EP 178: Teaching The Next Generation About AI

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How do we teach the next generation about artificial intelligence? It seems like there's really not a cohesive plan, right? Because whether you're talking high schools or universities, two year colleges in the US versus overseas, there's really not one plan on how to properly teach the next generation artificial intelligence. And it is one of the most in demand skill sets right now in the workforce. Yet it can be hard, you know, if you're a high school student or a college student to learn this. So I'm extremely excited today to talk about just that and how we can teach the next generation about AI. Welcome. If you're new here, my name is Jordan Wilson and I'm the host of Everyday AI. We are a daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like you and me not just learn what's going on in the world of generative AI, but how we can all actually leverage it. All right, so before we get started, if you're new here, please go to your everyday AI.com Sign up for our free daily newsletter. All right, so before we talk about how we can teach the next generation about AI, let's first quickly go over what's going on in the world of AI news. So Elvis is coming back in AI form. So the virtual reality show called Elvis Evolution is coming soon and it will use AI holographic projection in augmented reality and live theater to recreate key moments in Presley's life. So this new show is a collaboration between layered reality and the owner of the Elvis Presley estate, Authentic Brands Group, who provided access to the star's personal photos and videos. So, hey, Elvis is back. Thanks to AI. All right, our next piece of AI news is. Well, will it kill us all? According to scientists, don't worry, there's only a 5% chance. So AI researchers from multiple universities in the US, UK, Germany and others completed this study and just published it recently and got feedback from more than 2,700 AI researchers. So the study revealed that a majority believe that there is a non trivial chance. So yeah, 5% chance of human extinction due to the development of superhuman AI. However, there's also disagreement and uncertainty among researchers about those risks. All right, and our last piece of news, at least for today, Microsoft is bringing Copilot to everyone in a way. So right now, Microsoft 365 copilot, Microsoft's generative AI that lives in Your operating system is really only available to a select few enterprise companies. However, just hours ago, Microsoft announced a new addition to its keyboard with a dedicated Windows Copilot key. So hardware partners will begin launching laptops and desktops with this new feature in the coming days. And here's why. It's like, all right, Jordan, why are we talking about a keyboard key? Well, this is the first major change to the official PC keyboard in decades since the Windows start key was added, literally in 1994. So. So if nothing else, this move shows a big commitment to AI in the personal computing space. All right, there's always more news and more going on in the world of AI. So if you haven't already, make sure to go to your everydayai.com Sign up for that free daily newsletter for not just more on the shows that are the news that we talked about today, but on the show today. Right. We always bring on a great guest or two and recap what goes on in the conversation and how you can apply it to. To grow your business and to grow your career. So make sure if you want to know more about today's topic, to do just that. All right, so with that, now let's talk about how we can teach the next generation about AI. So we do have a little bit of a surprise here that we're going to unveil in a couple of minutes. So stay tuned for an everyday AI first, but let's go ahead and bring onto the show right now. There we go. We got him. Let's unmute his microphone. There we go. So please help me welcome to the show Jim Barud, the tech ecosystem leader in the New York City area and has been for the past two decades. Jim, thank you so much for joining the show.

Jordan, thanks for having me. I just want to thank you for your leadership. I listen to you all the time and I learn so much. So thank you for doing this for the community.

Oh, absolutely. And real quick, Jim, for people that don't know, I do. But tell everyone just a little bit about your background, because being a tech leader for two decades, I mean, what does that exactly encompass?

Yeah, well, I started my career at an entrepreneurship center. And so I led an entrepreneurship center for most of 17 years in New Jersey. And so that got me interested in entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology because most startups right through. Through all these cycles, right. The whole Internet thing happened during my tenure there. And so I got really involved and helping entrepreneurs throughout that experience. And then I ran the technology trade association for another five years. So that got me Even more immersed in a larger platform in the New York City metro area, from Philly to New York City, including New Jersey, helping tech leaders. And so since 2020, I've been, you know, doing mostly advisory work, again, helping leaders, helping companies grow from startups to corporates. And that's been a great experience. But I also have some, you know, side things that I do to help the community because it's sort of in my ethos, right, to help nurture the ecosystem. So I host events, have a podcast, speak on AI at conferences, and connect a lot of dots. So I help, you know, entrepreneurs, and I help leaders sort of grow their businesses in different ways. And so that's been really great. And the last thing I do is, you know, I've gone back to my educational roots, right, Because I had such great experience in higher ed. I started some collaborations, not only on the teen level, but, you know, executive. I do some executive ed briefings, you know, helping companies with understanding AI. So that's one. But I'm even more excited about the teen stuff because, you know, teaching the younger generation is really important to me. And so I launched a new course called Future Tech Skills. So kids can learn about generative AI, but also learn about all the other skills that are important to complement technology. That's going to be really important, that human factor. So, really excited about that. And as we'll get to it later in this program, we just launched a new contest for teenagers as well.

So, yeah, it's, it's super exciting. And I love, Jim, that even with all of your background and experience, you could be advising anyone, right? You could be helping anyone learn generative AI to better use technology, to grow their companies, to grow their careers. Why ultimately did you put a focus on helping, you know, students learn this technology? What was that, that thing that made you say, hey, this is something I want to focus on my time on teaching the next generation generative AI.

Well, two things. Number one is the next generation is going to be so important to our future, right? So if we can't teach them the right ways to leverage technology, then we're hurting not only ourselves, but society and our future. Number one, personally, I have two teenage daughters, and so I'm struggling as a tech leader. I'm struggling in teaching them the right ways to leverage technology and avoid some of the downside risks.

And what has been your take? So as someone, you know, with, you know, with children, what's your take in general? Do you think right now, schools, universities are doing enough? I've. I've had my own, like big rants on this. I personally think, you know, schools are unnecessarily, you know, shutting down education to generative AI maybe because they don't understand it. But I mean, what's your thoughts? Are schools, you know, high schools, middle schools, universities, are they doing enough right now?

Absolutely not. And you know, things go really slow in schools. Even, you know, colleges, except for a few very progressive teachers or administrators, they're usually behind the times and change is slow. And that's, that's a problem because as you know, everything is moving so quickly and as we know, students are taking advantage of the technology, some of them are using it to cheat. And on the other hand, schools are banning it, which is probably the wrong approach or definitely the wrong approach because you have to integrate it into your classroom as you've had guests on before highlight. And so it's a real challenge. And the more we can sort of get out there and educate them on how to integrate and leverage the best parts of generative AI, then we're just hurting ourselves and our young people.

So let's talk about that a little bit here. So talk maybe just a little bit, Jim, if you can, what the future tech experience is, who it's for and kind of in building this, what is your end goal with this?

Right, so my end goal is really to educate the next generation, right? And to do it in a sort of dynamic way which is sort of very approachable and fun. And so this course, some of the other courses I've developed for teenagers, talks about a lot of things, right? But not just the tech part, right? That is important, but the tech is always changing, right? And so we have to keep updating that the other parts are really more important, right? Those soft skills, those communication skills, those entrepreneurship skills. Remember, all young people are going to have a dozen careers, right? And there's going to be a lot of freelance or side gigs or side hustles, right, that they're going to probably be doing. So they have to be entrepreneurial. So now I've been talking about this for many years, many, many years. You know, the day of the gold watch after 30 year career, as it says, was over a long time ago now. It's sort of not even a reality in any sense, right? And so young people are going to have to learn to be more entrepreneurial whatever they do, whatever path they choose. And it's, it's exciting. It's also scary. And so this program sort of helps them of develop some of those skills and refer back to this, this course work and these insights because they're, they're really lifelong skills.

Yeah. And it's, it's almost shocking to me, you know, kind of, Jim, the disparity, because I, I feel if you look even at the last 10 to 20 years, when you look at innovation, right. I feel it's always the younger generation. Right. When you look at, you know, kind of this web 2.0 phase, it was always, you know, with social media, it was, it was kids in their dorms building this. Right. At least for me personally, I haven't seen this with at least generative AI. It seems like a lot of, you know, new innovation, new products, you know, companies that are being built and formed are actually coming from people mid career, especially someone with your background. Number one, is this something you see? And number two, what does that mean for when we look now, five and 10 years in the future? Do you see is there going to be this big almost gap where we don't have enough skilled young people to take on these future careers?

Well, I, I think, you know, the skill sets are changing all the time, so as long as the students have this curiosity and yearning to keep learning, I think they'll be okay. Right. And so it's great that older folks are getting involved and this is a great thing. You know, we always have to keep learning. Right. And that's really important sort of mindset for us, you know, for everyone. And so it's great that older folks, middle aged folks, whatever, are being entrepreneurial, doing stuff in Gen AI. But there's a lot of young people too. We're just not hearing about it. So they're using it in so many different ways. I'm excited about that going forward.

All right. Speaking of using technology in exciting ways, I think you have something you've been working on, a little bit of a competition. Can you tell us about that? Then after that, we're actually going to bring on another guest. But first, can you tell us just a little bit about what this challenge is? Working with teams?

Yeah, no, absolutely. The creation of a custom GPT App Store, which is what was announced a little while ago, is really exciting. It only happens once in a generation. The last time this happened was when Apple launched their App Store. I really was excited about this because the tools are so easy to use. You don't have to be a coder like the last time. I remember developing apps when it launched last time, it was super exciting, but I had to develop, you know, working by my side to do it. But nowadays you don't need to be a developer. It's plug and play and, you know, you can simply put things together, right. Come up with great ideas. Right. And so I wanted to take advantage of this, this point in time to get out there with a challenge for young people. Right. They have amazing ideas and this is a fun way to sort of have them learn about generative AI. And so it doesn't take, but it could just take a few hours. So it's, it's digestible, it's approachable. And I wanted to sort of start by, by doing an experiment which we'll get to later.

This is so good. So tell me, tell me a little bit more, Jim. So if someone's listening out there, I know we do have, you know, like Tara just said here, joining us live, that, you know, her, her kids are always listening to the podcast. So if there are, whether they're, they're high school students or maybe parents that have kids, is this open to anyone? Is this just open to people in a certain area? How does this global GPT Challenge for teens work?

Well, it's open to any teenager and globally. Right. It's just have to either register or submit the video. We just make it really easy. Right. Submit your video of your demo, you know, by February 11th. Right. And as you know, there's, it's not only OpenAI, although that's the most popular, there are other types of bots or custom GPTs that you can use, whether it's Microsoft PO, even Zapier has one, you could probably name a few more, but it's developing so quickly. It's so exciting. That's why I wanted to get this out to the world right away so kids could take advantage of it. We can leverage their creativity to see what great ideas they come up with.

Yeah, and that's, and that's a good point, Jim, because I think we hear about ChatGPT all the time and yes, you can build, you know, custom GPTs, but yeah, like you said, you can do so in Microsoft. And then there's so many really low cost or, you know, different options out there that have free plans. I know like Dante AI is a very popular one. So yeah, there's so many different, different tools that, you know, young people can use to, to build a custom, you know, GPT for themselves. So let's actually maybe talk to one of those students if we can here. So I'm excited. So this is actually a first for the everyday AI show. We're on episode like 170 something and we've never had. We have had one grade schooler on who joined with his father and then we had a college student on, but this is our first high school student guest, actually, so I'm excited for that. So let's go ahead and we're going to talk to this studio student here a little bit. So let's go ahead and bring him on. So, Ezra, you are a 12th grader from New Jersey. First of all, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

So tell us, tell us a little bit just about what was your reaction, you know, when you heard about this kind of global GPT challenge? I mean, had you been involved in, you know, creating different things on ChatGPT previously, what was your response when you heard about this?

So when I heard about it, I was excited because it's a, it's a like, interesting opportunity. I had been using AI previously to generate art. Mostly. I, I like to write stories and I write books. So I used AI to make art for my books so that I could add them in. So when I saw this, I was very excited to have this sort of opportunity because it's not one that I think happens very often, as Jim pointed out. So I was very excited.

That's amazing. So let's go ahead. I'm going to bring up, if you're joining us on the podcast, don't worry, I'm going to do my best to go ahead and explain what this is. But if you're joining us on the live stream, I'm now sharing a custom GPT. Can you talk a little bit about this, Ezra, about this custom GPT and what was it like to build this?

Yeah, for sure. So Jim approached me about creating a custom GPT built around him and a lot of his work. So this GPT, how do I say this? It will help. This GPT is. Sorry, give me a second.

No, that's okay. Well, here I can, I can even get, get us started here. So it looks like. So if you're listening on the podcast. So it says here, this custom GPT is trained on Jim's 25 plus years of experience in nurturing entrepreneurship, innovation and technology communities. So essentially, Ezra, so is this kind of how this works? Is anyone can go. So maybe if you're an entrepreneur or maybe you're just a young person trying to build a business, not everyone has access to someone like Jim, someone with decades of experience. Right. So is that kind of, you know, one of the main benefits that you see for Using a custom GPT like this, for sure.

I think that, you know, regular chatgpt is great, but having GPT trained on specifically someone with so much experience in this area, I think could be greatly beneficial to. To a lot of people.

All right, so we're going to go ahead. We're going to demo this live. So I have the gym GPT, the custom GPT that Azra built as part of this competition. So, again, it's all based off of Jim's wide knowledge base and all of his years of experience. So I'm typing in. I've never built a business before. I love typing live. I'm not very good at it. And then I'm going to say, where should I start? So I'm just going to go ahead and click Enter. So, Ezra, so as this gym GPT is responding here, can you just tell me a little bit about what was this process even like building the custom GPT? So if people aren't familiar, all you have to do is have a ChatGPT plus account, and it's pretty easy to build. But maybe can you talk a little bit, Ezra, about that building process and what went into it?

Yeah. So as you said, you need a GPT plus account, and the way it works is you take your articles, your videos. So Jim gave me a bunch of articles and videos and podcasts, and I had to transcribe a lot of those videos and podcasts to be able to put them into a document and submit them. So you upload your documents and articles, and it will take that information and train itself and use it to be able to answer questions. You can.

It can.

There's an even more complicated level to it that I only just started to get into, but I'm not even sure I can really explain that, because I'm not sure. I'm not. I don't really understand it myself yet, but it. It. It's. It's really amazing how simple it is, but at the same time, and what you can get done with it, it's. I had to take all of the podcasts, all of the videos, transcribe them, put them into documents, and I would upload them. And some of them didn't always work. Sometimes it didn't understand the document. I had to go back in and edit things and change the document or sometimes change the document type because. Because for some reason, it just doesn't always work. So that was always interesting.

Yeah. And for those of you not able to see the screen. So we did ask this question. I've never Built a business before. Where should I start? And then the gym GPT that Ezra built spit out some great information going through it looks like a. What do we got? A ten step plan. Everything from, you know, idea generation and validation to the legal structure, financial planning and then going all the way to bringing a business to fruition. And you know, I'm actually live as I'm doing this, I'm looking at the same thing on a general GPT and I'll even maybe share that here as well. So I did the exact same prompt just in the standard GPT 4 inside of chat GPT and although we got kind of similar results, I actually think the, the gym GPT is much better because it does, like Ezra said, it includes some of those specific things that only someone with decades of experience can talk about. So Ezra, first of all, nice job. This is awesome. Second, what is the biggest thing that you learned from this experience?

The biggest thing that I learned from this experience is probably the, well, probably the importance of AI nowadays. I mean this is going to affect everything in the future and I think.

That.

Yes, the biggest thing that I realized was important.

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So I am very thankful to have a very open minded school with AI. So they encourage the use of AI actively.

That's great.

Yeah, it's amazing. So in Fact, last year they had brought in an AI ambassador, an OpenAI ambassador, and kind of someone well known in the space, Iran Maldonado, to talk to at school. And he came multiple times and currently I'm interning at his company. But yeah, my school has encouraged use of AI for our class, for our STEAM class. We used it to help build a sustainable community. We used AI to help with that. So it's really great.

Oh, that's amazing. And what, I mean, what a great spokesperson you've been for this Global GPT Challenge to come on a live stream and to be able to walk through and explain to people what you've built. That was really cool. Ezra, thank you so much for walking us through this as we bring Jim back on. So, Ezra, you crushed this man. Thank you so much for coming to talk about it.

No problem. Thank you for having me.

All right, Jim, that was really cool. So we just not only learned about the Global GPT Challenge, but we got a live walkthrough from a super bright student in Ezra showing us how he did this. What was your, what was your reaction when you, you know, tasked a student with building you something that can actually be a little complex? What was your reaction in how he did and how he built this?

I was really delighted, Jordan. I was so impressed with his maturity and his willingness, you know, to do this and to be so attentive to doing this. And, you know, it really makes me us feel good about the future. Right. And so couldn't be more pleased. And as you can see, there's some schools like his, you know, that are very progressive and we need to sort of, you know, hopefully learn from those schools and hopefully that will spread throughout all the school systems across our country and across our planet, because they really need to be taking advantage of the opportunities provided by generative AI rather than be scared of it.

So what are some of the other challenges, Jim, when we talk about teaching the next generation about AI? So, you know, like we already talked about, there is the piece where, you know, certain things, you just can't get this into every single school. It's great to hear that Ezra's high school is, is ahead of the curve and bringing much needed employment skills to their students. But aside from the whole colleges or high schools banning generative AI, what are some of the other challenges in teaching the next generation?

Yeah, I think there's a few things that educators and parents need to be aware of. Number one is generative AI is a great creativity booster. The unbelievable amounts of creativity that will be Let loose by generative AI going forward is going to be amazing. We have to teach kids to leverage it as a starting point and to play with it and to see what can be developed. Now you can storytell, create whole movies just by typing in or talking to a computer, which is amazing. We're going to see so much amazing content coming out, and we're. I'm really excited about that. But the important thing is to start and to play with it. Right. And the second thing is we have to be concerned about ethical AI and we have to be concerned about bias. Right. We're concerned about cheating and leveraging AI in the right way. So we really need to understand that going forward, and we have to teach that. The third thing is that students should be using it as a personal learning tool. Right? Personalized tutors are coming fast and furious, thank God, so that everyone can be brought up to the proper level in the proper way so they can learn at their pace and their approach. That makes sense. So students need to know that, parents need to know that. Start taking advantage of some of those tools. Khan Academy has a great AI, but there's others coming and being developed as we speak. And then the last thing is, you know, I've spoken about this at conferences is the downside risk. This is the scary part. Misinformation, right. Deep fakes. This really scares the crap out of me. So, you know, we hear these stories about, you know, bad actors, or it could be bullies, or it could be mean girls or boys that leverage this technology in the wrong way. And even others try to extort money from parents, you know, faking the voice and doing things like that. So we need to be aware of it and we need to verify sources. Especially as we go into this election season, you know, misinformation is going to be a real big concern. And so students and young people need to know that you just don't see something on TikTok and you believe it. And I've heard it from my own kids that they warned me about some things that were happening. I was like, think about where you got that information. Go to a trusted source. And we have to keep. Now more than ever, we have to educate our kids about what to trust, because we're going to a trust. Unfortunately, it's hard to trust anything now because anything can be faked. And so we have to be really careful about what we see online.

Yeah, and that's a great point, Jim, because deepfakes, as we bring up, they're not new. They've been around for 10 plus years, the quality just wasn't that great. And it took a lot more resources to build something like that. And now you can do it actually in like a minute or two, which is kind of scary. But one thing that I wanted to get to is, you know, I just even think of when I was, you know, Ezra's age. Yeah, that was, you know, 20 years ago or something like that. But, you know, as I was, you know, starting my professional journey as a young college student, we were kind of afforded. Right. This was kind of the, you know, web 2.0 craze or whatever you want to call it, you know, when social media and communities came in and, you know, they're starting to teach those things in colleges. But it seems like, you know, both young, younger career people, you know, people looking for their first job had a very long time. You know, you had easily 5, 10, 15 years to learn, you know, proper email etiquette, how to use, you know, tools like Slack or whatever. But it doesn't seem, at least from my vantage point, it doesn't seem like, you know, if you're graduating now, it doesn't seem like you're going to have that 5, 10, 15 years to adapt to generative AI like we, you know, kind of adapted to 2.0. Is that something that you see as well? And if so, what is your advice for students to quickly get caught up to speed?

Yeah, well, clearly everything is moving so fast. So you are absolutely right. The good thing is there's resources out there where they can learn. So it's just about motivational mindset to keep learning. And that is the best thing that, you know, students can have and parents can influence their kids is to keep learning. I know how hard it is. Our teenage daughters, it's hard to get them to be motivated, but you have to keep trying and make it fun and dynamic. And, you know, your courses are great examples of that. You know, I'm taking the new one, the content one, and I know the PDP one is a great one and these are really important ways to keep up because I know you always update your courses with the latest knowledge and so it's not that hard anymore. You can learn in bite size on YouTube or your courses or things like that. And so if they just start listening to the right people, that will help them keep up the speed.

I love that plug. I didn't even pay you for that one, Jim. But yeah, if you want access to what Jim was talking about, we have our free prompt engineering, prime prompt polish course and we just launched a brand new three hour free course as well, touching on all points of generative AI. But as we wrap this up, Jim, what is the one takeaway that you want people to hear? So whether it's, it's parents listening to this and they're like, wow, I had no clue that it was going to be like this for my son or my daughter or maybe a high school student, maybe someone not as fortunate as Ezra in his school system that's allowing this. But as people are hearing this and they're hearing what you're saying and they're like, wow, okay, I've really got to understand this. What is your takeaway message?

The takeaway message is to get started, right? Just do it. And parents, you could do it with your kids, right? That's a great way to learn together. Educators, you can learn with your kids too, your students. And it's important. That collaborative process of learning new things together is really, you know, the most important takeaway.

So much great information there, Jim. Thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI Show. I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

And hey, as a reminder, we mentioned a lot in this story, so. Or in this interview, you know, so if you want to, you know, know more about the Global GPT Challenge, we'll have that in our newsletter as well as a lot of the other different, you know, tools. We talked to Khan Academy and custom GPTs, all of these different things. Going to be sharing about that all in today's newsletter. So make sure to go to your everyday AI.com and sign up for that free daily newsletter and we will see you back tomorrow as we have on an ambassador from OpenAI to talk about the secret skill for more effective prompting. So thank you for joining us. We'll see you tomorrow and every day with Everyday AI. Thanks, y'.

All.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit youreverydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.