Misfit Entrepreneur December 2023 - 383: Unlocking the Future with Kevin Surace - AI, Curiosity, and Entrepreneurial Wisdom for Success

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Dave Lukas Chats with Kevin Surace

383: Unlocking the Future with Kevin Surace - AI, Curiosity, and Entrepreneurial Wisdom for Success

This week’s Misfit Entrepreneur is Kevin Surace. Where to start with Kevin? He is a Silicon Valley innovator, serial entrepreneur, CEO, keynote speaker and futurist. He has been named INC Magazines’ Entrepreneur of the Year, a CNBC top Innovator of the Decade, Chair of Silicon Valley Forum, Planet Forward Innovator of the Year nominee, just to name a few.

If that is not enough, he holds 94 worldwide patents lead pioneering work on the first cellular data smart phone and has contributed immensely to the growth in AI.

Kevin’s experience in tech and AI spans decades and I asked him to come on and talk to us about what is coming in the future and how we can maximize our future success in an AI driven world.

www.KevinSurace.com

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Show Notes

Kevin was born a poor child in upstate New York, but had a great family, family life and had great parents and they supported him well. He was the misfit child starting early taking apart radios and electronics and TVs and repairing them at a very young age to learn about. He was very excited about technology from a young age and generally curious.

He built most of his career around tech and has had many accomplishments as alluded to in the opening of the show.

Talk about the power of curiosity and how it plays a role in entrepreneurship and how do we leverage our curiosity to improve ourselves as entrepreneurs?

Curiosity is at the root of everything.
How do you become a better leader? You're curious.
The worst leaders in the world are the ones that aren’t curious about the leaders that have come before them and take the time to learn from them and keep asking how to get better.
At its core, curiosity is a drive to keep learning and growing.

What is the state of the state on AI? Where are we right now?

We've been working on various forms of AI for a long time. In some ways, AI is a marketing
We've used the term AI for the longest time, certainly all the way back into the 50s and 60s when the term was sort of coined and bounced around. And we had artificial sort of interaction with human like things on a computer at MIT, something called Eliza in the late sixties. AI is mostly machine learning.
It was a very simple rules based function, uh, that, that you could talk to her and Eliza would talk back in some reasonable way based on a whole set of rules.
What has allowed it get better and become more useful is the technological capability with chips, processing power, etc.
We now can go millions of layers deep if one really wants to because we have the computer horsepower to do it and some companies have the money to do so.
Without knowing a computer language, now any of us could have done a fair bit of language modeling which is basically ChatGPT.
Most people would say AI finally arrived when we had deep learning models in 2012, but now that there is an interface like ChatGPT, it has become mainstream.

Where are we on the road to AGI and ASI?

In 2012, we, we finally got really deep learning models and by 2014 or 2015, those models could recognize and identify photographs better than any humans could period full stop. We trained them on millions and millions of photos and they could identify a dog from a Fox, from a whatever way better than any human could. And in that one area, it is actually super intelligent. It is way beyond what a human can. So in some very specific areas we are already there.
Now we have a language model and it is useful because it's able to take in sentences and spit out sentences. However, it actually literally knows nothing and doesn't really know what it's saying. It knows how to build sentences in perfect structure word after word after word.
The whole model is based on what's the probability that this is the right word after the last word based on your prompt. But it can lack context, so context has to be given.

Is there a potential, even where we're at now, for these things to become, based on having this knowledge, malevolent in any way?

“An automobile can be malevolent with the wrong driver be behind it and be used as a car bomb, right? Every single one of the technologies that we invented from the wheel on up can also be used against us and it needs a human to say use it against us. So, don't hook a large language model to the nuclear arsenal.”
But, this technology will be used by humans in bad ways and for nefarious things.

What is the impact we can expect at home and work as the advancement of AI continues?

All of the companies created lately that are basically a wrapper around chat GPT are going to be usurped and killed, or at least the vast majority because the technology continues to evolve and what someone built an app for last could be a standard feature in the future.
A slew of new features have already effectively killed thousands of startups from Chat 3.5 to 4.
The value in AI and any other field is when you have a moat, otherwise someone is going to copy or pass you up or compete easily. Having a moat is key to success for any business.

How do we take advantage of what's out there today? What are things that we should do?

Everybody should be using LLMs at least for the easy things helping to respond to emails, writing blog posts, writing marketing, writing content, writing Creating ads, social media ads, and it is very good at giving you really outstanding suggestions to challenges.
Kevin talks about all kinds of uses for life and business and at is best to just listen.

Is there a question or a topic surrounding AI that we haven't covered or that I should have asked about before we leave that subject?

“People always ask, is it sentient? No. But if you really, really want to get philosophical, what is sentience? How do, how do we even think about sending? Well, we know we're alive. Well, it is read enough books where it knows quote unquote, how to say it's alive, but what is alive anyway? You know, you start to get very philosophical about some of these things and that that's a much, much harder thing to sort of sort through.”
“Is it going to kill you? No, don't hook it to the nuclear arsenal. As I said, um, is it going to take your job? Uh, it is going to replace a lot of the dumb tasks that you did over and over again, especially repetitive ones. And we've been doing that with machine learning and AI for decades. You just probably haven't noticed.”

Spending your life in Silicon Valley, what are some of the best lessons you've learned for success in business and life? Because you've seen it all.

Be a lot more humble than everyone is. It doesn't mean that that's going to take away from your leadership. You just need to understand that you don't know what you don't know about markets. You don't know what you don't know about products, about people accepting those products. So stay humble and strive to keep learning.
You better be okay losing and getting up the next day. That's entrepreneurship. You can't win every time. There's a thousand people who won on the 10th or the 15th time.
On average, it's the fifth business model in a company that is the one that's successful

Best Quote

Curiosity is at the root of everything.

Curiosity leads to lifelong learning. And when you're curious, you learn. And when you learn, you go solve real problems. When you solve real problems, you get real patents and build real companies. Stay curious.

EQ matters going forward. It's going to matter a lot more than IQ. Lots of people with varying IQ have been successful, but people with lousy EQ are rarely successful

Listen much more than you do, because you don't learn anything from talking. Just listen, listen to podcasts, listen to the people around you, listen to your team, just shut up and take it all in.

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