FriYAY!!! I ❤️ AI - AI Leadership Happy Hour

Monique Howard, what? My friend, good to see you. Ah, don't make me cry. It's so good to see you. Monique Howard, what? Uh-oh, that's me. Hold on, hold on. I'm trying to like undo that.

That's me.

All right, there we go.

Hopefully it's still streaming. I shut my window. Hello, Andrea. Good to see you.

Hello.

Thank you for joining, getting on camera, being brave. This is my first time. Amazing. Glad to see you here. Look at all you people. That's all right, I don't mind. We got, uh, oh good, you got a note taker. Last time I— we at the beginning of the call, we had more AI bots than humans. Yeah, I forget now that it just automatically connects That's right, whether you come or not, it's crazy. It's crazy. Um, so good to see you, Joe.

Awesome.

See you here, Matt. What's up? Good to see you. Thank you for coming back, Sarah. We're going on like a lot of time here. Uh, we just got off our AI leadership call, um, for the paid community, and, um, Yeah, we kept talking, talking, and I was like, we need to go and now go right into our free call over here. But this is our AI Leadership Happy Hour call. It's a chance for us to get together, say hello, update each other on all the cool things. I also use it as an opportunity to update you on things that are happening in the AI Leadership Institute as well as what's happening in the I Love AI community. We got lots of fun things coming up and update you on all things Noelle. So I'll do a brief update. I gave the like deep download, uh, to my— to everyone on the AI leadership call. But I'll give you a quick update so you all know the craziness that is Noelle's world, and you can have a little empathy for me and, and all the things that we're doing. Um, good to see you, Mauricio. Thank you for joining us.

Hi, everybody.

Good to see you.

Thank you.

All right, Matt's here too.

All right, cool.

Mike, CFAB? Who's CFAB? What's up? Good to see you. All right, awesome.

Cool.

All right. And it usually takes people to get here a few minutes to get here. We'll let them trickle in. But it's great to see you. Happy Friday. Friday. I am outside the cone of concern. So we are in South Florida, Fort Lauderdale, but we did not get any impact from the weather, which is grateful for me because I was not here all week.

Glad you're safe.

Yes, thank you. I left my family in the danger zone earlier this week, but we were out of the cone when I left, so I didn't tell anybody I was leaving my family at the time. I felt a little guilty about leaving my family in a hurricane, but they were fine. And then my husband, um, yesterday, was it? Yeah, yesterday morning, text me a picture of a tornado like right out off our exit, which is less than like 3 miles from our house.. And I was like, I don't need to see that, but thank you for sharing. But I was in Salt Lake City, like, what was I gonna do? But I'm glad nothing— I mean, I would have left if I thought our house was in any concern. I would have, you know, family first and all, but it wasn't. But I do have a lot of— yeah, I'm sending good vibes to all those that did not make it out of that unscathed, unfortunately. But thank you all for being here. I think it's a, a great day. Lots of cool stuff that's happening. I started my week off on Tuesday in Denver at MGMA, which is a medical organization for leaders. It's an association, doing keynote for them as well as a discussion on building, of course, responsible AI at scale, talking to them about Baby Tigers and the importance of managing AI responsibly. So that was super fun. And then I went right from from there to Grace Hopper in Philadelphia, uh, and that was extremely cool because I don't know if you saw the picture on LinkedIn, but it's like it was a room full of, I don't know, 300 women, uh, that came to see our session, and it was awesome. We took the classic Noelle selfie, and so— but I couldn't take the selfie, so somebody else came and took it for us. But still, it was, it was my intention to take a selfie, but there were so many people, so this guy got up and took it, uh, so that everyone could get involved. And it was really cool to have that many women co-located in one got all thinking about responsible AI. Our session was called the AI— Responsible AI Revolutionaries: How We've Developed Our Careers in the Space. So it was really cool. It was less about responsible AI as a thing and more about as a practice, as a philosophy, as a way of thinking. So it was really, really neat. Lots of questions from the audience. And then I hopped on a plane to Salt Lake City, which is where I was yesterday. So 3 states, 3 days. It's not a record, but it was tied for one of the busiest weeks I've had in a long time. Uh, and in Salt Lake, I was talking to the Center of Responsible Nutrition, where I got to talk to supplement creators about how valuable the world of AI is now that they can create, you know, um, efficacy and proof. There's a company called Radical Science, and their, their product is proof as a service, like really focusing on, as you know, like all of us have probably purchased a supplement in our life. Like, you know, could be good, could not be good, might work, might not work. And so really watching this industry be hyperfocused and vigilant on how do we do tests and clinical trials, and how do we get— use AI to help us synthesize massive amounts of these results in order to find the ability to do precision proactive healthcare. I just thought it was really cool. So I, I am not in that space, of course. I was there as like the, their AI expert. But a lot of the things gave me a lot of hope about what, what they're seeing and how they can create positive in— impact on people and maybe get me not to have to take these gigantic vitamins. That would be amazing if they could do it in like, I don't know, Cotton candy, that would be awesome. Like, they should do that delivery mechanism. Cotton candy for— I mean, my kids would do that all day long. Spun vitamins, like, let's do that. I, I'd imagine that it'd smell terrible, but, uh, but I'm a big fan of changing up the way we've been doing supplements in the past. Um, let's see here. Oh, awesome. Yes. Oh, me. Oh, great. Yeah, exactly. So Joe is also, uh, here in South Florida, also got hardly any wind and rain.

I know.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We've had worse weather with that hurricane, but two hurricanes back to back, that's kind of an— not normal, but I'm hoping we don't get another one before the season's over. Priscilla's in the house. Good to see you, my friend. Awesome. Great to see you here. Thank you for joining us. So that has been my whirlwind week this week. Tomorrow morning, we are headed to Sydney, Australia. So that'll be fun. I will be speaking at South by Southwest in the middle of the week. But I have two really fun, exciting announcements. On Monday, I'm going to be speaking at Macquarie Asset Management and helping them think about— I mean, one of the best use cases for generative AI specifically is in these type of knowledge work fields like analysts, what are they called, like the people in insurance where they like do the actuary work, like that kind of stuff where they're just heavily in document management, having to read lots of documents. And one thing that generative AI is really good at is reading information and synthesizing information, especially when guardrailed properly. So I'm excited to talk to them about how it can help them do better work, not necessarily customer service. I, I don't really lean too deeply into customer service yet. I feel like we're still a bit immature in our AI applications broadly. But definitely in, like, how do we help the helper, right? How do we help the person that's trying to help the human? And I do think that AI is enabling very good spot to do that at scale in these companies. So that's on Monday. Wednesday is my keynote. One of— on Tuesday, I think I'm on a podcast. On Thursday, I hope we're going to the beach. This is my plan right now. And then on Friday, I have a really cool opportunity. I am a guest on a panel at South by Southwest that is sponsored by Dove. So you— if you follow the Dove brand on any of the social medias, I will be— I have 7 posts going out next week that are gonna be promoted by Dove. And in— I don't know. I love the Dove brand. So it's kind of a milestone moment for me where I actually get to evangelize an idea that I love. And then Dove has somehow figured out a way to make what I'm saying mean authentic beauty. And that's cool. I think it's really, really cool. So I'm, I'm a big fan of what they're trying to do in the space, especially when it comes to AI and encouraging everyone, but specifically young women, that they don't need filters, that they can show up on a Friday with no makeup and hair from yesterday and it's totally fine. You know, that we don't, we don't need anything else, that being us is enough. And I, I really do appreciate the Dove brand for that. So, so I'll be partnering with them, from a social media perspective next week in conjunction with that panel. And it's, it is a Dove panel. So it's got Dove executives on the panel. And yeah, so I'm excited for that. And then I come back and I'm gonna be speaking on the 21st. I'm the keynote at the DC Startup and Tech Week. So, Matt, I think you're in the house in that. Hopefully you'll get to come by and say hello. And anyone else who is in the DC area, please let me know. Ah, Gabrielle is here. Hi. Yeah, it's good to see you. So if you happen to be in the DC area for that, would love to see you. And then Tuesday the 22nd and 23rd, we are gonna be doing our 3rd installment of our Bot Builder Workshop. We have lots of people already registered. So I will— I don't send— I have a registration process that goes through Instagram. And none of you would see that. You're not in my little world that I'm advertising to. So I will also send it to you if you wanna join, but you're welcome to join any and all of them. It's either $99 for a one-time fee. We have a mission at the AI Leadership Institute to empower 1 billion people to learn AI. By building AI responsibly in the form of a bot. It's been working really well. I had a goal of a million, and I just did the math and realized, oh my gosh, I've taught over a million people in the last 6 years, which is crazy. So I've told— so I was like, oh no, I can't do a million. So now we're up to a billion. And I think, you know, if AI is any sign, I should be able to— yeah, I should be able to blow it up. But awesome. Yes, please, Andrea, come on up. Ask away or comment or whatever you'd like to say.

Yeah.

I'm curious about the AI bot. I saw that your announcement that people finish. How hard is it if you don't have tech experience? It's built for non-tech. We call it No Code, No Limits.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So it's for everyone. You don't— you do have to have— you'll develop it in the, the class. You do have to have a good clarity of thought, if you will. Like, you're gonna be asking a bot through words to do things you want it to do. But no, it's built for Anyone, if you're technical, you'll like it because it's really cool to build something with no code if you're on the code side. But it's even better if you think you're not a technical person and you'll realize you can build an entire responsible system end to end in less than 4 hours. Oh, I'm interested. Yeah, it'll be fun. It'll be fun. Everyone who's taken it, we get to the end and we have this moment where we turn our bot into a multilingual voice application and it just blows everyone's mind. We're like, hey, wait, wait, wait. What did I just build?

How does it speak Spanish and Mandarin?

Mandarin and Portuguese. It's really awesome. You have to know the language. Like, you'd have to know how to talk to it in the language so it knows how to translate it. But I usually recruit Mauricio. I think, Gabrielle, you can help us with, like, Italian or something, right? You could provide us some.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's right.

So we have some people in the community that speak different languages so we could test your bot and help you see how well it accommodates those things. Yes, Priscilla, good to see you.

Hey, hi everybody, so great to be here amongst greatness. Okay, question.

Hello, hello.

So you, you taught me, like, you really helped me dig deeper into Node.js, Noelle, back in 2016. Yes. I took the knowledge, like, I remember, like, we reviewed code, you were, um, doing some skills for Lady A, if I say her name. Yes, yes, going to be invoked.

Yes.

So if I was able to build the bot on my own outside, but with your knowledge, I don't mind if I still have to pay a fee. I just would like the certificate. For sure.

Yeah, you're an OG, so you don't count. Yeah, you're like already— you did that already. Um, anyone who was like part of that original group, like in February, and we did this whole thing, yeah, you all are in the, in the club. But if you're brand new to the community, everyone always, you know, everyone has to— it's $100, it's no big deal. Um, and it sponsors the platform for everyone. So, uh, it's a really cool opportunity. But yeah, no, I wouldn't worry about that. And if you— we do have a couple different options. So if you're a student, for example, if you're between jobs, if $99 is going to hurt you and it'll keep you from getting a skill that I think will change your life, like, just text me, just send me a message, we'll make it happen. Um, but most of the time, like I said, $99 is not going to change my life.. But you investing it in yourself, it will likely change yours. Like, it's not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna get a bigger house because you gave me $99, but, uh, you will because you invested in it. You might show up, you might not too. I have people who pay, don't come. But if you pay for something, you come and you show up and you're invested. And I found that that's like the sweet spot. Like, if it's too cheap, people don't— people will pay and not come. If it's too expensive, people are like, ah, it's too expensive. But $99 seems like something that everyone can invest in themselves and you get a certification. And I don't know if you know this, but like it's, it's a pretty— it's well received in the marketplace because they look it up and then they find me and then they're like, I know Noelle, she's cool beans.

So yeah, well, I invested in Noelle since 2016, so I, you know, I wouldn't have learned that without Noelle. So, okay, cool. Thank you.

Of course.

Of course. Awesome. So that being said, we also will have a couple other things. We just I love it when I talk to the AI. So the other option is if you want, there is an AI Leadership membership and you get access to all the things for free. So every class I deliver, every workshop I do, you are the beta testers for everything. So you get access for free. It is $797 for the year or $100, like $97 a month. That's why we only do Bot Builder. We, we, once you do it once, you can come back as many times as you want. You don't have to pay again. It's just like I said, it's an investment in yourself to prove that it's not Like, it's skin in the game, and I believe it's a really important part of the process. But we are gonna be doing after the Bot Builder workshop, we have until November 1st to get what's called the AI Skills Challenge from Microsoft. It's a badge. It's really cool. It's good to have on your LinkedIn profile. And so that we're gonna be doing right after the Bot Builder workshop. It's another couple hours, maybe an hour a day plus an hour of Q&A each day. So 2 hours if you stay for all the Q&A. Some of you won't. But when you do that, we're gonna actually do the live— oh, it might still be in my— yeah, here we go. So I just put that in the chat if you wanna go check it out. You could do it without me. Like, you don't have to do it with me. But if you do it with me, you'll get my perspective on it. We are gonna be doing Document Intelligence because we don't talk about that enough, and it's such a cool model, and it's not a generative model. So we'll break from, like, I love generative AI to an actual set of AI models, OCR, handwriting, really cool. Like vision models that I think would be really fun for us to, to take a look at. We'll leverage doc— we'll take in documents, we'll analyze them, and we will get 100% accuracy on their transcription into code, which is fun. And no skills, no tech skills are needed. It's just a chance to get exposure. And at the end, Microsoft will give you a badge. Yes, Matt, go on. How are you?

Hey.

Hi, Nicole. I'm doing well. Thank you for asking. Not in the normal area, getting the car's oil changed. So, you know, dialing in from the dealership. But, um, no, just a few things. Um, one, uh, definitely, uh, am interested in that walking through the AI thing with you. I think that'd be really cool. I'm definitely going to look into that. Um, two, uh, when you're in DC for, you know, one of the conferences, um, yeah, just hit me up, whatever, coffee, lunch, happy hour, Anytime. And 3, I just, I just wanted to share some news with the group. So the hackathon I was in with Strawberry for Microsoft, or for, I'm sorry, OpenAI-01. Well, it concluded and, you know, it's pretty legit, right? So I put the, I put a little demo video of the app, me and the team and I built, and also you have access to the GitHub repository, right? So if you want to go check out the code and what we were able to do with 01, in the open beta. It was, it was really cool. So I just wanted to let everyone aware of that as well.

Amazing. I'm going to try and because you're on the road, I'm going to try and find that really quick and copy it into the chat for people who haven't seen it yet. Because I am— we— I don't spam everyone. Some of you have notifications turned on. I'd encourage you to do it. If you see a post you like, there's a little bell inside the community. You can turn it on so you get notified when these types of things come out. About once a week I send an email to everyone and it usually is like an update post or an announcement type post. Post, but I don't want you to get to the point where you're like, no more email from you. So I try to be very careful about that. But I do wanna let you know you can control your notifications inside the school application by looking at different posts or categories and turning on that bell symbol so that it'll let you know. But I do have it here, so I'm gonna grab the link and throw it into the chat for everyone so you can go take a look. But yeah, I love it. That's so cool. Thank you for sharing that.

Thing. Yeah, of course, totally. And I'm actually starting one with Microsoft Fabric on Monday. So, you know, I'll be able to, you know, once we get done with that, I mean, I'll post the results in the chat so you guys can see what we were able to do and the functionality and all that, just so everyone kind of learns, you know.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. And if you ever need testers, I mean, that this group is great at testing out apps. So if you ever need testers at the end of a hackathon, feel free to throw the link in the chat and people will go and kill it.

Oh, that is so awesome. Thank you so very much. Um, yeah, it's just, you know, like, life happened. It was a crunch. It was like, oh, we got to get this crap out, get out there, you know, that type of thing, you know, get in by the deadline. But, um, but, but one more thing, and I, I put the question in the chat, like, you mentioned earlier, um, about utilizing generative AI for data analysis, you know, for the structuring essentially of unstructured data. Um, would you be willing to start a, a, like, you know, like your category for your thoughts on that and the use case. Yeah. Yeah. If you would please, like, I would love to like see that conversation play out on message boards. I think there's a lot of meat there for the community to have. Awesome. Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, that's a great idea. I think we created events last time with your guidance too. So every week we won't be able to create a new category every time.

Oh, I'm, I'm sorry. I mean, you could just put it as a general discussion.

I know, I'm not, I'm not saying anything. I actually think it's great. Yeah.

But I, I'm very— Okay.

Okay. Yeah.

Then I, I just wanna get the information out of your brain cuz I am very curious as to what your thoughts are for that use case.

Yeah. So no, I'll put it in as a message and then if we have a lot of, like, there are definitely analysts on this call, that are more on the analytical side. Yeah. And even on the machine learning side. So I think you're right. I think there's a lot of meat we could end up biting into there. And if that is the case, we could always make it its own topic if it becomes something that we're all really excited about. And we wanna, like, save them. You know, that's the only reason I create a topic is if I wanted to quickly go and find those answers. If it's just a discussion, then we'll, we'll do it on chat. But, but great idea. I love it. There's so many of these where I'm like, oh, I should write that down. Should put that out there somewhere, build a framework about it or something. So this will be great. I'll just write in some of the use cases I saw.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Start your own knowledge base. 100%. 100%. Yeah, awesome.

Cool.

Thank you for that. There's your— and I missed that question.

Well done.

Yes, awesome. Uh, let's see, did I miss anybody?

Thank you.

You're welcome, Matt. Thanks for joining us abroad. Um, let's see. Uh, okay, cool.

Awesome.

So yeah, so I think we have got a bunch of fun things, uh, coming into the end of the year. In December, um, I will be— for the AI Leadership Institute, I'll be hosting an MVP boot camp. So I'm going to teach what it takes to become a Microsoft MVP. One of our members, I don't know if she— oh yeah, Sherry's on here. She had said that, you know, it is a credibility builder. So for the— if you're looking to build your credibility, but granted, one thing to know when you— I've also done this. I helped build the Champion Program and the— do y'all remember the Alexa Champions like back in the day? Anyway, I helped build this program and then I got a bunch of people nominated and awarded that. And I was like, but I want, I want to have that insignia and I never could get it. And then I got awarded by Microsoft and then Amazon was like, you're definitely never going to get it now. So just know that MVP is awesome. I encourage everyone to go after it, especially if you're a Microsoft, like if that's a technology stack you know and care about. But also know that it, it could potentially create friction if you want to get into Amazon or Google because they will see you as is, you know, in cahoots with their enemy. And it's crazy. It shouldn't matter. We should be celebrated for our agnosticism. But that's not the way it is sometimes when it comes down to opportunities and— like, I actually found out over time when people find out who you are and you're really good about promoting the way you think. So last year I was invited by AWS and paid, even though I was an MVP, paid to be on stage at the AWS Startup Summit. Event that was on generative AI, their very first generative AI event. And it was actually with this guy, what was his name? Patunde, Patunde Thurston. Anyway, his last name's Thurston. He just launched a new PBS show. But he was the host. And I was like, oh, see, we could all be friends. But here is what happened. So I go, Amazon hires me. I'm like, great, no problem. I mentioned Microsoft 3 or 4 times in the thing. Nobody said anything. It was all good. Everyone's happy.

I come back and Build happens.

The BUILD conference. This is like 3 months later. And literally a person walks by and goes, "So how'd it go at Amazon?" Like in this super mean, like, "Who do you— who are you with? What side are you on?" And I was like, "Yes, it went fine." Like, I was like a little bit like, "Well, you don't be mad. Are you mad?" I even found out, like, I was working for a company at the time people like I got shamed apparently in the leadership for going and working at Amazon when I was supposedly aligned with Microsoft. So just be aware that sometimes these create an unfair perception that you are aligned with a brand when it's an award. They award you for your contributions and it has nothing to do with their product. Of course, I am. I mean, I mentioned their products. I actually think they're the best in market around some of the responsible AI and safety activities that they've done. So I talk about that, but they're awarding your advocacy in the space of the technology that you get the award in. In my case, in responsible AI, they're not saying, oh, do you do pitches on, on Microsoft AI all the time? Like, that's not what they're awarding. So anyway, but people are weird and all it, it, it could be. I just, I encourage you to take it if you want to just learn how to do it, but make a decision. And I just wanna be transparent that sometimes if you're all in on Google and you go get a Microsoft award, they might be wondering where your loyalty lies. Sad but true. Um, but my loyalty always lies with the best solution for my customer, as I know many of you agree with. So do whatever it takes. Uh, that's what I say.

I—

and that's— people speak in high school. What?

Say that again.

Oh, sorry, I said some people just peak in high school. They can't leave.

That's right, that's right. And it hurts, it hurts them. Yes, that's all right. When these things happen, you just ask them, who hurt you? Um, or just think Yeah, think in their mind. Somebody must have heard them along the way. Anyway, so really cool stuff. Very exciting. Yeah, exactly. I recommend that for all of you who are builders. I am actually in the process of building JusticeGPT, the Justice as a Service, JaaS platform. It's called JaaS Life, actually. I think we called it— maybe it's JaaS platform.

I can't remember.

But we did the whole, like, generative AI knuckles where it was like JaaS Life. Tattooed on your knuckles. It was very cool. But Justice as a Service is a multi-agent platform that allows a nonprofit to get help with all the things that I perceive to be the things that they struggle with the most, which ends up being like fundraising and marketing and talking to donors and objection handling. How do they like navigate that, as well as how do they help their volunteers be more efficient in their work? Because they've got a bunch of people that they don't pay. And so you want them to stay, you want them to feel rewarded. So we created an internal reward system. So every time they do a thing positively, they get a reward. Volunteers don't get money, so we gotta give them something. So we end up leveraging a lot of, kind of non-monetary reward systems through generative AI through this platform. So I'm building that. So, as I mentioned, all of us are, you know, many of us would be happy to help test some of the things that Matt's doing in his hackathons. Of course, I'll be extending an opportunity for you to become a tester on the Justice as a Service platform. This is for dream.org, but it's also for any nonprofit as we expand our client base beyond them. And then, but if you— and I just wanted to say that to let you know, if you're building something, please know you have a community of people that are willing to test it. Like, this is one of my favorite things about the— I don't let everyone in here. I know we've Did you see our numbers? Like, oh my gosh, we're this close to 1,000. 1,000. It's crazy. And I'm hand-selecting. I'm like, nope, not you. And the people I do not let in here are people who don't think— like, I'm looking in your— you don't have to have a bio. It's fine. I do want you to have a picture, or at least something. Mauricio has taught me that maybe not everybody wants to share their picture. So, okay, maybe you don't have a picture. But when I ask you, like, what do you want to gain from the community? You know, I'm hoping you're not going to be like an affiliate partner or like an opportunity to sell my stuff, a new audience. And people luckily are very transparent about that. But if you don't— or one person, it was a bot, I think it just said, yeah, Y-E-A-H. Yeah. What do you want to get from this community? Yeah. So you didn't get in, by the way. So I am— I am the only one with accept and reject capability. I have only banned 3 people because we are very careful about who we let in. But sometimes they do get by. So if you see something in the community that seems weird or unnatural or promotey or spammy or makes you feel uncomfortable, literally, please hit the button that says report to admins. That's me. That is Sherilyn. That's a few other people in the community that are just there to help keep the nonsense at bay. We have one of the best, like, least amount of nonsense going on in our community. We have the least amount of bots. We are celebrated for that in the school community. We have really— I'm actually going to Vegas to be— the school community is owned, or at least heavily invested in, by a guy named Alex Hormozi, and he is bringing a bunch of people to Vegas in December. And so I will be doing a 2-day workshop with him in December, which is pretty cool. To talk about scaling this business. But in order for me to get there, I did have to commit to growing our community. So you'll see a lot more promotion, a lot more like hard, acting of people. Like, if you want to learn to build systems safely and responsibly, like, be here, be there, be square. So that being said, you might see a lot because you're already in my algorithm. You'll see a lot more of that type of talk in our, in my feed. But I think it's all good. A lot of the people that I— that join our community are not tech people. And I think that's the most important audience to, like, attract because everyone's tech people now. That's my belief is everybody's a tech person. They may just not have, you know, generated that awareness or flex that muscle yet. But I mean, if you own a smartphone, you're a tech person. So helping people learn how to use the tech that they're exposed to and leveraging every day, I think is really important. Priscilla, I just noticed your hand is still up. Is it still up or did you—

Oh yeah. Yes, it's totally okay. I'm just sorry. Really? I'm in agreement with what you're saying.

Okay, cool.

Don't worry. Yeah, I just wanted to point out that stemming back when Amazon really pushed out Amazon Alexa through you, Noelle, like you were in the forefront of that. I learned instantly. I was like, okay, there's something here. Now everyone else is really going to be pushing that forward. So I started utilizing the Lingua, like, AI platform agnostic so that there was a clear message to everyone, like saying, hey, I work with Google, I work with Microsoft, I work with OpenAI, I do all these things. Now that's how I like to present myself, just to eliminate the, oh, you're, you know, I thought you were just Amazon or you were just Microsoft. And another thing is, Matt, I'm really looking forward to using, utilizing what they did, that whole project. What's helpful coming from a research background would be like how Noelle was pointing out that sometimes you really need to be careful with these different languages and how they're being presented. One tip I would use is like go to the different models and say, translate this language to English and see what they respond to you. If that's something you're going to use to update, let's say, a GPT or your chatbot or something like that, that is really, really helpful for anyone who's interested in really nurturing in RAG as well. So those are my two things.

No, totally. I appreciate you. Thank you so much.

Welcome.

Yeah, it's cool. We're going to live vicariously through your projects and then eventually, hopefully, Matt, you'll figure out either a way to get like, let us know when they're happening. I think, are you posting some of these in the event section or how would someone like join?

Yeah, yeah, no, I, yes, I did. So I did solicit the OpenAI team into the group. Didn't get anyone from here, but that's fine. My Microsoft Fabric team is already locked in because like I said, that's of course on Monday. And, but the next one that rolls through, I mean, yeah, I'll throw it back up in the chat. Yeah. And definitely tag me. Yeah, totally.

Because sometimes it gets lost in the feed. I, I maybe do a lot of posts in the day. So, yeah, tag me so that I, it gets—

Yeah, sure.

So I can maybe even resend it out in a message so everyone sees it. Because just sometimes, you know, it's like that and job alerts are kind of like big things that are really time sensitive. I'm sure there are people here who are like, well, wait, I didn't see the one on OpenAI. I would have done that, you know? So Yeah. So let me know so I can make sure you get that.

Yeah, no, no, totally.

Yeah.

Cool. Awesome.

All right.

And like I said, if I get the time, I'll just take the— not just the ones I'm participating in, but I'll try and pull the full list because they're published like, you know, about a month or two in advance and just try and throw it up there. Awesome. I will attempt to do that.

You know, like I said, if it's in a public link, you could send it to me and Sherilyn can help, like, put it on.

Okay.

Yeah.

Then cool. Then cool.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'll just, I'll just shoot it to you probably later on today or tomorrow. Sometime this weekend.

Thanks, Sherilyn. I know I just committed you to—

Okay.

Yeah. I think that'd be awesome. And then we could put them on the calendar and that way—

Yeah.

No worries.

I got it.

Yeah. Because I just worry that people miss it and then like, but I would have done that if I saw it. And it's just hard to get, you know, bubble the right things up. So I can help with that. Amazing.

Sweet.

Well, yeah.

Yeah.

Like I said, I'll reach out this weekend. I can do that.

Totally.

Awesome. Thank you.

All right, Monique.

Good to see you. Thank you for joining us. How are you?

I'm good. How are you? Hi everyone. Great. So who is that? Matt talking about the hackathon? I just wanted to mention that there's one for women that Microsoft— I believe it's Google. Google has one for women, She Builds AI, through Devpost. So it's supposed to be beginner-friendly. I think, you know, obviously the need to have more women and even girls. The age can go— I believe the age can go down to like 13 or something like that. So I think it's great, you know, that they're doing hackathons specifically because it's the first time I've seen it this year for women.

Oh my gosh, I love it.

And that's something I'll put that in the chat just in case any—

Oh, I just— yeah, I just threw it in, but I threw in the more global one that goes to the— I presume you were in the event, which is how you knew about it, maybe. Um, because there was like some event on the 9th, which would have been like 2 days ago.

Yeah, I missed it, but I had been looking at it. Yeah, I just— I had that for it, but I, I, um, yeah, that's what you put in the chat. So I just— I didn't know if anyone else knew about it, but I just, you know, there's a lot of women here, so just wanted to mention it.

I love it. Thank you for doing that. I love it. We'll put it on the calendar too. This is awesome. And I like that, yeah, apparently there was an event. It's sad. See, maybe there's something to this Microsoft MVP thing, but I did not even see anything from Google. So, but, but I love this because there's actually, I think you can go and watch the recording of that event and there were some really great speakers. And then under at the bottom of that page it says join the hackathon. So that's pretty cool. And 100%, if anybody wants to do that, you could even— maybe I'll create a post and you guys, you can connect together and even join or create a team just of members here if that's interesting to anyone. But really fun. That's cool. Awesome. And let's see. So thank you for that. And Monique and I also go way back, way, way, way back. Noelle Russell. I talk about your work all the time. Was that you, Mauricio?

Yes. So maybe if you could expand on, pardon my ignorance, but kind of what is really a hackathon? What's the main goal and how is it?

Oh, sure.

I heard the term many times.

Yes, this is a great point because we're not all like—

Oh, that's such a good topic.

Yeah, exactly. You're welcome to chime in, Matt. One of the things, as a matter of fact, one of the ways that I built the awareness that Priscilla is talking about in Alexa, and this is like 10 years ago, is that we had a mission, like Jeff Bezos gave us metrics to measure the success of our, like, building and, and advocating for the use of Alexa globally. And our number one metric for measuring success was the number of hackathons that we did in a year. And what that meant is that we'd go to an, an organization. So let's say a lot of companies do it now. They even do them online virtually. Devpost, thank you for mentioning that, Monique, So Devpost, I was trying to remember that last week when we were talking about this. That's a site that has a lot of hackathons. You can actually go back and look at my old hackathons that I've done. You can do individual projects. You can also join teams. And a lot of companies sponsor hackathons on this. But the, the definition of a hackathon is usually a set period of time where you are given an opportunity to create end-to-end a solution. So ideate, create, design, develop, deploy, and pitch. Now, obviously, you have usually a very specific period of time, and it's usually very compressed. So anywhere between 24 hours, or I should say 4 hours and 48 hours, is usually where it goes most, or at least a day, sometimes 2. I loved it back then, pre-COVID. We did hackathons like in person. And I've, I've been in or hosted over 100 hackathons. And in these hackathons, like, they would be in person and we would be in beanbags. You would take turns sleeping because you were building overnight, and your job at the end— it's a competition. So your job at the end is every hackathon participant is judged against a rubric that is predefined that you're building towards, and then they build a finalist, and then the finalists pitch. And then from those you get a set, like a first, second, and third place winner. And when I was doing this, there was a lot of money to be made. So I did one in Vegas at— I think it was at re:Invent, maybe. Yeah, it was at re:Invent in Vegas, and the winner got $100,000 if they won the hackathon. It was 2 days nonstop. People slept on the floor. People like— it was crazy. But the winner— and they were building— I mean, this was in the heyday of Alexa, so everyone was building devices. Like it was all hardware driven. They were building stuffed animals that had like Alexa Raspberry Pis in them. They had like babies that were— you'd put a baby on a crib and you'd have all these sensors that would then trigger a device. And so, so hackathons give you a chance to really build any hypothesis out end to end. But usually there's a metric for measuring the success of your project. These are the judging criteria. And then at the end you get judged and potentially you win and potentially you get something for winning. Sometimes you just get a badge and that street cred is enough. But at many organizations they've changed the name because hackathon is so tech-focused. At NPR we did a yearly hackathon, but ours was called Serendipity Days. So different organizations have framed it different to make it less hacky. But I like, I like the concept of it, which is you dedicate time, you get away away from everything. You put yourself in a room for 2 days and you build something. And you don't just build a little thing, like, you build it enough to sell someone on it. So you have to build a demo. Sometimes the demos are not functional. Sometimes they're just like Figma demos and screens, but it shows you've thought through a process. I think, Monique, didn't you do a, a hackathon of— or a few hackathons? Yeah. So with Smarticles, right? Yes. So anyway, she's got some great experience as well. And it's great because it allows you to validate an idea in a very short period of time and decide if it's something that you maybe even want to spend more time on. At NPR, I got my executives to fund the projects that were in the top 3. I got them to fund $50,000 to each project. You didn't get money as an employee, but you got 50 grand in company investment to help you build that idea to the next phase. And that can be pretty exciting. Any, anyone else, maybe Matt or anyone else who wants to chime in on on hackathons and descriptions, definitions, experiences.

Yeah, sure, sure. So I can tell my personal journey. I came into artificial intelligence from the business side of the house where I was lucky enough to work on a corporate native generative AI instance, essentially as a senior business analyst, use case development, all that stuff. And that was about 2 years ago, a little over. And so mind blown. Right? Like, so, you know, like just like, oh my God, you know, like I see the light, you know, for decades of really complex, like, like operational stuff I've dealt with. So I just went full on into AI. And even though the academic side was difficult, the practical application is even more so. So, you know, I spent all of my time, you know, like, like doing the Microsoft certifications. That's how I went in because I've worked with Microsoft my whole life. So yeah, let's go Microsoft native for the certs and to learn that, you know, the terminology lexicon and understand the functional basics, right? And then after that, I was like, okay, well, this is really cool. And so really the only way at that point to start building out my technical skill set, because trust me, with AI, you need it. You need to technically understand these tools that you are working with. It's just like being an auto mechanic.

Right?

Like, if you want to work on the car, you need to know which wrench to turn, um, and how to turn it. So anyways, and so I started doing online hackathons, and, um, they're a little bit different, right? Um, because, you know, you're spaced out, you know, you got a team like, you know, Pakistani, Indian, Australian, Indonesian, Filipino. Like, it's great for, you know, multicultural, like, coordination experience. Um, and yeah, and I just started doing those, and that's how I learned my hands-on keyboard time AI. Like, that's how it's happened, and it continues to happen. So, um, to me, they're an invaluable online tool that lasts anywhere from 4 to 7 days, um, and you essentially act as a beta tester for an LLM, or the ones that I do anyways, because I like really generative AI solutions. Um, and, uh, yeah, you build out solutions, and it's just like, um, what Noelle Russell Russell said, you know, you do the pitch and like there's prize money involved, and, you know, to win would be amazing, but, you know, just the fact that, you literally every week I'm getting keyboard time in a different LLM is just done wonders for my professional and technical development. So I would highly recommend them. And that's all I got unless you got questions.

Yeah, wonderful. I think one of the most interesting things of hackathons is that it's a team sport, usually, ideally. That is the most valuable thing is that it's a team sport because technically our Bot Builder Bootcamp is definitely hackathon style, except I want— I give participation trophies. Judge me if you will. I don't really. You have to do something to get a certification, but everyone can play and everyone technically wins when you build a bot and do your homework. The difference with hackathons is there's grading, and I think that just changes the nature of it. It kicks in this competitive spirit, especially when you see that other people are working and demoing and you're like, wait, wait, wait. Well, like, you— it creates this kind of energy that happens, but it's a team sport, and that's why I like them is because on that team you do need someone who knows the technical side, but you also need someone who understands how to document and build a communication strategy. You need someone who knows how to build a, a pitch deck. And when you all come together, you realize the value of those skills. But you also, as a founder, realize that they don't all have to come from you. And as a matter of fact, it's better if they don't all come from you. Like, you leverage other people for their skill set and that they can be technical and non-technical alike. And when those things come together, And in a 2-day period, you gotta figure it out really quickly. Like, you have to figure out who's gonna do what and who's gonna be accountable for what. And in some hackathons, you'll be on a team where one person takes all the things and you're like, I guess I'll just, you know, like, you don't really know what you're doing. In others, you have a, a leader that gets involved and they, you know, are really good at assessing the teammates and bringing them in together and making sure everyone feels like they're part— like, that's the kind of person I am. I come in and I'm like, what do you do? What do you do? What do you do? Okay. And then even if there's cross-pollination, I'm like, great, then you guys are going to work together on these deliverables. But like, with— it could go either way. And both experiences are extremely valuable. Like, neither one is good or bad. Like, being on a team where you're like, what am I supposed to do? And being on a team that's well-run and organized, it's all fun. And the more you do, the more reps you put in, the better you are. And all of those reps count. Like, this is one thing I find a lot of people don't do is they don't, they don't even like record the fact that they built these systems. And I'm like, you will do more in 2 days than most people will do like in their career, or at least in a month. Like, you will gain so much experience compressed in these 2 days that it's— you wanna then, like, again, as part of the skill set, you wanna codify that into a project, which is why there's a GitHub repo, right? And then you leverage. Yeah, I love that you said that. Like, go look at what Matt just did, even just as an example, because that's a reference you can use. Like, you could say, I did that thing. I built, for Mixed— no, it was Mixed Reality at Microsoft. It was a hackathon on Mixed Reality. I ended up building a— and I had no— I had no one when I got there, and I ended up with 5 team members, and they were just walking around. None of them knew AI. None of them knew A, like, um, AR, VR, and I had a HoloLens and like, we're doing this. And I wanted to create a system that allowed you to talk, obviously leveraging voice, 'cause that's my skillset. I wanted you to talk to your system. And in my case, I wanted to connect to, there's like, um, are you guys familiar with those kids coding, like Scratch, right? Where it's a WYSIWYG coding environment, you put blocks together, but in Scratch you like are in an app and you click and drag and they connect. And I wanted to say, I wanted to do it all with my voice. Voice and with my hands, but no devices, no weird pinching. Like, I wanted to be all like as accessible as possible. Anyway, we got it working. We ended up got getting it to work where you could build an application and at the end it would blow up. That was the goal. So you'd put 5 or 6 pieces together and then at the end, if you connected it successfully, it would trigger this TNT box and it would go, it was really cool. And you did it all with your voice. Move this box to this box. Take the red box connected to the green box. Box, take the green box, connect it to the purple box. And it wasn't about like how cool— it was just, can I get a voice, real-time voice interaction to move things in ARV? Like, this is Unity, you know, Unreal Engine. Like, can you— it's very hard to get that real-time connectivity, but we did it. Um, and when we were done, like, the own— the mixed reality, like, uh, CVP, the corporate vice president, was like, this is awesome. They ended up adopting the project. I don't know what happened to it because I was just hackathon person. But now when that hit the market I was like I helped build that because I did you know? I'm like I did that thing! And so you never know in these hackathons a lot of times you're building products that will eventually become really popular or at least become a product that you can reference in the world and even if it's not but sometimes it does and that's pretty cool too yeah hey one more— sorry Priscilla have fun with your afternoon.

One more thing though I just wanted to point out real quick Sorry, Matt.

Is that with the DevPost projects, you can also, like you just said, present them. I remember with my community, a generative AI community on a social app, we worked, collaborated together, and we were able to show step by step by step what we did with the natural language processing, with collaborating, like the product manager, and just how we put everything together. Also, um, Mauricio, I think you're the one that asked about this, you also earn badges and they give you products. So like, um, Amazon gave us a Raspberry Pi, you know, which was amazing. So they give you things to work with too.

That's a great point because that's one of the things on Alexa. I wasn't doing hackathons, I was the sponsor, right? I was Amazon Alexa. So we'd come in and we'd bring devices, we'd bring Raspberry Pis, we'd bring like all these, like, different speech recognition platforms so that we would encourage everyone. And for 2 years running, every hackathon, big hackathon like Maker and like these huge hackathons, everyone in the top 10 would have Alexa. And that was our metric for success. Like, are the hackathon winners— do they have Alexa in their solution? And what my selling point would be is I'd go in and be like, no matter how cool your thing is, it's better if you can talk to it. That's literally what I would tell everybody. Alright. So in the spirit of that, I'm gonna share with you one of the hackathon projects that I did. This is from a long time ago. I actually don't know what's on this page. I just saw it come up when I did a Google search. So this is my Alexa bartender bot. And it literally is a box. Yeah. This is like old hardcore hackathon. And so I built a—

Oh, yeah.

Oh, I can see.

Yeah, this leverages 5— I basically want to build a Negroni for Jeff Bezos. It's his favorite drink. So I created an Alexa skill tied to DC motors, tied to silicone tubing, tied to 5 individual liquor bottles that when activated, it didn't look pretty, but when activated, it would gen— like they would all pour into a single cup with a square or sphere ice in it and make a Negroni. Journey. So the cool thing is, but you can kind of see it, you can see like the hardware that I use, you can see the products that I, the software platforms that I use. They also, I think, I can't remember if it's on this one or another one, but I went on, I built all the schematics out. So before I built, I burned so many Pis at the, in this stage of my career, like hundreds of them because I didn't, I didn't understand hardware. As a matter of fact, one of my friends ended up buying me I think I still own it, an Electronics for Dummies. And it's kind of like what, Matt, you were saying, like, when you get into this space, you now have to learn a new thing. But here's the cool part about that. Like, anyone can learn the thing. It is science. So it's learnable. It's not an art. You're not having to figure out brushstrokes and, like, creativity. It's like, follow the steps. So I would literally do that. And of course, I followed the steps and I busted it. Like, it broke. Many, many times. So anyway, it's— I think I wrote the story in here. I'll put the chat in there for you all to see. The code is, yeah, in my Bartender Bot. So this is my GitHub repo. So you can go and see the Python code that I used to actually trigger the robot. But it was just fun. And I used a CNC wood cutting machine to build the bartender box. Like, I was all in. It was super fun though. And like, had I ever, ever touched electronics before? Nope. I had built Alexa skills, and that's how I ended up winning the competition, was that I could just say, Alexa, make me a Negroni. And all the electronics that I did was fancy in its own right. All that stuff worked. But it was just so cool that I could just ask it, and magic happened to everyone that watched. And that's why, you know, no matter what you do in a hackathon, I'm like, at the end, and like just trigger with your voice. It's the, it's the easiest.

Is your repo in the chat?

I'm sorry, what?

Is your repo in the chat?

Not yet. I will send it over. This is the bartender bot, but I have all of my, all my hackathons and all my skills that I built for Amazon are all in the repo, are all in my, in my GitHub.

Yep.

So I'll throw it in there for you.

Oh, it's invaluable.

Yeah, it's really cool. And that's what I encourage you all to do, especially at this stage. You're not building anything that's trade secret. Share, share, share, like build it, share it, build it, share it. And people will— you'd be surprised how many people like use what you built and you'll be like, I didn't know what I was doing, but it turns out to be good because you're just figuring it out. That's why I like— that's why we call it hacking because you're literally just like, you're just trying stuff. It's like massive, very fast. Yes, very fast iterative development, except you could win prizes. And you almost always at least get a sticker. And if you're like me, that's enough sometimes. So anyway, I thought I would share, share that with you because it's— and it stays on. It lives in infamy. I mean, look at— I did this in 2016. So that's a long time ago. And there's a bunch of these. I did one on Hackster. I did one on Devpost. So yeah, it lives on forever. So you can like put this on LinkedIn and have people— I don't have this one on LinkedIn. I should probably put it on there. But it's pretty cool anyway.

Just a classic.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's fun. All right, here we go. Let's see here.

Yay!

And Sendrika, it's always good to see you. I know we have lots of people that are in different places and can't jump on, but I always want to say how grateful I am that you're here and we love you as much as you love us. It's really awesome. So if you all have time, yeah, you're welcome to peruse around the bartender bot. But it was fun. I actually got the idea because I was like, can I build a robot that bartends? And then I found out Jeff wanted a Negroni, and it just kind of grew from there. No problem, Matt. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, we're right at time anyway. Anyone else have some fun and exciting things? Anything to share? Bye, Matt.

Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed joining us today. I am leaving in like a few hours to Sydney, Australia. So And I just landed this morning at 6. So I'm going to spend the rest of today with my kids. Mauricio, anything? Were you going to say something? I feel like you were.

I was going to say thank you for the explanation.

Oh yeah, that was, yeah, it might have been very long.

It's, um, but it's amazing how you, you, you talk a lot about, um, kind of finding what, what your product is going to try to do. And we discussed that in the previous, in the previous call. And it's amazing here how we're looking at hackathons and sometimes we borrow terms, but they mean completely different things for many people. And so I used to work for a corporation that if you come and tell them, hey, I'm going to do a hackathon, they show you the door.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because they're like, that's a violation.

Hackathon, hackers, going to steal my data. No, no, no, just out. Out of here.

Yes.

We're, and so it goes. So sometimes some of those terms we believe, we use them so often, we believe, but it's just for the people around us that know, know those terms and not.

You're right. And that's why, like, at MBR, and it, and it's something to think about because remember earlier today we were talking about AI consultancies and doing like a one-day hackathon that you'd have to be careful. Like you said, I couldn't go to Caterpillar or John Deere and be like, hey, right? I'd have to name it something different.

It would be like you're gonna have a mini competition. I mean, yeah, at the end we're gonna do a mini competition where you do one, you know, since the— in, for, for, uh, in business terms, uh, people are familiar with these, uh, business case competitions. Oh yeah, so you can say, oh, we're gonna do AI business case competition. You sold. I'm gonna do a hackathon. No.

Yeah.

So that's all about knowing your audience, right? But 100%, we own how we use that term and, but how unfortunate it would be, right? If we don't have that consideration and that industry never gets exposure to like this type of thinking because we don't, we don't think empathetically about what that might cause them to be worried about. Right? So I love that. That's really important. Amazing. Thank you, Sherry. I will have a very safe trip.

I will.

Someone told me, I think it was Sandrine, to stay hydrated and walk on the plane. Um, I'm on the aisle, so I'm happy. Uh, my husband's not, but are you gonna do any sightseeing? Yes, yes, we're gonna go. So last year we didn't get to go to the zoo, so we're gonna go to the zoo, um, and see our favorite marsupials. And then we're going to also go to Bondi Beach intentionally. We went very quickly on our way out last year, but I'm gonna dive into the ocean, uh, in Australia, which I did not get to do last here. So that would be amazing.

Um, watch out for the sharks.

The shark.

Yeah, thank you.

Did I—

which call was that in where I talked about the new shark meter or whatever? He could take pictures for the shark book. Um, yes, absolutely. Um, oh my gosh, it's so, uh, interesting. Yes, uh, Syndrika is asking about kiddos. Uh, we are building— one of the things that I'm very passionate about is actually building out So I always say I go from the boardroom to the whiteboard to the keyboard. And in— when I'm talking to educators, I also add in the chalkboard, right? That I— we go all the way, like, the same skills that are needed for an executive to understand the value of AI, a kid needs to understand as they move into a world that's gonna be heavily driven by AI. And so I actually have partnered with MIT. They have an organization. So there's content and curriculum for kids. There is very few people who know how to teach it. And so I am putting together a— it's basically a recorded train the trainer for teachers to learn how to teach this content. But I would love to think about maybe something we could do as a community. Think about how we maybe create an event that people— that kids could come to, that our kids could come to. They give them the same experience. They'd all build a bot.

It would be awesome.

Right?

Yeah.

And, oh, and I'm doing it with the Girl Scouts. So 2 of my girls are Brownies this year, which is like the second from— they're not little littles, they're the next level up. But it— I'm teaching them the Bot Builder Boot Camp, and they're gonna get— they get 3 badges as a result of that. How to Think Like a Programmer, Building a Bot is actually a badge that they can earn, and Design Thinking is another badge. So we're gonna do all of that in a workshop. So I think that's another thing we could extend, right, to, to not just Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, but also schools, especially underrepresented schools that will likely be not the first to get educators. Yeah, I was going to suggest, being the design thinking guy I am— yay, Legos! Yes, I love it. Design, design thinking with Legos. So build a product design. You know, like maybe a handheld device or something like that. Or anything, whatever. That kids are interested in.

Yeah.

And use Legos.

Yeah.

And, you know, you can go through design thinking principles, thinking about, you know, so what about people with disabilities? How are they going to use your device?

Exactly.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. That's amazing. And I like it because it's not about Legos. It's like about the thinking, you know. And kids love LEGO. So exactly, exactly.

I'm writing a book, and it's funny that Joe says that because one of the examples has to do with LEGO for the, the kids. It's very interactive. So it's a book for kids regarding machine learning. So I would love to donate that to the cause.

Gosh, amazing. That's what I'm talking about. What is it called? Is it on Amazon? Like, what is it called?

Not— I haven't launched it yet, but you'll definitely be the first to know, and then I'll, you know, I would love that.

I would love that because yes, it would be great for like— so what I'm a big believer in the iterative process, right? So the first thing we do is we contact like Girl Scouts and we do it for free for them, and then we use that to figure out like, how's it going? Did it go well? What did they, you know, what, where were the gaps? And then we harden it into something that's like good, and then then, then people pay for it. Like, the, the school system has money for this. This is what I would cover. Um, and we go after even the most affluent school systems first, and then we use that to create opportunity for us to then pay ourselves to do the, the less affluent communities. And I've done this all the time. This is why, like, you know, technically, if I was only doing this community, like, I'd be like, you guys have to give me $350 a week or whatever so that I could eat, but I don't. Like, I can do this for free. I can serve, you know, with my information, give you all this for free because I've gone to people like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, and they have money. And they— or Delta or Caterpillar or, you know, John Deere— they've hired me at a much higher rate. So it gives me the opportunity to serve people who, you know, everyone, serve everyone else. And I feel like that's, um, a really good opportunity here too. And I— it would be awesome because then I could add the chalkboard much more intentionally to my, my architecture.

Yeah, Noelle Russell Russell, when we talk about building for kids, is it good to maybe to separate them in age group? Because each age group has the way they, they learn. I think the, the little one, they need more attention. They like, like gaming stuff like that. But for the others, well, they need maybe another kind of teaching for them to catch what they're telling them.

So yes, um, yeah, that's a great Great point. So that's why I like Girl Scouts, because they are chunked by age, and they call it progression. So you build something like you create a— in my case, I have the Bot Builder workshop. But what the little kids do is not the same thing as what the older kids do. But everyone does the first thing, which maybe is build a very simple bot. And then when I go to the older ones, they now are gonna add, you know, responsible AI. Middle schoolers will add the responsible AI guardrails. And then the older ones that are now in high school, they're gonna add maybe the product and design thinking pieces, right? But, but it's all progressing, everyone. And the nice thing is, is that as you progress, the older ones can mentor the little ones.

Yeah.

And so they, they become the teachers. So I absolutely love it. Um, and Sanjuka, yeah, we should just talk because I wonder if I could just give you some guidance and you maybe be able to bring it to your, your people.

Yes. Yeah, in the community especially, because they talk less and less about AI, you know. Yeah. So maybe sometimes the parents are aware of what AI can do, you know, for the kids, especially they are going to be those kids that are going to live in the next 10, 50, 30 years. So, they're going to be immersed in the AI world. So, if the parents are not aware of what exactly it is, they're not going to, you know, to impact the kids. So, if we can bring them to the community, it's going to be a great, you know, a great opportunity for those kids.

Yes. Alright, I'm gonna share with you all on this note the resource from MIT, the partnership that I worked with. This is called Raise. This is where if you go in and look under resources, which maybe I'll create, but they have an entire Google like Drive full of— I'm gonna actually put this link into— this is the resources section, but they have an entire Drive full of playgrounds, app, like projects. The challenge with this is they, they created this incredible content and I go to talk to in like teachers and they're like, I can't teach that. I'm not teaching that. What do I know about that? I can't teach an AI. So they, there's a gap now between this amazing content MIT has created for basically like I'd say K, not, not kindergarten, but maybe like 5th grade through, you know, 12th grade. On building responsible AI, and there's no real educators that are comfortable with delivering that information. And it's a huge opportunity because this content is free. So, obviously, they don't want you to go and build a commercial business that makes billions of dollars on their free content. So there is an opportunity to build a nonprofit organization that leverages this content, and then you use grant funding once you get a couple of customers to pay you. But if you organize yourself as a nonprofit, you could easily do this.

Okay, that's great.

Yeah, exactly, Cyndrika. Yeah, it's very intimidating, I think, for, for teachers, especially as we're now asking them to teach kids about AI, and they're like, whoa, I, I barely use my phone. So I think it's a great opportunity for us to, to educate them. Mauricio, we're gonna say something.

I have teenagers in high school. And some of the open houses now, asking the teachers, hey, what are you going to teach? What are you going to do about AI? At least half of the teachers, the response was something along, AI?

No, no, no.

Why do we want to teach the kids AI? AI is— they'll be— AI will be doing the homework. How can we do that? No, no. I've tried to keep them out of AI. And this is in a, uh, regular high school. I mean, as you know, very close to your house.

Yes.

Uh, but not, uh, and that's, that's a gap. That's a huge gap.

Yeah. It's a, it's a huge gap. And I think we can help them, right? Like, because I don't know. I feel like there's a few of us that care about this space. And, and if you didn't know, like part of the reason I don't do a thing is because there's a piece of the puzzle missing. And I'm like, I, I don't know how to solve for that piece.

Piece.

And in your case, if the piece of that puzzle is like all content, like there's content now, so that piece is solved. MIT is giving you the content to teach, and it's really good stuff. Like, it's very animated. It's like comic book style. The labs are really good. Like, I, I mean, granted, I might be tooting my own horn, but I think it's really like, it's engaging material. You could even use it to teach adults. I use it in my material too. So So you could look at that. And so if that's a gap for you, you've now solved for that gap. So what's the next gap, right? Like, now it's like, go start talking to schools, you know, like, learn the material. I right now know people who don't, don't know about this, and they're just blindly just trying to create programs for AI in communities. And when I teach, when I tell them, like, well, MIT has stuff for you to use, they're, they're like, where has this been? And so it's almost always like, gosh, we We just miss— we don't know all the things, and those gaps can keep us from really serving these communities at the, at the best way we possibly can. So if this can help you, please feel free. Like anything we share on this call right now, we are live broadcasting this call on my YouTube channel. So if you want someone to hear this, or if you would like to share this resource with anyone, please encourage them. There is obviously, like I said, they don't want you to commercialize. They want you to, you know, take a platform and like build it to $1 billion. Like they, they want you to help people, and if you do that in a nonprofit way or way, what do they call it, public benefit type of way, as an organization, I think you could use it. So please feel free to share this with others.

The sad thing is the kids that don't learn AI, start learning AI now, will become mindless consumers.

100%.

They'll be paying, they even will lose their jobs.

Yes.

Or they will just pay.

Yeah.

They're going to be paying people to manage their AIs, like their robots. Like Optimus is going to be set out into this world. So imagine 10 years from now, the advanced Optimus. How are they going to understand, hey, we can manage this robot, this AI, instead of even having to depend on someone else to do it for them? So if education systems parents don't come in and act now on empowering their children to be able to manage AI, there's going to be a big problem down the road.

I agree. And for those of you who didn't see, um, Tesla's latest craziness, I will put that YouTube in the chat for later viewing. Um, I, you know, I'm not— I'm gonna just leave it at that. We could talk about it next week if y'all 'cause we are out of time today. But, but yeah, it's exciting. Like, like you said, it's, it's, we're showing an evolution. I 100% agree with you on the gap that it's creating, that if we are not very intentional about equalizing access, and there's no reason, like, it is accessible. It is only a matter of like knowledge, like awareness. It's awareness. Like, do you know that this information is here? Do you know that there are people that can help you teach to teach this to your, to the kids. We very well may need to take on that mantle, some of us who are care about this space. And the good news is that you don't have to be a 10-year veteran in AI to do that. You just need to care about this problem because the material is built. You have to be a vehicle for that material. That's why I joined Alexa. I didn't know anything about AI, but I cared about the problem that I thought it would solve. And then I learned, just like Matt had said before he left, left. Like, you learn as you go. You figure it out as you go. You learn the required skills in order to keep moving forward. But don't let that be a reason you don't start now. Like, the material is here. Learn that material yourself. You can actually start teaching it on YouTube and, and start targeting teachers. Like, hey, I can help you add this to your curriculum. I mean, there's so many, so many opportunities. Um, I think, yeah, I really think equity and equity and access is going to become a huge problem over time because kids who don't learn this versus like my kids' school. I'm the one in their school, and I'm going to their classes teaching them. Like, I'm pushing that on their teachers. I said it the very first day at open house, like, I will be here. I'm gonna teach this. Your kids will know this when they leave. But every— like, who, who else? What other schools are doing that? What other classrooms even in our schools are doing that? And we're in an affluent area, let alone people in Homestead where I grew up. Where they told me, you don't even need to go to college, just go get a job in the food service industry. Like, you do good at that. You'd make good money.

Like, what?

And I did, by the way, make good money. Not good money compared to what I make now, but it was definitely a true fact from his perspective. But that, like, who's going to go into those schools if not us? Like, it's going to be us. And I just, I encourage you not to think you need to be uber smart, uber experienced. Decades, you know, in, in, in seat. Like, as soon as you know enough, like, as soon as you learn a thing, teach a thing. That's my philosophy. As soon as I learn something new, I teach it. What I did— did you all see? I did an event called GPT Tuesdays in, in South Florida at Miami Dade College. It's on YouTube. I'll put it in the community for you all to see it. It was really good, but I literally was testing out my material. Like, I learned a new thing.. And I wanted to frame it in a new way on a whiteboard. And so I built that whiteboard out like dynamically right in front of like all these people. And it went really well. I was like, oh, this is a workshop. I'm so— so it won't be up for long because I'm like, wait, I'm gonna sell this. But it was really good. I wasn't— I was like, everyone understood what I said regardless of their education level. And it was very complicated stuff like model selection, model evaluation, Guardrails, fairness, accuracy. These are hard machine learning concepts, but they understood why it was important. Now they can go dive into like, how do I do that? But what is it? Why do I need to learn? Like, that is an critical, like, inflection point, I think, for, for young kids to even know that it's accessible, that they can even ask the question. Most of them won't even get exposure to it, and that, that kinda breaks my heart a little bit because they won't get the jobs that— and even if they do get the jobs, they will get different jobs. And I've heard people talk about blue-collar AI, and I— another term that just drives me insane, um, because blue-collar AI is, you know, basically they're saying people that will do AI, but the cheap AI, as if there's a thing, as if there's a thing like that's cheap versus expensive people versus cheap people.

Um, anyway, but, but Noelle, we, we We saw an example of that when we were looking at the people that are trying, you know, as you do, Google it, thumbs up, thumbs down.

Yes.

The systems. Some of those signals are collected and sent to some companies. Some companies eventually have to promise Amazon and Google that they will hire 1,000 humans within a day to review the, especially thumbs down.

Yes.

But, uh, some of those people are in India, Bangladesh, um, and, and they're being paid cents per hour to do the job.

Yeah.

So there is, I mean, yeah, but I mean, I mean, is that okay?

Are we willing? Like, that's Mechanical Turk, if you all remember the days, Mechanical Turk. It was like, no bueno. We were, we were spending billions of dollars but in pennies at a time for individual resource. It was— I didn't feel good about it. Like, it was a mass capitalist choice. It was not illegal to do, but I didn't feel good about it. I didn't want to do that. So I don't want to create workers like, oh, you're awesome, thank you for that. I don't— I don't want to create a scenario like— I want to— I don't want the high school people that went to my high school I don't want them to instantly be defaulted to that category of you're gonna be the ones that get paid that much. They get paid a dollar an hour. And that's what's gonna happen if you don't get the skills. You will be defaulted into that category of worker, a blue-collar AI worker. And I'm like, that's not fair because the only thing that's different is someone like me was a parent to my kids and I showed up and taught them something different. Now all those kids will be wealthier because of it. And that accessibility challenge is why I have my my billion-dollar, you know, my billion-person rule. Like, everyone has to learn how to do this, and everyone— sure, maybe if you're in, in the Philippines, I mean, we've got someone from the Philippines here, like, depending on your cost of living, that's a different conversation.

That's your point of view, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that are the ethics, you know, like, and it's—

ethics are very subjective, right? Like, very subjective. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's what purpose is all about. Like, that's my purpose.

This.

So that's going to drive what I do. But like, all of us have a different purpose. So you might, like me, am I going to go and actually take on high school kids? Probably not, because I'm worried about businesses. I'm worried about the big businesses building big tech and what they're going to do. But someone here, like Cyndrika, might take on like, hey, I'm going to just start with my, my, my own school for my kids. And then that's going to be, they're going to, as soon as you do it, they're going to be like, can you come do that over here? And it's going to expand. So some of us are going to do that and it's going to expand and grow. I just say like, let's, let's not forget that there's a demographic of people that could be very much easily forgotten. And it was your point, Mauricio, like that there is a, a gap that is created in this, in this huge swell of opportunity. And we have to be really intentional about what we want to do individually. Like, I will sleep better at night knowing that I care about this problem. But everyone cares about a different problem. I mean, I also care about special needs kids, you know. I, you know, there are people here who care about the people that are over the age of 65 or 75. Like, I think it just depends on where is your passion and how do you use that to create equity in that space.

But even, even with the forgotten communities, there is a gap. There will always be money to be made. There is, there are good business opportunities to be doing what you love or helping society, helping the world, if that's what choose, but also making some money. Uh, yeah, because as you mentioned, all these government and school systems, they have tons of money. They don't even know how to spend it, but they gotta do something for AI.

Yep. I mean, Miami-Dade County, they got like $7 million from Facebook or from Meta and they, they were like, uh, let's bring in speakers. And I was like, or we could build something. I was like, of course I am a speaker, so I'm like infringing on my own livelihood. But I'm like, or we could like build a product. So I created what's called ISA, Intelligent Student Assistant, and I pitched it to the National Science Foundation, and I think we're gonna get funded this year. It's like $1.2 million or something like that. But I was like, but their tendency was to do these easy things, like, because they don't know what to do. To your point, they have no idea. Why are we— what do we do with this money? How do we even— do we even know the right people? And most people don't have the network. Like, we literally represent an extremely wealthy network of resources, ideas, connections. And the more we can do to extend that to these— like, that's why I say, like, Mauricio, you and I have gone to these meetups. We've met people, and we are anomalies in that group where we're like, oh, we'll put you in touch with this person. We know the guy who built the data center. Like we're connectors. And I feel like that's part of, you know, my DNA anyway, is to— my network is your network. I always say that, like, if there's someone I'm connected to, I'm gonna do what I can because I can't serve everybody, but I can at least help you serve the people that you want to serve.

Okay.

So anyway, I hope you all enjoyed it. We're a little bit over. Um, thank you for staying a little bit extra. Happy Friday. Uh, we'll be back. I will be in Sydney, so I don't know what time it will be, but I will be here. Um, I will be embracing Dove's philosophy of authentic beauty, so however I show up, I will be on camera, but it may not be pretty. Thank you, but it was awesome. See you next week.

Thank you, guys. Where's Rick?

I don't know, I don't know. He, um, Anyway, we'll talk about that.

Okay, call me.

But it's okay, he's part of the community. He's not— he hasn't been banned. He's welcome here. Um, but thank you, Andrea. I hope you enjoyed your first call.

I loved it.

All right, bye, Andrea.