Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: How did the launch of ChatGPT change the AI landscape?
Because that sort of answers the question. I can't convince someone that humans are gonna be around for millions of years. And then maybe the next question is, well, is there a bubble? Like, where do we sit in the investment? I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but where do we sit in the investment timeline and how much of this needs to shake out? And I have sort of three answers to that.
By the way, I don't know if you were gonna ask that, but maybe I answer it. I'd love to hear your take. Yeah. Okay. Well, I have three answers and all three of them are hot. One of them has a negative connotation. One of them has a positive connotation. One of them is neutral. I'll start with the negative one. People hate this take, by the way, but it's true. This is how I feel.
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.
You hate being a part of it, but like a lot of people are beneficiaries on the back end of it as long as things sort themselves out and short-term pain can lead to long-term growth and progress. I'm not, by the way, sure that there is a bubble. I just don't spend a lot of time talking about it. And by my calculation, the people who really need to worry about it are like hedge fund managers
and individuals who are so uniquely exposed to AI. By the way, I am one of them. Like, let's be clear. It's not like I want my net worth to take a material hit. It's that I know that this takes a long time to play out. Now, my other hot take is that even if there is a bubble, what we are building right now, the AI infrastructure is super valuable. And in particular, the energy infrastructure.
I think that the forcing function here around the AI sprint, the broad AI infrastructure sprint, is a net positive for everyone because it will spool up not 40% more energy, but 1,000% more energy. And 1,000% more energy is only tenable if you have step functional breakthroughs in energy. So you either need, for example, geothermal, of which there's like 100 gigawatts outside Yuma.
You need a solar field the size of Texas. or fusion and small modular reactors. And that forcing function is going to drive us into a new energy paradigm. And what I always say to people is unmetered intelligence is very cool. Do you know what's cooler? Unmetered energy.
Like if nothing else, if AI drives us to a place where we can build desalinization and vertical farms so that everyone, everyone on earth, thanks to energy advancements can have clean drinking water and fresh produce, we will have done an enormous amount. There are second order consequences, much like the railroads to this stuff.
You've talked a lot today about unmetered intelligence, the different phases of the integration of AI as kind of this ubiquitous presence in our daily life. And a lot of that goes back to what you talk about a lot in your book, the AI Renaissance, which obviously has implications for consumers, of course, for us as investors.
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