Interview with Zack Kass: The Next Renaissance
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What sparked Zack Kass's interest in AI and his career journey?
I don't really care if there's a bubble. I don't care. And I'll tell you why I don't care. I don't care because I've studied history long enough to know that bubbles pop and sometimes it's healthy. Like sometimes market corrections are actually quite good.
That was Zach Kass, author of The Next Renaissance, AI and the Expansion of Human Potential. I'm Motley Fool producer Matt Greer. Now, Zach Kass is a global AI advisor and the former head of go-to-market at OpenAI. He was at OpenAI when the company launched ChatGPT back in 2022. Motley Fool contributors Rachel Warren and Rich Lumello recently talked to Kass about the future of AI and about his new book, The Next Renaissance.
You started your career in AI almost 15 years ago, as you say in the book, and at OpenAI as head of go-to-market, you helped the company grow from $1 million to over $2 billion in annual revenue. But you say that nothing really prepared you for November 30th, 2022, the day that ChatGPT was released. So I'd love if you would tell us about your background, your journey, what led you to here, and then walk us through that experience, that moment in time when the world was introduced to ChatGPT.
Sure. Well, I'm not sure that anything would have prepared me for that date. So even as you framed the question, I was thinking like, what would have prepared me? I went to Berkeley for college. I studied history and computer science. I graduated and got a job at a machine learning company. And the focus was on, at the time, building data sets. It was a company called Figure 8 Building Data Sets. for the purposes of machine training. Of course, now this has become exceptionally normalized and quite lucrative. Companies like Mercor and LabelBox and Surge, et cetera. And we were principally selling data at the time to companies like Facebook, Google, and... Amazon, who could afford these large statistical machine learning models.
And they were mostly just doing product recommendations. And I stayed there long enough to graduate to a company doing large language models for the purposes of machine translation. That company was called Lilt. And I stayed there long enough to graduate to OpenAI. And so I joked that I just, at a time where everyone was making money hand over fist in things like cloud storage or e-commerce or sales optimization software, I just stuck around in AI long enough for it to pay off. And at OpenAI, for a long time, if you emailed sales or support out, you arrived at my inbox. And that started to change as we started to build API products, it became more popular. Of course, GPT 3.5. Most people don't remember, but it was state-of-the-art and really impressive in many ways.
And then of course, ChatGBT, November 30th, 2022. And what was particularly impressive about that is that I had felt like OpenAI should have arrived much sooner. My case to anyone who would listen was that GBT 3.5 was a commercially viable or economically viable model that people should have been adopting much faster and weren't. And it was publicly available in the API since June 2022. So you had the stretch of about five months, four months, where people could have built ChatGPT and didn't. And ChatGPT was, as I remind people, not a research breakthrough, it was an application breakthrough. And it serves... For me, this is an incredible reminder that the application layer matters so much. You have to build things that people can simply use, otherwise you cannot change consumer or even enterprise behavior in a material way.
And that moment is indelible in certainly a lot of technological history, but also my personal history, because a lot of us went home that night Not sort of thinking anything of it. I mean, the purpose of it really was to create an experience so that a CEO could come to the website, use the product, and then tell their CTO that they should build something with the API. And then of course what happened was hundreds of thousands and millions of downloads and then billions of downloads later. And it was amazing.
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