know, this is apart from the AGI stuff, which we can do a different podcast interview where we can go super deep on AGI. It's one of my favorite things to talk about and one of Lindsay's least favorite things to talk about. So I need somebody to talk to about it. Perfect.

Just let me know. Happy to.

But the other thing is like what all of this is, is. And Part of it is like what is it today? And what it is today is like these are tools that allow us to do really incredible things if in a way that we never could have done from an efficiency standpoint before. And so I think for, for us, if our job is we are creating content, we are monetizing that content with a brand partnership, we're monetizing that potentially partnering with Raptive, running ads against that content. We have our own product that we're selling, E Commerce, you know, whatever it might be, a digital product. We now have the opportunity to use a tool that is going to allow us to do something more efficiently. What do we do then? Once we have created those efficiencies? I think we do more of the things that we want to do and that we're excited about and less of the things that we don't want to do and that we're not excited about.

You can also take more risks.

You can take more risks that you have more bandwidth, you have more time.

Because one of the things, right. With AI, one of the reasons I have this job is because I was able with AI to take more risks than my day to day life. I was able to go out and try a startup because I could get started on it at night with the help of an AI and then that startup eventually leveraged into this job. Right. Like time is something that you're always risking. Right. Like you're always risk gambling your time. Right. And like this is like a tool that can help you reclaim a lot of that time.

Yeah.

So that you can take risk on. Okay. Like I don't have to spend as much time managing my backlinks because like I've got an AI that helps me with that now. But that means I have these addition this additional five hours a week that I was like using to like backlink all my stuff. Now I can use that additional five hours and I can go and you know, try and kick off like a video sort of like content creation business that I've always wanted to do but I haven't had the time to do. Or I can get into a completely different vertical and like start a new site in that vertical and go after.

That do a cooking class or like everybody shows up and you're doing it together. Yeah, yeah.

Whatever it is that you want to do. Right. Like AI is going to allow you to gamble time on bets that you maybe wouldn't have wanted to gamble your time away on. Because you know that if I'm making content for my site that's going to make money. But I don't know if I go and do this cooking class if that's going to make me any money. But now you can have your cake and eat it too. I think that's maybe the best way of thinking about it.

I think that's great. And I think maybe a final kind of thing that'll leave people with to think about and then would be interested if you have anything else too is always ask yourself the question. Like I wonder if so if you're doing a thing, you get into a thing, you're working on a thing, you start to get into it. Just ask a question like, I wonder if there could be a way whether using ChatGPT, Claude Google another tool that exists out there. I wonder if there's a way that I could do this more efficiently where I'm doing less of the thing I don't want to do in order to allow me to do more of the thing I do want to do. And I think that's the thing that is most exciting to me about all things AI is that it opens up that world. And that to me is I feel like to end on a. On a. Not like AI takes over the world and takes all of our jobs and shuts us all off, which is also again, very interesting path to go down. But today I know that to be true. Like, I think that's the thing that's really exciting for me is like finding those, those opportunities and efficiencies. And one of the things we'll continue to do on the podcast is like talk about what those look like. Be fun to have you back on at some point to talk through like a tool session. Hey, what are the tools that we can use as creators that we can use?

A ton of stuff out there too. I mean even just like get out of Chat GPT land. There's like more than just chatgpt out there as far as language models. Like I would say, Claude 4.5 is, is an excellent writer compared to ChatGPT these days.

Yeah, I use both. It's interesting. I pay for the premium plan for both and like spend a lot of time in each and we'll almost have them like fact check each other. Like I'll do a prompt in one and then do the same prompt in the other and we could go on and on. Trey, I want to be respectful of your time if people want to connect with you. I know that you'll occasionally write content for Raptive. I know that you, you know, I mentioned LinkedIn at the beginning you have a LinkedIn account like and there's obviously Raptive as well to follow along with anything else.

Yeah, Raptive and LinkedIn are great. I think I've got a Twitter, but I couldn't tell you what the handle is. It's out there. You can find me on Twitter. But really, LinkedIn, if you want to get in contact, that's where you probably want to go. But you could always just drop in and say hi. At a raptive event, I'm always down to say hello because they take me to all of them so I'll always be there.

The AI guy, you need to be there.

Gotta be there.

Yep. Trey, thanks so much for coming on.

And thanks for having me. Take it easy.

Hello Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful for you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro Forum. In case you didn't know how it works. If you're a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It's one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself and on the forum we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a building Traffic section, a photography section. We have an Essential Tools section. We chat about generating income and essential plugins, all sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. It's a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you're having, and brainstorm together. Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help members with their questions. Casey Marquis and Andrew Wilder are always popping in and so is Danielle Liss, our legal expert. It's a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns. The forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you're working to grow your site and your business. If you're ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful Forum, head to foodbloggerpro.com join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoyed this episode and and can't wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.