The next wave of AI with Matt Wolfe

Inbound season is upon us, everybody. So get ready because Inbound 2025 will bring together once again the brightest minds in marketing, sales and AI to explore what's now and what's next. The event is taking place September 3rd to 5th at the Moscone center in San Francisco. And this three day experience features inspiring keynotes, tactical breakout sessions, exclusive product reveals and immersive workshops you can network with industry leaders and gain actual insights to implement immediately for your company. The speakers we got on the docket are great. This year we got Amy Poehler, Marques Brownlee, Sean Evans, Glennon Doyle and many others. You're not going to want to miss it. You can go to inbound.com register to secure your spot at Inbound 2025. Happy New Week everybody. It's Monday, April 15th. I'm John Weigel here with Matt Wolfe and and this is the Hustle Daily Show. It's another AI Monday this week. Today we're getting the chance to hear from content creator and host of the podcast the Next Wave AI and the Future of Tech, Matt Wolf. In our chat today, we'll discuss the AI industry, what new modules are most useful, what innovations you should watch, and much, much more. We'll get to that in a bit, but first, let's give you the hits and headlines today in business and tech, starting us off with a pretty scary statistic. There are Now a record 323 medications in short supply in the US many are older generic drugs that pharmaceutical companies aren't incentivized to make anymore. Next Nike's stranglehold on the shoe market has softened a bit. And there's one obvious reason, per their CEO John Donahoe. It's remote work, he was quoted saying. It's really hard to do bold, disruptive innovation to develop a boldly disruptive shoe on Zoom. So I guess Nike employees will not be going fully remote anytime soon. Next Vietnamese real estate baron Truong Mai Lan was given a death sentence over a $12.5 billion fraud and embezzlement case. A white collar federal prison suddenly doesn't sound so bad anymore, to be honest. In more crime related news, police in Los Angeles arrested four members of a Lego crime ring who stole about $300 in Lego sets from stores to be resold elsewhere. Similar rings have popped up in Seattle and also France. TBD on how many Millennium Falcons were recovered. And finally, a fascinating business venture, petsmart has a wild way of enticing pet owners to join its new customer loyalty program. They're offering to pay for a tattoo. Specifically, they will pay to cover up an old regrettable tattoo with a new one of your pet. So I better get a regrettable tattoo sometime soon so I can get this one for free. All right. Today we're joined by Matt Wolf to give us some insights on the ever changing field of AI and to talk about his new podcast, the Next Wave, which of course is available wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, Matt, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on.

Oh, thanks for being here. It's great to see you. I'm excited to get to chatting. First off, I just wanted to talk to you about this new show that you're spearheading over here. Would love to know what you'll do episode to episode and what listeners can expect from you.

Sure, yeah. So the show's called the Next Wave and it's hosted by myself and my co host, Nathan Land. Nathan founded a website called lore.com. he's super connected in Silicon Valley. His newsletter is all about tech optimism. And we're what companies are raising money right now with a strong focus on the AI world. And then my background's actually in digital marketing, but for the last, like two and a half years, I've been focused on AI with my YouTube channel. I have a website called Future Tools where I share all the latest AI tools and news that come out. And so Nathan and I kind of teamed up. He has the sort of financial Silicon Valley tech investor side. I have the marketing and the tech and the tools and the researching the news side. So we felt like a good blend. We're both kind of looking at the AI space from different ends angles. So the idea of the show is we call it your chief AI Officer. You know, every business these days kind of needs to be paying attention to AI. It's growing so rapidly that pretty much every business is eventually going to have AI in some form in its business eventually. So our goal with the show is to keep business owners and individuals who just want to stay in the know in the loop with what's going on with AI, the latest news, the latest tools, who's raising capital, who's, you know, the drama. It's fun because there's a lot of storylines going on in the AI world of, like, this CEO left to go to this company, which is the biggest competitor.

Oh, yeah.

These two CEOs are beefing with each other. There's a lot of, like, fun, interesting drama happening that we get to explore as well. So week to week, the show is Essentially going to be either me and Nathan breaking down the latest interesting stuff going on in the AI world and how, you know, small businesses can apply to their life, how individuals can apply it to their life.

And.

And then also we're bringing on guest experts, the CEOs, the thought leaders, the people really pushing the AI space forward. And we're going to be interviewing them, having them as sort of third co host on the show, and talking with these AI experts on everything that's going on in the world of AI as well.

That's awesome. I think this sounds super comprehensive. Great pitch. I think you and Nathan really work together as that dream team over there. I like that combination that the both of you have. You know, you'll be talking week to week about new AI companies coming up and talking about CEOs beefing and everything going on in the world of AI in which you of all people know how quickly this industry changes week to week, day to day, even hour to hour some days. How do you personally keep up with all the AI news? And how would you suggest that people keep up themselves?

You know, I wouldn't suggest that most people do what I do because I'm doing this full time, kind of keeping my finger on the pulse. But the first easiest way is to listen to the Next Wave podcast and to check out my YouTube channel, because I try to keep you in the loop with everything I'm learning. But if you want to know how I'm staying in the loop, I actually use a lot of RSS readers. I use a reader called Feedly, where I subscribe to all the tech blogs there. It also has AI built into it. It's kind of got like a advanced version of Google Alerts built in where I can set some keywords and it helps surface news articles for me in the AI space. I'm on Twitter every single day, kind of scrolling all the people that talk about AI to see what they're talking about. I've got a few inside connections at a few of the, like, bigger companies. I have somebody that I talked to at Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, places like that, that kind of feed me news through Discord and Slack and places like that, so I could kind of stay ahead of a few things. I'm on calls all the time. The CEOs, the people building these companies, they're always like, hey, can I jump on a call and demo what I'm working on? And so I'm on these calls, getting insights from them. I'm on all of the AI newsletters there's a ton of great newsletters. There's the Rundown with Rowan Chung, the Neuron with Pete Huang. There's a bunch of really, really great AI newsletters that also try to keep you in the loop. So outside of my own research, I read those newsletters to also make sure I'm not missing anything but saying all of that. Just staying in the loop and creating content around it is a full time job. So I don't expect most people to kind of go to the depths that I do to keep my finger on the pulse for sure.

But it's good to know how you do it. It sounds like you're bombarded a lot of this information, so I imagine that parsing through and picking out the stuff to create content about is kind of a chore.

Yeah.

What do you think are some of the biggest or most useful AI innovations as of late? Maybe in the past month or year even?

I kind of see like two categories, right? There's AI that is really, really useful and then there's AI that's just like really cool. Right. There's a lot of AI tools lately that are just really cool. There's tools like Suno and a new one called Udio which generate AI songs. You put in a prompt and it makes a song that sounds like something you'd hear on the radio and the songs are really, really good. Practical use, case. I don't know, it's just kind of cool, right?

Yeah.

You see a lot of these AI video tools like Pika Labs and Runway that generate really cool AI generated videos. They make for really cool videos. But practical use, case. I mean, they're not quite there yet.

Sure.

So as far as like actual useful tools, my answer is probably going to be fairly cliche because I still think the most useful stuff out there is the stuff like Claude and ChatGPT and Midjourney to create AI images and Dall E to create AI images. Those are really the ones that if you're asking what I use myself on a daily basis and I find myself logged in and using these tools all the time, it's really that stuff like the AI art tools like Midjourney and Dall E are great. If you're a content creator and you need images for your blog post or you make videos and you want like a very, very specific like B roll shot on your video, it's great for that kind of stuff. Facebook ads, Google Display network ads. Awesome for that kind of stuff. ChatGPT and Claude, amazing for writing real basic code, for writing a rough Draft outline of a blog post or an email for double checking your work. A lot of times I'll write a blog post, plug it into Claude and say, read this for me. Look for spelling errors, grammar errors, and like, make it more readable to the average user. But the stuff that I'm using on a daily basis is really the stuff you hear about the most often because I do think it's got the most applications to the most amount of people.

Yeah, that's a good call out the difference between useful applications and just really cool applications. Like, I've used a bunch of different AI applications, but this one specific one was like, you get to put any song in there and the voice automatically changes to the voice of Plankton from spongebob. How incredible is that module?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not exactly the most useful thing out there, but I had a great time with it. But considering, you know, all of these cool things coming out seem to be ruffling a lot of feathers. You know, Tennessee, for example, just became the first US state a few weeks ago to prevent AI tools from replicating an artist's voice in the state. So with things like that coming up, what do you think? Are I kind of net is at the end of all of this? Will we be getting more cool stuff? Or when the cool stuff comes up, will it just kind of be struck down pretty quickly?

No, I think we'll end up getting more cool stuff. As far as, like these rulings about you can't go and make a song that sounds like the voice and style of another person, I think that's a good thing. I don't think anybody should just go be able to make, you know, a Drake song, put it out into the world, make money off of it. And because it's Drake's style and Drake's voice, he's not getting anything. I don't think that's right. So I sort of agree with a lot of these policies and that's probably counter to a lot of the AI enthusiasts out there. But I think, you know, it all comes down to the monetization, the financialization elements of it. At the end of the day, the creators, they want to get rewarded for their hard work for all of the time they spend putting into their craft. And so I think what needs to happen and what will likely happen over time is that there will be some sort of compensation model worked out. I think the logistics of it are really complicated. I don't envy the people that have to figure it out and. But I do think we will end up with some sort of like Spotify sort of model where if the training data includes your art, your music, something like that, you will sort of get like a fraction of the earnings generated from that piece of content created. I think that's where it needs to go. I think as long as the artists, the creators, the people out there that sort of laid the groundwork that the AI is now training on, as long as there's a way for them to still, you know, earn off of it, have their livelihood off of it, still continue to grow and thrive, I think the companies will still be allowed to innovate and push forward. We just need to crack that element first.

Definitely. Yeah. The getting everybody paid part is always the most complex with these things by a long margin. And, you know, I wanted to hit on something you said earlier about some of the biggest companies or some of the most useful pieces of the AI industry. And what one of those is, definitely Nvidia. And Nvidia has been getting a lot of attention across the board. I feel like it hasn't in maybe recent years by people outside of the tech space, but now I feel like a lot of business people, a lot of tech people are really, really interested in what they're doing. And you were at GTC recently. Could you tell me about your experience there and kind of Nvidia's place in the market as it is right now and if that can ever be challenged?

Yeah, so I actually posted a tweet back In January of 2023, beginning of the year, where I said, I think Nvidia is going to be one of the top three largest companies in the world. Here's why. Crypto, gaming and I all rely on Nvidia GPUs. And those are like three of the fastest growing industries in the entire planet. Nvidia at the Time was the 15th largest company by market cap, something like that. Today they sit at the third largest company on the planet. And, you know, I think it's largely because of AI, but also gaming. And then, you know, crypto had its sort of revival during COVID and everybody was buying miners and stuff like that. So Nvidia just saw this huge skyrocket growth because of all of these things. And I think now they are so far ahead of everybody else that I do think other companies will eventually catch up, but I think it's going to take a while. The news that's coming out right now is that Meta is working on their own internal chips, Google is working on their own internal chips, Apple's been doing their own internal chips for a while now. Right. Previously they were working with intel, but now Apple makes their own, you know, M series of chips.

Sure.

So I think that's probably what we're going to see is more and more companies try to figure out how to bring the creation of these processes in house and sort of custom tailor them to the unique needs of those companies in house. So I think that's what we're going to see over time, which will probably reduce Nvidia's dominance a little bit. But I think overall, Nvidia is probably still going to be the top player for a long, long time. As far as the GTC conference, it was just a blast. I mean, if you've ever been to something like ces, the Consumer Electronics show, where they have just thousands of booths of people showing off the latest and greatest tech, GTC was almost like a mini version of that. It was like hundreds and hundreds of booths of people showing off their latest, greatest tech, most of it including AI. And because it was Nvidia's conference, all of it, including Nvidia's chips. But it was just really, really fun to walk around the expo floor. And there's some really good keynotes as well. I went and saw Jensen Huang. He actually presented inside of the arena where the San Jose Sharks play, right?

Oh, cool.

And there was not an empty seat in the house, including the entire floor with chairs. You would swear you were at like a Rolling Stones concert when Jensen took the stage.

Oh, my God. I don't even think the San Jose Sharks get that.

Probably not.

Also, you know, we mentioned a lot of big companies, Google, Apple, Microsoft. And it seems like definitely what from you said and from all the news that I've been seeing lately is that there's really kind of a pressure nowadays to develop your AI. And there's kind of this race going on between all these companies. Who would you say is kind of at the forefront? If not, of course, Nvidia, anybody in their software? I'm guessing OpenAI is a big contender.

I'd say right now the biggest winner of the moment is probably Microsoft. You know, I mentioned Nvidia as the third largest company in the world. Well, Microsoft. Microsoft recently passed Apple to become the first biggest company in the world. And if you look at what Microsoft is doing, they have a 49% equity stake in OpenAI. They're working with Llama and Meta to work on that open source side. They have large investments with Mistral, which is a French company that builds large language models. Microsoft went and they saw, okay, OpenAI has the best closed source model right now. Let's invest in them. Metta has the best open source model right now. Let's invest in them. Mistral has both open and closed sourced models. They're kind of working both sides of the fence. Let's invest in them. So Microsoft, in my mind is really the company that's super, well diversified. If OpenAI ever goes away, they still have Llama and Mistral. If Lama ever goes away, they still have Open AI and Mistral. Right. Wow. So they seem to be sort of spreading the deck and playing this the smartest. And then also because they have all these investments, they get to roll all of this tech into their Copilot software. Right. So now if you have a Windows computer and you're updated to the latest version of Windows, you have GPT4 just built into Windows. Now if you go in copilot.Microsoft.com, you go to their copilot site, you can access GPT4 with Bing search engine connected to it. So OpenAI has probably the most powerful model right now. But if we're looking at the AI industry as a whole, Microsoft is, you know, the best chess player out there right now.

Yeah, I mean, it seems like they've really diversified their portfolio. It's almost like they have the best stock portfolio in AI right now.

Right, right, exactly.

Well, that's all great information. Thank you so much, Matt. It's been such a pleasure talking to you and definitely looking forward to your podcast in the near future. What can we expect?

We have a lot of guests that we're really excited to try to bring on. We've recorded interviews with Pete Huang from the Neuron Amazing, amazing show where we talk about all of the large language models. So a lot of the stuff that we just talked about, we dive deep into those, the pros and cons of each. You know, we have a great interview with Greg Eisenberg, who is a serial entrepreneur, but he also has been working a lot with AI lately. So he breaks down a lot of strategies to make an actual successful business around AI. There's a lot of narrative right now about how if you're building in the SaaS world, you have no moat. Well, we talk about that with Greg and how to actually build a moat around an AI company. We had a great call with Logan Kilpatrick who used to work at OpenAI. He left OpenAI and is now heading up part of Google's AI. So amazing conversation there. And a lot of surprise guests lined up in the coming months. Some big names that we're still locking down and confirming, but we really have an exciting lineup ready for this show so we can come out of the gate hot and really just try to make it the best AI focused podcast out there.

It sounds like it's going to be. That's super awesome. Can't wait to listen. And Matt, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Would love to have you back sometimes.

Absolutely. We'd love to, John. It's been fun. Thanks.

Thank you very much. All right, that'll do it for us today. Be sure to check out Matt's show, the Next Wave, wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for tuning in to the Hustle Daily Show. You can head to the link in the description of this podcast to vote for the Hustle newsletter and the Webby Awards. We're a proud part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. Our editor today is Robert Hartwig and our executive producer is Darren Clark. We've got a lot more tech and business coverage in our newsletter. If you're not subscribed, go get yourself signed up at the Hustle Co email and we'll see you tomorrow. Okay, look. Side hustles fail when they consume all of your time. I mean, every single bit of it. The pros, though, work smarter with AI doing all the heavy lifting to help you out. We just dropped the side Hustle accelerator database. You can search your exact problem for your Side Hustle, grab the perfect prompt and get results. If you're struggling with marketing, content and customer service, it's all solved in just seconds. This isn't just another tool, guys. It's your unfair advantage in a spreadsheet. So stop asking AI the wrong questions and start scaling with what actually works. You can get it for free in the link in our show notes and you can stop right now. Actually, why don't you take a look down at those show notes and tap the link. You don't want to sleep on this. Okay, look, Side hustles fail when they consume all of your time. I mean, every single bit of it. The pros, though, work smarter with AI doing all the heavy lifting to help you out. We just dropped the Side Hustle Accelerator database. You can search your exact problem for your Side Hustle, grab the perfect prompt and get results. If you're struggling with marketing, content and customer service, it's all solved in just seconds. This isn't just another tool, guys. It's your unfair advantage in a spreadsheet. So stop asking AI the wrong questions and start scaling with what actually works. You can get it for free in the link in our show notes, and you can stop right now. Actually, why don't you take a look down at those show notes and tap the link. You don't want to sleep on this.