Lessons from 2 Years of ChatGPT

Will AI replace marketers? What we learned after 2 years of ChatGPT being around.

All right, so let's start this off by saying that I'm very optimistic about technology and Neil tends to be pessimistic about everything. Yes, about the whole world. You go first.

So, you know, back when OpenAI first came around and then ChatGPT came out, I saw a big problem and I never really felt AI would replace marketing at all. And there's 2 main reasons. One, I think the creativity to replace what you and I have and other amazing talent has, and I'm not saying we're the best or anything like that, but just if you're a good marketer, it's really hard to replace your creativity with something that's scraping the web and then coming out with outputs based on what they've seen in the past versus coming up with stuff that's new and fresh. The second thing is, is a lot of what they scrape on the web is inaccurate. So then it's affecting their decisions for the future based off of stuff that is inaccurate. And that is a hard problem to solve. Google has not been able to solve that problem and they've tried so much since day one. I don't know how much they've invested into it, but my guess is over a billion bucks easily.

So my take on it is, will AI replace marketers? Not the best ones, not even the good ones. I think it'll replace the below average ones. And so I had a conversation with Seth Godin about this.

If you do a job that AI can do, either you're going to figure it out first and change your job so that AI works for you, or your boss is going to figure it out first and you're going to lose your job.

And we were just talking with— so bestselling author wrote, by the way, he wrote a book called Lichpin, which we make all our employees read when we start. But that's— I digress. And so I think this is no different than when you think about the industrial age, right? Everyone used to be farmers before, right? Then we moved into industrial age and then everyone kind of started doing like, you know, computer work, right? We call that blue-collar work. Yeah, right. There's going to be another shift here. I think most people will learn how to leverage the power of AI and then they'll be enhanced by it. To your point, I think the best of the best people are the creative people that are constantly just a little bit ahead of the curve. If you're just a really good learner, you're talking to other people, like Neil's really good at getting on the phone with people and learning his own way. I'm really good at like reading things and then talking to people about it. If you can do that, you'll be ahead of the curve no matter what. And I think you'll have a significant advantage too because you'll be able to compound yourself. But I think if you're below average, What happens with the below-average people? They don't want to learn new things, right? They're the type of people where, you know, it's like they do something right now, it's like, oh, Neil, look, I did this, but they did it 6 months ago. It's something they should have done 6 months ago, right? They're too slow to adopt to things. And so I don't necessarily look at ChatGPT as AI. I just look at AI as a whole. And I don't know if you saw this. There's that big investor conference. Did you see what happened? That was yesterday.

So it was massively—

Saudi, right? Yeah, Saudi.

The cumulative CapEx $9 trillion. $9 trillion. How do you recoup? How do you recoup? It's too much investment for many people's view. I say, I say it's still very reasonable CapEx. $9 trillion is not too big, maybe too small.

So Masayoshi Son came on and he's like, $9 trillion expenditure CapEx on AI, on the chips, right? He's like, That's cheap because over the next, you know, 10 years or so, uh, that's only gonna be 5% of what the, uh, potential, uh, value is gonna be, right? So his whole point is that we're gonna scale quite a bit. You know, everyone's talking about these, um, these super chip centers. I forgot what they— the, the Giga— was it GigaChip by, by Nvidia? Do you remember what I'm talking about?

Uh, no.

But yeah, okay, anyway, like for example, Elon built like this giant cluster, right? Um, and it took him like 19 days to do it, right? Um, and so we're gonna see a lot more of these. There's a lot of infrastructure work going into AI, uh, chips and it's And Neil and I are not technologists in this sense. We're not pros at this. But my whole thing is like, if there's a lot of investment going into infrastructure right now, this has a lot of room to grow. And so my conclusion is AI will replace mediocre to bad marketers.

Now, this is what I'm really curious on, right? Because when we talked about this a few years ago, you're a big believer that AI will replace many, many more marketers. You're more optimistic about it back then than now. I'm curious what's changed for you.

I tend to be like that though, because usually when you've seen my patterns over the years, when a new thing comes out, I'm like, oh, Neil, Clubhouse, this is the new thing, right? Right. And sometimes, and then you're like, this is stupid. And like, you were right in that case. Right. But sometimes I'm right too. Right. Sometimes I'll call it and it's like, oh yeah, that sometimes you'll call things. You'll be like, oh, you know, you're gonna buy these Facebook likes. Right. I'm like, I don't think that's gonna work. And like, didn't work. Right. So there's like certain things we'll try and like, we're gonna get a lot of things wrong. Um, and then I think with ChatGPT though, um, I think you, you look at what Sam Altman says, and obviously he's talking his own book here, but he's like, it's going to replace 95% of people. I think that's a bit heavy now because if 95% of people are replaced, what are they going to do? Then it's going to be like anarchy, right? When we can't have that. All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. So this is an agency peer group ran by my podcast co-host, Neil Patel, and myself, Eric Siu. And these were 9 and 8-figure agency owners respectively. And what I will say is at the end of the day, you want to learn from people that have been there, done that. If you want to grow your agency to 7 figures, 8 figures, and beyond, this is the group for you. And we bring in other agency owners to speak as well. And it's a great peer group where you can help each other out. And you're going to learn how to acquire more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day and to build the business of your dreams. And the cool thing, till November 30th, we are holding a special price and you can apply at marketingschool.io/agency. And the great thing about it as well, if you try to get into group, there's a 7-day free trial, right? So once Once November 30th hits, we're going to increase the price by $200 per month. So right now you're getting it at the lowest price possible. So go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more and we'll see you inside.

And I don't think that 95% is a little bit heavy. I think it's extremely heavy.

Yeah.

You know, you want to talk about mowing a lawn, sure. You can create something that's programmatic and analyzes the landscape and the terrain and be like, okay, here's how you Ideally mow the lawn or how much you watered or whatever it may be. But for a lot of stuff that isn't the blue-collar jobs, like the white-collar jobs, I do believe a lot of them are going to be hard to replace. I could be wrong. It really depends per industry. And I've been wrong in many places, right?

Yeah.

I just think, you know, when this AI first started coming out and people used to ask me this question, people used to always say, Neil, you're biased. You own a marketing agency. And I was like, Sam Altman is biased. He created an AI company. And honestly, I wasn't saying this to try to be biased or not. I really felt it wasn't replacing any, or it wasn't replacing most marketers. And the reason being is I'm like, look at what it's outputting. If you look at the progression of ChatGPT and what they've releasing, the quality is drastically slowing down on, or, and the abilities of what it can do is drastically slowing down as in the innovation part. And I still think we're in the early innings, right? in baseball, I would say first inning or second inning. But what I'm getting at is it's really hard to continually innovate and make it 5% better, 10% better, 50% better. And for it to do extremely well, you need not 50% or 100% better, you need leaps and bounds better. And I think that's extremely hard to do.

Yeah, I think we'll, we'll see in due time, right? I think we're still— it's still very— you talk about innings, it's very early right now. So I think I I'm really looking at the next 5 to 10 years or so. And we've talked about this on the podcast. We're bearish in the short— or more bearish in the short term, but very bullish in the long term. And I would say for me, typically when I call trends, I call them right for the long term. So for example, Nvidia, I told my mom to buy that stock. Why? Because I bought Nvidia video game cards when I was like 9 years old, right? Now, did I know they're going to come into this AI thing? No, right? But at least I knew they're going to rip for a while, right? And so I think Long-term, it's going to do— I think it's going to help people be more productive because I think the mediocre and the bad marketers, it's going to be like, hey, maybe you just shouldn't be doing marketing. Go do something else that's more productive where AI can enhance you and you'll do a much better job. I do think we'll become a lot more productive as a society.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I do think AI is going to change marketing, whether it's from the creation process, the systems and processes, helping with boring tasks. It's definitely going to have an impact on marketing and it already has had an impact. It's just the aspect of it's going to replace all marketers is going to be tough for even the majority. But what is very realistic is everyone is going to have an AI assistant that's going to power you. You're going to have your own virtual buddy that is helping you do anything you want, or you're going to have specific agents that go and help you with specific tasks and job roles that you need filled out.

All right, so that is it for today, guys. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association, where we help agency owners grow. And that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.