Zoltan Prokai - The AI Game-Changer: How Skillful AI Is Unlocking The Future of Everything

Full transcript: Zoltan Prokai on London Real

4:01 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Zoltan Prokai, the entrepreneur, innovator, and artificial intelligence expert. You are the co-founder and CEO of Skillful AI, a groundbreaking personalized AI ecosystem that provides a decentralized way of harnessing the benefits of the artificial intelligence revolution. Your mission is to democratize access to advanced AI technologies, ensuring that powerful tools are available to everyone to provide a more inclusive technological future.

4:31 You believe we are in a critical transition period where AI is poised to profoundly impact our lives, and you’ve emphasized the importance of addressing issues like censorship and the misuse of personal data during this pivotal time. Your vision is to close the existing gap in the industry, creating opportunities for all to participate and thrive in this rapidly advancing field. Zoltan, welcome to London Real.

4:56 Zoltan Prokai: Thanks for having me.

4:57 Brian Rose: It’s great having you here.

4:59 I want to start by saying that Skillful AI is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures, the world’s first media powered investment firm where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting edge web 3 and AI companies while giving our partners marketing exposure across the London Real media platforms and academies. We heighten awareness, create customers, and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network Zoltan. We are super excited to be part of this journey with you.

5:27 So let’s jump in. What is Skillful AI?

5:30 Zoltan Prokai: Thanks. So as you said, Skillful AI is a complete accessible ecosystem of AI tools generally that anyone can come in and either find the kind of tools that they need or they can easily create them just like they do with websites. Currently, it’s as easy to create and then they can deploy and leverage them and even monetize them if they wish to.

5:54 So if they have any real world skills, they are going to be able to easily bring them to the digital realm and use them that way.

6:02 Brian Rose: Okay, so they can kind of plug and play and build anything they want to do on your platform and then ultimately do it in this kind of a decentralized way.

6:12 Zoltan Prokai: Yes, that’s correct.

6:13 Brian Rose: And that’s a big issue because, you know, ever since that chat GPT moment, I think all the eyes of the world are looking towards Silicon Valley. We’re looking towards Sam Altman and OpenAI.

6:25 We’re looking over at Google and the Gemini. We’re looking at what’s happening with Microsoft and Meta. And yet, those are all centralized AI systems where they’re going to take our data. Lord knows they probably already took all the data out there and they’re going to eventually spit out things that we don’t even know where they came from. And that’s one of the reasons we are huge proponents of blockchain-based AI and decentralized AI.

6:52 Can you talk to people about why that’s important? Because I don’t think a lot of people really understand why they shouldn’t just go and ask chat GPT everything or allow their, you know, personal AI assistants to be coming from these centralized tech companies. What should they know and why is skillful AI maybe a better option for them?

7:16 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, so one of the story maybe, just how one of the first occasions when the idea for the need of something like skillful AI came up.

7:26 It’s actually coming from one of my founding partners, Emmanuel, who is the CTO of skillful AI based out of Costa Rica. He’s a long-time developer. He’s probably close to 10 years in the industry, worked at Intel, Apple, and obviously had the chat GPT moment for the whole industry. And all of them were kind of using it as well. And what they found is that their productivity increased dramatically, like two, three, four X.

7:52 But at the same time, those models are kind of learning in a centralized way as well. So even as a developer, just like with any skill that you might have, whether if it’s marketing, whether if you’re using a GPT to write a certain copy in your style and you’re kind of iterating on the outputs by putting it back, it’s kind of learns from you and essentially, you know, kind of giving your knowledge away at some point as well. So one of the solutions that we are bringing that once you create an AI assistant or agent on a skillful AI platform, you’re going to be owning all of your kind of knowledge, what you bring in, even if you, you know, how you calibrate it, how you set up all the skills and all the strategies that a certain assistant will have to use, whether it’s be marketing, whether it’s be, I don’t know, an outreach campaign, whether if it’s, let’s say, sales, and there’s two very different kind of sales, let’s say you’re like a car salesperson and real estate, there’s different kind of tricks and tricks and what you have to kind of learn over decades.

8:58 If you’re in the industry, like what questions to ask, what are the kind of buttons to push to all of these little nuances, you’re going to be able to kind of preserve and you’re going to be owning it thanks to blockchain technology as well. So that’s going to be all of those ways where we stored on chain.

9:14 Brian Rose: So Emmanuel, your guy in Costa Rica, his productivity went up, but he soon realized that he was training the model and that some of your proprietary intellectual property was going into the model and maybe your competitors could have benefited from that.

9:28 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, that’s absolutely correct. It went to a length that at some point some of the developers even stopped using it, as I heard. Really? Yeah, and some companies even banned using it as, you know, it was just in the news as well. It’s probably for the same reason.

9:43 It got access to data and, you know, as you’re iterating, obviously want a better output out of them, but you’re kind of giving away your craft, essentially.

9:52 Brian Rose: Right. There’s that old saying that if you can’t tell what the product is, you’re the product. Yeah, exactly. It’s that classic web two model, and you guys are in web three and you’re thinking, wait a second, we’re still back to that same old web two paradigm.

10:08 Yatsu of Animoca Brands, who’s been on the show many times, calls it digital colonialism. We give away our information for free and they sell it back to us. It’s kind of a dig at the old British Empire, where we would basically go to these countries, you know, like India, take their cotton, bring it back here and sell it back to them in terms of like, you know, shirts and goods. And meanwhile, these people don’t have anything. They’re giving up their raw resources.

10:33 They’re paying money for these things. And you’re just kind of getting jacked both ways. That’s what centralized AI is doing right now, isn’t it?

10:41 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, essentially, essentially. And we don’t know how they want to use it.

10:45 They’re obviously saying, and all the policies are kind of in place if you read them or if anyone cares to read them that they’re not using the data, even if it’s like a corporate plan, they are just using it maybe for a certain period, but they can’t look at it. But essentially, we don’t know, and no one knows what’s happening there, essentially.

11:04 Brian Rose: One of your models, and people can see this if they go to your website, is that you can basically kind of create these agents if you’re an influencer or an opinion leader.

11:14 And if you want to create one of those things, you’re going to have to tell them a lot about you. You’re going to have to basically try to create a version of you, and they’re going to, to be effective, maybe need to have your identity information, your voice, maybe some of your deepest and darkest secrets. And so I would say to anybody listening to us or watching us right now, it’s bad enough that Google has your browsing data, that maybe they have your email data.

11:41 Do you really want them having your voice, your thoughts, your deepest, darkest moments, telling them when you’re having a bad day, a good day, because all that info is going into the AI, and now they have a kind of a customized record on everybody in the world. And when you hear these data hacks and all these things happening, now they have your email address. What if they have your entire personality? That is the kind of future we’re looking at. Now, maybe I’m playing it up a little bit as dystopian, but I don’t think it is.

12:11 Zoltan Prokai: It’s not necessarily, it can definitely happen. In our case, what we call the branded AI, I think what you were referring to from the website, it is actually a tool. It should not necessarily have extra data compared to what an influencer or an opinion leader shares anyway, because it’s kind of trained on your publications. In your case, for example, it would be your videos and all of the articles that you have written. And, for example, some of your followers or viewers could chat a version of you asking questions about, I don’t know, episodes back to, what is it, 10, 12 years now?

12:50 Something like that, even more. But yeah, it could definitely happen, and we just don’t have any control over it. So yeah, this is what we are building towards and trying to solve, and also the skills. As I mentioned, that’s a very, very important part of it, because if you are just using a centralized AI, essentially, this is the kind of playbook that can end up making people redundant in a way. So if you spent, in any industry you spent, you learned your craft over several decades, and sometimes it’s just a few sentences that can either win a deal, win a customer, or something like that, that you kind of built up over decades.

13:34 And then we can help people preserve that.

13:37 Brian Rose: Right, okay. I see what you’re saying. So say you’re Grant Cardone, and he’s known for selling real estate, right? So Grant starts using chat GPT to try to help him optimize his stuff and correlate his stuff.

13:53 Meanwhile, all that knowledge is being drained from him. And it might start showing up in my search when I say, I want to sell this building, what do I say? And you go to him and say, look, we’re going to allow you to own that data, you can customize it and build something, but you’ll always own that on your own piece and blockchain, and you can prove that. And that’s how you retain those skills.

14:15 Zoltan Prokai: Yes, exactly.

14:16 And if, and sorry, just an addition, if Grant in this case decides to share that with other people, let’s say he’s making an addition of 40, 50 of these, and you would like to use that, he can also, he’s got a way to monetize that further.

14:31 Brian Rose: Okay, license that thing. Okay, nice. And that’s why you call it skillful AI? Why?

14:36 Because you want to preserve those skills?

14:39 Zoltan Prokai: Yes, exactly. Yeah, that’s the point. So we are kind of the real world skills. That’s coming from trial and error in anything that it might be, whether if it’s any industry really, whether if it’s fitness or any of the digital products like these fitness influencers currently that they have these applications that walk you through of how to eat, what kind of exercises you do, they kind of learn that in the same way as well, like through trial and error in a long, long, long time.

15:07 But to take it away, it’s quite easy today as well. So, and this is where we come in.

15:12 Brian Rose: So you provide the solution to the potential dystopian future of AI is that we’re all going to become useless. And you say, wait a second, you can preserve your own intellectual property and then use it as an agent and then monetize it and multiply it and maybe even make it better, but still own it. Let’s still own it.

15:31 Wow, that’s quite a different future reality than centralized. I mean, that’s life or death for people. Relevance or irrelevance.

15:39 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, it definitely could be. And it’s definitely not necessarily a solution for absolutely everybody, just like in today’s world, someone is just using someone else’s knowledge or something like that.

15:51 You still have to have something that you know. But in our case, you can just come in and use them and pick the best one. We have several companies reaching out to us to kind of start making these agents which we’re going to start doing by Q4 this year. We’re also going to be releasing the first iteration of the platform towards the end of the year. So I invite everyone to try and use it.

16:16 And even like from CPAs, from major companies, from you name it, we have probably 13, 15 of these conversations going already that, for example, a guy who is a CPA and have obviously a few things or two about how to do his craft. And this is a good solution for him. It’s kind of amplifying of what he does.

16:39 Brian Rose: Excellent. Talk to me about some of the data that’s been ripped out there.

16:45 I know the New York Times, I think, settled the lawsuit, which had GPT. I think it’s now public knowledge that OpenAI ripped every single transcription of all of YouTube videos, even though they broke the law to do it. And they’re meanwhile trying to get data because there’s only a certain amount of it. And they’re trying to rip it left and right. What are your thoughts on that?

17:10 And then why should people be aware of that and then know about what they can do to protect their own data?

17:18 Zoltan Prokai: Well, to protect it, it’s not easy. And let me think about it the second of what can you do. So you can use services and blockchain in several ways. And there are amazing companies that are helping people doing that.

17:33 And in terms of what these large companies got their hands on, we have just no idea. I’m going to be honest, which is probably everything already or most things. But there’s certain levels to data as well. There’s like the superficial data, which is like, let’s just call it like three layers. There’s one, two, three, and three being the deepest.

17:55 The first one is like the superficial that you kind of put out there anyway, what you share in your social media. Second layer would be like either your location and somewhere like movement data that’s a bit more sensitive, but you still really don’t care. You still use any of the apps that’s kind of tracking you. But there are the sensitive data. That’s your medical records.

18:16 That’s your banking information. And that’s when it gets dangerous. I think most people go out their way to protect those as well. So those are kind of still safe, I would say. But to have a truly personalized assistant in the future, you’re going to need access to all three levels.

18:37 And this is when it gets tricky.

18:39 Brian Rose: Right. This is when you don’t have access to those big tech companies having that information about you. Because if they do, it can leak, they can target you in a way that’s really unethical. And it’s going to happen, probably.

18:54 And so you’re going to want it. The other thing the blockchain brings is this kind of provenance of data. And I think this is really important. So right now, if you go to chat GPT and ask it for a question, it’ll spit out an answer. If you go to Google Gemini, I remember famously people asked for pictures of the founding fathers and they came out as black people.

19:13 And people were like, what’s going on here? And you could see that kind of the tainted, as Elon Musk calls it, maybe woke mind virus of Silicon Valley was being infected into the AIs. And it was just a scary moment that kind of a political bias might be manifested in pictures like that. And so it makes you start to wonder, where’s my data coming from? Is it leaning left or right?

19:38 These kinds of things. That’s kind of scary if people are making decisions based on whatever spits out like a Google search. I was on a Zoom call the other day with like a hundred people in this kind of a high level mastermind group. And I was talking about one of my guests and one of the guys raised his hand and said, oh, I just chat GPT’d and they said this guy is a blah, blah, blah, conspiracy theorist. And I said, bro, I said, you really are going to take as face value anything chat GPT says.

20:07 You’re probably the same guy that believes Wikipedia and believes everything the New York Times says. And he was just like, oh, yeah, I do. And I was like, oh, wow, we got a real problem here because you’re not seeing where that data is sourced. There’s nothing on the blockchain saying I got the data here, here and here. Can you talk about why that’s important and maybe why a lot of people don’t even know that’s happening?

20:27 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, probably most people have no idea. And yes, as you said, the majority of people probably take whatever chat GPT says at face value. We did play around with it in a way about some political questions like about, for example, back then, you know, at the times of the Syrian war, for example, just, you know, kind of asking them about questions that the answer should be like either leaning towards one side, like, I don’t know, lots of iterations. And there is definitely, definitely bias in some of the models.

21:00 And then that might be coming from what the direction of the actual companies or it might be decided by, I don’t know, like the top management or someone who is training and training these models. But we actually have no way to know where the data is coming from. You can clearly see it. It’s something that you can do. It’s one of our first alpha products, I would say, in terms of skillful AI.

21:25 It’s something that we call a model hub, which you can just come and log and anyone can try it right now as well where you can talk to three different models of your choice on the same screen, giving one prompt and then see the differences between them. So that can bring some interesting results. So you can talk to like chatgbt and llama. There’s more than 120 models integrated already, I think, but yeah, all the big ones are there. And then you can see the different results.

21:54 Brian Rose: The Grok in there as well?

21:55 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, Grok is going to be there soon. Okay. Yeah, but the LAM is in there and all the major ones are there, even mysteries and everything. So that’s, yeah, I would encourage everyone to try it.

22:05 And we actually made that, by one part is being a foundation of the AI builder that we are creating. Another part, it’s an educational kind of way to show people of what these can do and what different opinions they might have if you ask them about, like, for example, Trump, let’s say, or anything that comes up.

22:26 Brian Rose: Joe Rogan was famously talking about an example where he said, what’s worse, if I misgender Caitlyn Jenner or a thermonuclear war, and I think maybe he was exaggerating, but it came back and said, yeah, you don’t want to misgender.

22:42 We’d rather take the thermonuclear war. And look, whether it’s true or not, I think it just highlights maybe the alignment or the priorities of some of these models. And again, they’re going to make these decisions based on how they were trained. And I think it just shows that these biases are real. And if you are concerned about them, you need to have something like skillful AI, where you can at least look at the different types, you can see where the data is coming from, and then ultimately, keep your data private, right?

23:11 And choose where your AI is coming from. Yeah. And another thing about what you do is you bring in all sorts of models.

23:17 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

23:18 So we’re going to be training our old ones, our first stable diffusion, which is image generation-wise. It’s, I think, it’s probably ready by last week or today. It’s not deployed for, or it’s not accessible for the public yet, but it’s going to be very soon. And we’re going to have some news around that. But we are going to be training our own models.

23:38 We’re going to be essentially hosting these large open source ones as well, and kind of re-tweet them, refine them, so they kind of become their own models, essentially. We are, you know, like a much smaller company than one of these like large AI companies. So we don’t necessarily have the resources of hundreds of millions of hardware to do everything from scratch. But we’re going to be able to do that. And essentially, we’re going to be aggregating all the tools that we think that they are useful for one of the users.

24:06 So that’s meaning all of the models that are out there, whether if it’s through an API, so it’s a closed one now, or open source, and we’re going to be hosting them as well. But also all the other integrations, your payment gateways, your, you name it, whatever applications. And essentially, you’re going to be able to build these agents through that way. So you can pick your base model. We’re going to be giving recommendations.

24:30 You know, in many, many, many cases, it’s not the best way to use one of these large models because of, might be latency, might be price, because, you know, when you are talking to OpenAI and it’s not a mini, let’s say it’s the original 4.0, it’s a large model to run. You don’t necessarily need a lot of compute, for example. And then most of the, probably 90% of the tasks, you can get away or get a really, really good result with a much smaller model. So they’re going to be able to pick that and we’re going to make recommendations and then pick their skills, their personality, the strategy it uses, even, you know, generate images for it, kind of pick the whole percentage and just build it block by block.

25:17 And then, that’s how you’re going to be able to make an agent. You can think of it as, what Wix did with website building. So one of these, like visual drag and drop builders for kind of websites or what essentially converted for graphic design. So same frictionless experience, probably 15, 20 minutes, depending on the data and the complexity to build one of these agents and to deploy it and even start using it or start monetizing on it.

25:47 Brian Rose: Okay, nice.

25:48 So if someone’s watching us right now and they want to give this a try, they should go on to SkillfulAI. Do you recommend that they try to set up first like a personal assistant? Do you recommend that they maybe try to make a version of themselves maybe? You know, whether someone’s a huge influencer or even a little bit, can they try to plug that in as well? Can they then create like customized agents?

26:10 Could you talk about all the payment gateways and stuff? What’s the best way to start?

26:15 Zoltan Prokai: The best way to start is to, right now, just to keep an eye on us, it’s probably when we’re going to be making this available and we’re kind of going to be rolling it out gradually. But when the full builder is going to be functional, it’s meet Q4, I would say, or early December, something like that. And if anyone’s following us, so just make sure you keep an eye on SkillfulAI and they’re going to be knowing about what’s happening with us.

26:39 But I would say, obviously, this is a long process to get to that complexity where you can even, you know, create your face in 3D render even or everything like that. So a few steps before that, but a general assistant, even something that helps you navigate through the market, something that helps you doing maybe education. It’s something like, for example, something similar that you do in terms of like some of your DeFi courses that could be built by then. It’s one of the examples that be used already internally.

27:14 So you could do something like that. And then we go from there, yeah.

27:18 Brian Rose: And you go from there. And where do you think this goes? What do you see this becoming over the next year, two years, three years?

27:26 Zoltan Prokai: Well, this, what we are aiming to do, and we are very well on track of that, is to be, for Skillful AI, to be a go-to hub for anyone that’s using AI. Whether if you’re just going to be kind of browsing in a marketplace and you’re looking for a certain tool to even help with your, I don’t know, accounting or design or something like that. Or you’re going to be able to build basically anything to any level of complexity. So we are heavily and deeply cooperating with several very strong projects in terms of like blind computing with Nelion as well, just to make sure that the security is on point and cutting edge.

28:02 And all of the, probably have three or four deep in partnerships as well for decentralized computation in order to make sure, first of all, like security as well, but as well as cost that we are optimized. So we have everything to kind of become this hub. So whether if we just want to solve something on the day or you want to build a complex assistant or agent or multiple agents that have like a multi-agent workflow at the end, that’s going to be possible soon as well.

28:35 Brian Rose: Why did this need to be on the blockchain? Can you talk about why that’s important? Because you could have built this company or it seems like you could have built some of these services off the blockchain. Why does it need to be on there?

28:51 Zoltan Prokai: Okay, so what Webtree did, in our opinion, is they kind of attacked the whole kind of stack of AI with blockchain.

28:58 So if you think about it just by the infrastructure, its GPUs and everything, and there are some good use cases everywhere and where blockchain comes in is first of all immutability, security and ownership. The ownership is very important and that’s a good way we can kind of automatically incentivize people as well, but the ownership is the most important part I think and then you can have complete first of all privacy, but also ownership of your data as well. We could have built it.

29:32 There are solutions as well and there is another component to this is that the Webtree community is somewhat more open to this and more aligned with the idea that we have, because if we were doing it completely web too, that would mean a completely centralized ecosystem that we kind of have to, not have to, but we could look at some of this data as well, which the other companies and one of the main differences is that we really want to give complete power to the people through this as well and this is where blockchain is really important. So even if we don’t want to be, I’m never going to be malicious actors, but we cannot even be.

30:11 Brian Rose: Right, so you don’t even want to give yourself the opportunity to look at the data, because we know in a long enough timeline, someone’s going to do something with that data, right?

30:22 I mean, you see it like Robin Hood, even the name Robin Hood, it sounds like you steal from the rich and give to the poor. Meanwhile, they’re selling your data to high-speed traders. That’s how they make money and they do that because they cut margins and slash and burn everywhere else and then what do they do? They’re like, we better sell this. So you’re just saying from the get-go, you wanted to make sure you’re not centralized.

30:43 That everyone owns their data and Web3 people get that, you’re saying. They get the whole concept of owning things, of being part of the ownership structure. So it makes sense to pitch them.

30:55 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, absolutely.

30:56 Brian Rose: You know, I remember I was at Consensus last year and behind the scenes, I was talking to Yahtzoo of Animoca Brands and he said, Brian, I think that AI is going to empower crypto because all these AI agents ultimately have to talk to each other and the micropayments.

31:13 I was on a live call yesterday with Rand Neuner of Cryptobanter and he said the same thing. He said in the future, all of our personal AIs are going to talk to our other personal AIs and he gave a great example that we’re both driving in London. I’m driving the airport and he’s driving to work in our AI-powered self-driving cars and he said, you’re in a rush to get to the airport, every minute counts and I’m going to work and every minute doesn’t count. And so your car comes up behind mine and they negotiate a micropayment for me to let you go ahead because there’s value there.

31:48 And he said that could never happen in a fiat currency in a Web2 system but in crypto, that can work beautifully and seamlessly and globally and transparently and all that good stuff. And it’s a simple example but it maybe is a really good example.

32:02 Zoltan Prokai: It is a very good example, I think, yeah. I never heard that before but it is a really good example. Right.

32:08 Yeah, that could happen.

32:09 Brian Rose: And so do you think that the future of AI is going to have to point right back to blockchain because all these AI agents are going to have to communicate. If they have to communicate, that means they have to exchange value and also that’s probably micro, micro, micro payments which can’t really be done at scale in a fiat world. So do you think it ultimately comes around to blockchain? Because a lot of people, if you ask Sam Altman that, he might say no, although he might admit that it’s probably true.

32:39 But the Google people wouldn’t admit to it. But do you think ultimately it comes back?

32:44 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, ultimately I think I think it does. And then also there’s kind of, there’s going to be not a fork on the road but two kind of ways that we can go but there’s going to be these large centralized models but and even Mark Zuckerberg was talking about this the recent when the recent meta-launch as well that there even their vision needs to have millions, hundreds of millions even billions of agents on the long tail.

33:07 And I think you even had Dr. Roman recently as well, Jambloski and even he said that probably the solution lies in like narrow need specific AI and this is exactly what we do. So there’s going to be a large number of these.

33:21 Brian Rose: A large number of these is just what I’m trying to get to. Billions of agents.

33:26 Zoltan Prokai: Billions, probably potentially even more than people are. We don’t, we have no idea like even if everyone has just two or three doing different things and then they’re going to be have to be essentially transacting by talking to each other just by you know validating data between each other. So it is a really good solution and I cannot give you another one from the top of my head that could solve it other than blockchain.

33:51 Brian Rose: Right, okay. So it should come back around.

33:53 You mentioned Dr. Roman. I had him on the show a couple weeks ago and he can go pretty dark on AI as in he believes that if you give an AI all the information that ultimately it’s going to optimize us right out of the loop. And he did tell me the same thing that you quoted is that the future for him was this narrow AI. Allow them to work on this biomedical solution.

34:17 Allow it to work on this. Allow it to work on this narrow AI. But he said if you’re going to give them all the information and go for this AGI he just thinks it ends. He’s a very frank guy. Where’s he from originally?

34:30 Zoltan Prokai: Eastern Europe.

34:31 Brian Rose: Yeah, he’s probably Eastern Europe. I don’t know if he’s Russian or Slovakian or something. Yeah, he’s in America. But he just says there’s no two ways about it.

34:43 They’re going to optimize this out. And if you say, oh no, we’re going to align the AI. He’s like, yeah, and then they’re going to optimize the alignment out because it’s inefficient. And like he just comes back and it’s very hard to argue with him. I’ve had some big names on the show to talk about this.

34:56 I’ve had Mo Gaudet, X Google X. I’ve had Peter Diamandis. I’ve had Professor Hugo de Garris who wrote a whole book called The Art of Like War. Obviously, Dr. Ben Gertzel, all these people going deep and some of those outcomes do seem possible.

35:13 How do you personally deal with the dark side of centralized and AGI in the long run that says it’ll basically make humans useless and then maybe even not here?

35:25 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, that’s a heavy topic in general. We’ll try to, I guess, get as much information on this as possible in general. It could be potentially there is a dystopian version of this which to be honest, we’ll just try not to think too much about it because otherwise it would be just miserable all day. We’re going to have to trust essentially in ourselves as well.

35:53 And that’s something that kind of essentially blockchain could help, but there’s a lot of work to do. And there’s something that we’re really going to have to pay attention to. It’s really hard to confidently say that there’s nothing to worry about because we know how large companies deal with this in general and how they’ve been dealing with, for example, social media back then. And this is something that’s several magnitudes more powerful. So we are just dealing with it by not looking that far.

36:30 At the moment, but it could be potentially dangerous, I guess. And I agree with what Dr. Roman said as well, that probably in the near future, one of the solutions could be to have narrow, specialized niche specific AI.

36:46 Brian Rose: Also, some of what you’re doing is to potentially prevent that, right? I mean, with Skillful, I can take my skill set and I can own it and build kind of a wall around it, and keep it to be mine, at least keep it longer than I would normally.

37:04 Now, maybe I couldn’t hold it in the long run, but you’re actually providing a way where I don’t get optimized out of the world, right?

37:12 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, absolutely. That’s big. Absolutely. Or maybe that version of you can keep working essentially when you are not anymore.

37:19 That’s doing the work that you’ve been doing essentially. In some cases, that’s also possible.

37:25 Brian Rose: Right. All right. So we’re going to have a Skillful AI version of me on our website soon.

37:30 When you come on, it’ll prompt and you can ask me questions about anything, including all of our content, best Dan Pena moments, worst Dan Pena moments, all these things. And I’ll be there. It’ll start off probably as a chat, but then over time, as you guys progress, it’ll morph into video, 3D video, audio, all that stuff.

37:49 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, absolutely.

37:50 Brian Rose: And then we will be monitoring it to make sure we choose the right model, and then we will own all the data and we’ll own my personality as well.

37:59 Nobody else will own it.

38:01 Zoltan Prokai: That’s a perfect example.

38:02 Brian Rose: And so I’m doing this for my company and also for my personality as an influencer. We could also do a version on my social media that might be slightly different. And then I can be a version for my kids as a parent.

38:16 Zoltan Prokai: But you can do, I guess, all these different types of agents. You could be able to do that.

38:22 Brian Rose: You assume we’ll be able to do all of this. Talk to me about freedom of speech and censorship, because this is something that we unfortunately discovered back in 2020 when we were minding our own business, speaking our truths, and we soon found out that one of these trillion-dollar tech companies, actually pretty much all of them, were stopping us from doing that. Now, if you go down, further down the rabbit hole, it probably was ultimately being commanded by the government, even though at the time, if you said that, you would, everyone would say you’re a conspiracy theorist and out of your mind.

38:58 But thanks to Elon Musk and Twitter Files, we know the government was coming in and saying, don’t say this, say this, don’t say this. How will skillful help in the future to ensure free speech and help with anti-censorship?

39:12 Zoltan Prokai: Okay, so one of the things that we are implementing already is that the rating of these models as well and the answers that come out of them as well, that’s going to be stored completely on chain, if you like. And then this is how, this is what we’re going to use.

39:29 This is all kind of reviews and feedback from the users that are already there and we’re going to be continuing to do that in the future. So what that means is that we’re going to be kind of using like a DAO-like system as well to kind of decide what answer is true, what data we’re going to be using to train these models, essentially, and that’s going to help on that front as well, because it’s going to be somewhat transparent, at least the feedback that we are getting from the people and the users that’s coming. So that’s what we’re going to do on that front.

40:08 In terms of where we are now, but this is just, yeah, companies have their agendas in general and even these current AIs and the large models depending on where they deployed and how they’re used in many of the cases, they cannot give you the right answers. So in our case, we are not planning to introduce any censorship in general as well. It should be free as well. And then people still should be able to kind of think for themselves to a certain level as well.

40:45 Brian Rose: Okay, so you want to provide them unfiltered AI and then people can make those decisions from there.

40:53 Yeah, I mean part of the reason that they say that we had the chat GPT moment with open AI is that they were able to publish a model whereas Google had the same model years earlier, but they were worried about the PR. And so they move fast and we’re less worried about breaking things and reputation. And they got it out there faster and beat them. But they still have now eyeballs on them. But you want to be able to present people kind of a clean version of what the AI is saying and then the person building can make a decision.

41:25 That’s what you ultimately want.

41:27 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this is the direction that we’re aiming for. And as far as, you know, regulation is going to be still coming. We are monitoring that closely with, you know, legally is probably working, you know, almost probably more hours than us lately that we are coming closer to the launch.

41:43 So we’re going to be making sure that everything is done by the rules. And I know that especially large centralized companies are pushing for regulations more and more, obviously, because they don’t, maybe they don’t want others to get up, you know, to that table, who knows? But we’re going to be monitoring that and make sure that we comply with everything. But as far as we can, we’re going to be making everything super clean in terms of censorship.

42:11 Brian Rose: You know, Trump came out recently and he was criticizing Google heavily because I think on some basic search, not amount to even mention AI, when you type in his name, you were getting, you know, Trump rally, you were getting Kamala rally.

42:26 When you typed in assassination questions, it was kind of denying it. And I mean, it was crazy. So for people to know that, imagine what the AI would say. And, you know, if Trump was elected, which we don’t know if he’s going to make it or not, then there could be some very different regulations coming down to these companies. And there still could be regulation in general.

42:47 Some companies are begging for it, like Altman has. The Andreessen’s of the world will say, oh, yeah, he’s begging for it. But that’s just because they have agendas in their own. And of course they do. And it also potentially hurts the smaller ones when they do that.

43:00 Do you expect maybe potentially some backlash of big tech coming from Washington at some point? You mentioned the social media issue. If you get a certain type of government, you could really see people coming after those companies, right?

43:15 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, it could happen. We don’t know what’s going to happen when the election comes, but we are ready for kind of all scenarios here as well.

43:24 So that’s going to be, you know, that’s one of the reasons why we’re not going to be looking at that data. We’re not going to be owning that data. It’s going to be belonging to someone else. We’re just providing all the tools, and then everything that’s kind of allowed by legislation and rules we’re going to be doing on this front. And what comes in regulation?

43:45 I think it’s going to be really hard for them to get their head around regulators in general. Like, you know, what is it? 10, 15 years, and we’re still talking about regulating crypto in general. And then, you know, now AI is probably much more complex to do. So there will be something on training data, maybe, you know, just to give them the source or something like some more basic ones.

44:09 I’m definitely expecting. But we don’t know where it’s going to take us in terms of regulation. We’re going to be ready. It’s the only thing I know. Yeah.

44:17 Brian Rose: Tell me about the skillful AI token. Tell me about the utility of it. You launched it a few months ago recently, had an amazing launch. A lot of demand for it. A lot of people watching you guys.

44:29 Talk to me about why did you launch it before maybe the platform was fully developed and what’s the utility of it? Why is it important to have?

44:39 Zoltan Prokai: Okay. So one of the reasons and one of the main reasons that we came up with the token earlier as well is just was kind of partly because of the investors as well and partly just because of the timing of the market as well. You know, you’re part of it.

44:56 You know that we have long resting periods as well. And then some of the investors were worried that, you know, if we come out too late, by the time the product is or the first iteration of the product is completely finished, we might be out of the cycle completely. And then that’s one of the reasons that we kind of brought it out on time. It was also a fundraising vehicle for us, obviously. We didn’t raise or we didn’t give away any equity of the company yet.

45:24 We are not planning to do it for a considerable time coming. So this is what we kind of use, but all of the investors are happy still. In terms of the utility, it’s going to be the whole kind of glue and the kind of powerhouse of the whole ecosystem as well. So it’s going to be working as kind of generating and incentivizing all the developers because in terms of skillful AI, it’s not only, you know, the AI agents that can be made. We’re going to need a certain amount of data, certain, you know, specific data that we can use it to incentivize people to bring that in or for developers to create the kind of tools to make sure that it’s fruitful and a sparkling ecosystem that, you know, everything that we need is in there and there’s really hundreds of thousands of items that, you know, we can bring into this.

46:21 And also for rewards in general, for giving the people to… It’s not really a doubt, but rewarding people to, you know, give their opinion, to use the platform, to give us feedback and we can make everything better that way.

46:38 Brian Rose: Blockchain AI is a hot narrative right now, right? A lot of people are looking at this. A lot of people are investing in this.

46:48 Like I said, you had a really strong token launch. Who else do you see in this system as ecosystem is important? I mean, we obviously had the three-way merger of the Singularity Net and Fetch and Ocean. Was it them? I’ve had Ben Gertzel on the show.

47:04 I mean, back since 2019, he was on the show. It was kind of wild to see all of those three come together. There’s a few other protocols. What would you say the ecosystem looks like? How many of those are real Blockchain AI companies?

47:18 How many of those are AI meme coins in disguise? Do you think that some of these companies are really going to provide some amazing utility? What do you think?

47:27 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, there’s… Well, definitely there’s a…

47:30 I think… I can’t give you an exact ratio, but there’s a big portion of those that are kind of capitalizing on, the institution of being the AI hot topic in general. And I don’t know if you just probably go to a CoinMarketCap AI tab. We are approaching 400 or 500 tokens maybe now. So definitely a big chunk of those is this group.

47:53 Brian Rose: That have AI in the name.

47:55 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, they have AI in the name and it’s a chatbot or a wrapper around one of the open AI products or one of them and it is no… like something crazy behind them. But there are a lot of projects still, like definitely more than a handful, big number of projects that are trying to solve actual problems. One of them being us and some of the older ones as well, like the internet computer where you can actually run AI fully on chain.

48:24 Even computation is happening on the chain. And Dominic Rums I think he’s kind of a genius as well. So we’re really looking at what they are doing. Also, Nilian, one of our partner, is also with the blind computation. We are building a product together.

48:40 You’re going to be able to see that as well, which is meaning it’s going to be an important component for us as well, meaning that you can share all of your data, like even the sensitive ones what we talked about earlier. And then other parties can compute on them and maybe get answers out that they certainly need but they don’t see the data that they are computing on. So it’s not something that could be essential and kind of unlocking these whole new use cases of what they call sleeping giant industries.

49:13 I think that we kind of need it. For even them, lots of decentralized infrastructure projects that are either incentivizing people to use their gaming PCs for mining and providing compute. So when they are not using it, those are good use cases as well. And there’s a number of them. But the vast majority, I think, like if I would have to say something, maybe at least 60%, so more than half of these projects that we see on like a coin market tab is capitalizing on AI being a hot topic at the moment.

49:52 Brian Rose: Right, no new innovation, no long-term game-changing technology, just kind of wrapping things in and putting it on the blockchain. So you have to be careful when you look around and what you invest in. But the people seem to understand what you’re doing, right?

50:10 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, we have really good feedback and also we make sure, like even with our fundraising, we have a very strong connection with the community. I would say even with the fundraising part, we got them involved, one of the big rounds, kind of last minute, the team decided to change it because we were so much oversubscribed and everyone kind of wanted a little piece, so we made sure that everyone could get it and it’s really appreciated by them as well.

50:40 We have lots of testers and everyone is looking forward to this launch. And there’s going to be obviously other utilities and things that we’ll be introduced that I can’t not yet talk about, but everyone’s going to see. We have really good feedback. In general, it’s not always easy to kind of distill down in like a five-minute, I don’t know, five-sentence introduction for them to really grasp of what we’re doing, but in general, it’s really good feedback and we’re excited too.

51:10 Brian Rose: I remember I was texting you when they took a launch and you said, Brian, you ain’t seen nothing yet. We have so much stuff coming down the line. He said, we’re going to grow this so much bigger. You sent me that because I think you launched right around Consensus in Texas, right? That was in April.

51:26 What did you mean when you told me that?

51:29 Zoltan Prokai: Well, it’s just, there’s unlimited possibilities kind of in terms of this platform of where we can take this because we are not just the stuff that we are building, we’re also going to be bringing and kind of embracing other people to build things and provide tools that people can use on this product. So we are expecting a large number of users and lots of use cases that we cannot even think of and also some tools, integrations in terms of whether it’s blockchain, whether it’s just from normal Web2 because we can use that as well.

52:08 And because it’s going to be a frictionless experience and we use account obstruction pretty heavily, we want to make sure that even for Web2 users, it’s a kind of easy on-ramp into Web3 while having all of these benefits of privacy and security. And it’s looking pretty good.

52:27 Brian Rose: Nice. So I can come on as a Web2 person. I don’t need a MetaMask wallet.

52:32 I don’t need skillful AI tokens to start. I could start using the protocol and then later and then get all the benefits owning my data as well and then later unlock things, get better priorities by having tokens, etc.

52:47 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, exactly. It’s actually all going to be happening in the background as well in terms of like payments, everything and the token holders will be always rewarded from a portion of the kind of income or whatever is happening on the platform as well.

53:04 So it’s going to be worth having those tokens as well.

53:07 Brian Rose: Okay. We mentioned earlier, I think 3D avatars. So the way that you’re set up, I mean, you could potentially plug those in from other sources.

53:14 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, we could.

53:15 Yeah, okay. Definitely easily.

53:17 Brian Rose: And that’s the beauty of a Web3 protocol is you don’t have this like walled garden area where it’s like keep your hands off my tech with you, you’re just anything that else wants to plug in, you’re open to it.

53:27 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, yeah. And that’s one of the benefits of the platform as well.

53:30 Whatever is coming because obviously we wanted to design it and set it up in a way that don’t know what’s going to come, what kind of innovation is going to come, what kind of tools is going to be even, you know, trending or is going to be a need for and we’re going to be ready to integrate all of those. So that’s kind of partly our mode as well but our vision to kind of grow with the industry.

53:52 Brian Rose: Okay, you mentioned D-Pen. D-Pen for people that don’t know, it’s quite the buzzword right now in blockchain but I think for good reason.

54:00 It means decentralized physical infrastructure network. What it really means is all the hardware that’s around you from your phone to your computer to your gaming GPU, the good stuff, right? Is usually sitting dormant almost all the time and in fact it could be used to power all sorts of things in the future including AI computations and other stuff. We’re actually investing in a company right now that has kind of a way of accessing all the D-Pens and kind of doing D-Pen, you know, yield mining, yield swap and you can get some of the best ones but I don’t think they have an AI agent that you can plug in that would basically intelligently look at all of your hardware and constantly monitor it and optimize the way that you could get returns on that but that’s something that you see you guys doing.

54:50 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, we could be doing that as well. So, anything that, for example, if that company has a need for this and get in touch with us, they can either very likely tune SDK eventually like a software development that they would be able to do eventually or we’re going to be assisting them. We could be assisting them doing that. We can’t have an arm that’s going to be focusing on that kind of coming up with these custom solutions for certain partners, clients, whatever you want to call them but we could be doing that as well.

55:21 If anyone needs of any kind of agent, it’s very likely that it can be done.

55:25 Brian Rose: Nice. So, they could come in and build it themselves on your platform but if it got a little technical forum, you’re going to have an area that can kind of customize and consult that for them. Yes. What are the other areas you see yourself going into in the future?

55:37 I mean, you mentioned Deepin earlier, I know it’s the unknown unknowns. The beautiful thing about your system is you can move anywhere at any time and customize anything but what do you think it’s going to turn into?

55:51 Zoltan Prokai: Well, it should. Biomedical? Yeah, it could be even biomedical.

55:55 There’s actually, we have a conversation going in that direction as well with the company in Australia very early stages but that could be used. In that case, it’s going to be analyzing data essentially and there is also another company that’s kind of doing like a mental well-being kind of platform as well that would be using and building assistance as well and that’s again kind of an area where if people have those conversations with these assistants, that’s very sensitive data. That’s something that they wouldn’t want to share or wouldn’t want to know and that’s also a good use case.

56:40 So it’s really hard to exactly tell where we’re going. I really would like to, or we are actually looking at gaming as well. We could be doing assistance or agents that kind of help game designers to do some of the tasks that they don’t want to spend time on like creating the surroundings, for example, or non-character, non-player characters, NPCs that can be taken from one game to another, for example, that all could be done.

57:11 Brian Rose: Do you think it could plug in and be a gaming assistant for me as I play games in the future?

57:18 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, that could be as well.

57:20 Brian Rose: Okay, it’s interesting. You talk about mental health and for me, there’s the Mafia test. If you know about this, but like there was a famous show on TV called The Sopranos and the Mafia boss was going and talking to his therapist and you asked some actual Mafia guys and they later said that if anyone ever found out they were doing that, they’d be whacked and that’s an interesting test because like you said, that’s sensitive information and most people would think twice before sharing that with a Google of the world or a meta or an open AI and so I’d say the Mafia test is good.

57:55 If you would be whacked for sharing information, it’s probably something you better own yourself. So with the mental health stuff, again, that’s another perfect example and I think it’s really important because with mental health, the AI can pick up on lots of little indicators about you, not to mention have a conversation with you and also check maybe your vitals, maybe your oral ring, maybe how much you’re posting, how much activity you’re having, how many emails you’re sending, how many phone calls you’re making and then ask you questions how you’re doing and that can be really helpful for your mental health but the last thing you want is Google owning that data or worst case there being a breach later or Lord knows the deep state owning that data.

58:39 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah and who knows what can happen and at that point, they can just push the right buttons and they can take it either direction, either sell you anything or just persuade you into anything they want.

58:50 So that’s an area that’s really what we have to be careful about.

58:54 Brian Rose: What do you think of what Elon Musk is doing with Grok and with XAI? You know, obviously, he’s the guy that’s not very happy with OpenAI and the evolution of that company. He’s still suing Sam. He’s not happy with the woke AI examples coming from chat, GPT and mainly Google.

59:13 He’s trying to offer an alternative and then also he likes to have fun so he has the different modes of Grok, I think. Obviously, it plugs into X right now and you see some real-time version. I think their image generator just came out a week ago and the reviews were really good. What do you think Elon brings to the market? I’m guessing you’re going to allow his AI alongside all these other AIs but also how do you feel about what he’s doing?

59:42 Zoltan Prokai: If we are good in general, to be honest, I think what he’s trying to do because he’s one of the main founders of OpenAI and then when it was coming from open source and then we heard the news about that maybe without him, OpenAI wouldn’t even exist as well. So I think this is what you’re trying to make right. It’s probably not the right word but probably do something about that and massive amounts of resources are being poured into Grok as he’s actually really good as well.

1:00:14 We’re definitely going to be integrating in as soon as we can but I think what he’s doing is generally great for and X in general, not just XAI but X in general is something great, I think.

1:00:27 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s without X, I think we’d be in a different place these days and I know it’s not perfect and some people say, okay, he censors other people but our latest film, we had to premiere on X, we couldn’t premiere on any other platform. I argue that X itself changes the conversations we have in everyday life because I don’t think people would feel as comfortable speaking openly about things if it wasn’t being talked about on X and the old version of Twitter was the worst version of the woke mind virus really and it was just out of control and it’s amazing the example it shows you of what big tech can do.

1:01:08 I mean, that in itself is a case study. You know, as Elon said, whether you agree with him or not, it was a square mile in downtown San Francisco that exported their value system to the world and then pretty much went in and enforced that value system to everybody else and did it in a really effective way and that’s kind of scary. The fact that it happened for so many years and now he’s trying to kind of reverse it, it tells you a lot about the power of big tech and AI wasn’t involved there yet and now it is.

1:01:41 So you’re happy to see what he’s doing. It looks like it’s pretty positive. Yeah, the whole story of open AI is crazy because apparently the reason Elon helped start that company is because he had an argument with Serge Abran of Google at a party and Serge just said, well, you know, the AI is going to win and Elon said, well, what about the humans? Like, I’m on Team Human. I think the humans should win and he said, what are you, a humanist?

1:02:04 And Elon was like, yeah. And he was so scared by that conversation, he started open AI and it’s weird because now what, six, seven years later, like, you know, Google is now doing that. Google is now doing that and I think he just updated the proceedings against open AI as well. I think he just did that and it’s just, yeah, funny and he probably never gonna forget that sentence that first you start off as preserving the forest and then you become a lumber company.

1:02:37 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, poachers turn gamekeeper, I think is what they call it too.

1:02:40 Brian Rose: What do you think about what meta is doing and with the open source llama? A lot of people are surprised to see them open sourcing, but then other people say that’s the best way to develop a product is to open source it. So what are your thoughts there? Also, Jan Lacun, who works for Facebook, he’s constantly chirping away on Twitter because he’s anti-musk and so it’s this weird dynamic happening between these people.

1:03:01 What do you think of that?

1:03:03 Zoltan Prokai: Well, I think for the first part of the question, I think what meta is doing is great. I mean, open source is gonna be the way and in the future, sorry, in the past it was kind of the way of developing in a trustworthy way that anyone can kind of examine and see what the software is doing and giving the opportunity for, opportunity to companies like us, for example, to kind of build on top of it, tweak it and his vision is the same as well that it’s going to be like a long tail and billions of or millions of AI agents and that could be done through one of the main models is what Meta just did.

1:03:44 Brian Rose: It might be a bit of a contradiction compared to his old self, what we have seen from Mark Zuckerberg back then.

1:03:51 Zoltan Prokai: Of wanting to own everything.

1:03:53 Brian Rose: Yeah, of wanting to own everything and having everything. Is this a way of owning everything? You know, somehow, because if you look at a Linux or a Bitcoin or a blockchain, it’s open source is what made it successful.

1:04:06 And then maybe that’s gonna revert back to their success faster than a Google model.

1:04:12 Zoltan Prokai: Well, we don’t know what their long term plan is. It’s partly, they had to kind of catch up, I guess, and you know, the new 3.1 for like the 401 billion parameter, like the strongest model that they have, they kind of had to catch up with that. And what they’re doing now, it’s kind of like a scorched earth kind of strategy. To me, this is how we look at it.

1:04:38 It’s kind of, you know, meet same level as like, let’s say the competition and then release it for free. And this is what happened just now. So we don’t know how they’re gonna do it in the future. I don’t know if at some point they’re gonna close it. They don’t seem to or this is not what they say.

1:04:57 But currently, I think they’re both gonna exist, close and open source, but for the developer community, this open source way of, I guess, developing and advancing is more beneficial. I think it’s definitely for us.

1:05:11 Brian Rose: Okay, and you like that a lot. You can use it, plug it in.

1:05:15 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, of course.

1:05:16 Zoltan Prokai: And it’s super helpful.

1:05:17 Brian Rose: Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, it’s one thing to use these big models with tons of compute, but you can get all these smaller localized versions that can do faster, more specific compute really efficiently. And you can run them on your phone or run them on some localized piece of infrastructure.

1:05:34 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, and even soon, smart contracts as well, because they’re much smaller.

1:05:38 You need the smart contract. Main memory needs to be much smaller. Obviously, that could be also done.

1:05:45 Brian Rose: An AI smart contract.

1:05:46 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, well, smart contracts can kind of hold one of these models at some point.

1:05:51 This is what ICP is. I think, to some extent, they did. As well, large models, I don’t think they worked there yet, but something like a 2 billion or 4 billion, I’m not sure. Don’t quote me on that parameter model. They already ran.

1:06:06 That was completely ran on a smart contract and it was doing image categorization, I think, something like that.

1:06:13 Brian Rose: Okay, that’s pretty interesting.

1:06:15 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, it is very interesting. So a lot of interesting. So we’re looking closely at that as soon as it gets to that level that we can integrate it and use that VO, very likely going to be doing something like that as well.

1:06:29 Brian Rose: Okay, ultimately, you’re in the blockchain business and that means it’s subject to the ups and downs of crypto. What are your thoughts on that? Right now, most people say we’re, I don’t know, halfway through the bull run as if we ever know where we are. But Bitcoin’s been hovering around 60. It’s been as high as 74.

1:06:50 You’ve got all these bullish tailwinds like Bitcoin ETF, Ethereum ETF, rumored Solana ETF, potential new administration that’s going to fire Gary Gensler. You got some Larry Finkle Blackrock at the Bitcoin conference. They’re doing RWA. They’re tokenizing treasury bonds like in a real way. There’s a lot of positive things, but we also know this is a cyclical market.

1:07:14 What’s your view on crypto? Are you bullish? Do you think this bull market lasts a long time? Does it matter? What do you think?

1:07:23 Zoltan Prokai: I don’t think it matters. That’s my short answer. And two things that, one is we are kind of a blockchain company, but we are essentially a company that’s utilizing the benefits of blockchain. So by the time we get to we want, even when there is a bear market, people are still going to be using these tools. So the company is still going to be worth holding this token.

1:07:44 We’re still going to be generating some kind of, we’re not profit, but we’re going to have some kind of results doing that what we are doing, regardless of the market cycle. And we’re going to get there likely by the first half of next year, by the time we have this running in an optimal way. So we are not going to be necessarily affected. So Skiffle.ai is not going to be a company that disappears in the bear market if it’s long enough. That’s for sure.

1:08:13 But in terms of the market cycles, I think it’s still coming and it’s still going to be crazy. Like in my view, for example, Bitcoin still didn’t have the real all-time high. Like, you know, it was, you know, what is 70, 70, three, four, something like that. I don’t remember the exact number, but if you’re looking at the massive inflation of the last few years, it’s probably a bit closer to 80 when we actually reach a new high. And it’s not even counting the,

1:08:48 You know, the customer indexes as where they might be even higher as well. So we don’t know. And that’s still coming. I think all of these that you mentioned is definitely positive. There’s more money flowing into it.

1:09:00 There’s kind of more awareness. Big players are in now as well. I don’t think in the short terms, to be honest, I don’t really look at it that much. Obviously, there’s opportunities to make money through the cycles. But what everyone should be looking at is like a longer-term trajectory, which, you know, it was quite obvious of where we are going, I think, from now on.

1:09:24 Brian Rose: Right, a lot higher. And so your tokens launched, so you don’t really need to worry about the markets much anymore. Now you need to build and generate revenues and make customers happy and scale. That’s all you’re worried about.

1:09:36 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, exactly.

1:09:37 Brian Rose: It’s a nice place to be. And your customers aren’t necessarily blockchain companies. I mean, they could be D-pin companies, but it’s not just that.

1:09:44 Zoltan Prokai: It’s not just that, yeah. Subject to that ecosystem.

1:09:46 Yeah, it could be really anyone. It could be individuals that just want to use a product. Or it could be even companies. It could be a company like yours. It could be anyone.

1:09:57 Brian Rose: You’re obviously kind of worried about and making sure that everyone is happy.

1:10:02 Zoltan Prokai: So we’re going to be making sure that timing everything based on the market cycles and make sure that we’re always in a good position. And the token is doing well, which we managed to do quite well, I think, upon to here. And we’re going to continue to do that. But this is not what’s going to make or break the company.

1:10:22 Brian Rose: Right, yeah. Let me ask you a practical question this whole time. Right now, I’m not running any AI agents. And part of me thinks that I’m missing a competitive advantage. And for anybody listening who’s not running them, now I should know better.

1:10:36 I mean, I’m invested in you guys and a bunch of other companies. I’m interviewing these people, but I’m not really running a lot of AI agents. Should I be worried about that if I’m not running agents right now and learning and putting in my business? Is it only a matter of time before I become obsolete as an influencer? Before my business becomes obsolete?

1:10:55 Is this something maybe to be scared about a little bit and think, wait a second. If I’m not doing it, someone else is doing it. And these things can learn and optimize and service customers in such an incredible way that I have to take advantage of this now. Tell me and give it to me straight. You know, or anybody who’s listening.

1:11:14 I mean, should I have at least five agents right now? Ten agents. Should I be morphing my personality? Should I be using it to run all these different systems here in the company? Like, what’s your honest opinion on that?

1:11:23 Zoltan Prokai: The short answer is yes, because if you are up against someone in competition in the marketplace that’s kind of using them and kind of making it native in their business, you definitely have an edge. Whether if it’s just a normal daily operations where you don’t have to send any email, for example, just to stay with a very simple example or don’t have to even pick up the phone did we get back to this customer, for example, where are we on these accounting issues? It could be just someone implementing a chatbot already in their internal system that knows all this information, for example.

1:11:59 So that’s just a very simple example. So everyone should pay attention in general. Everyone should educate themselves as much as they can. We’re going to be helping on that front as well. There’s going to be an academy within Skillful AI that we are kind of building out now to several partners that kind of help with the first push towards this direction, I’m pretty sure.

1:12:24 But the short answer is yes, everyone should be aware and pay attention to this because if someone is not using it against someone who is, it is a really hard game to win.

1:12:35 Brian Rose: Yeah, I had Peter Diamantis on the show and he’s pretty forward thinking Silicon Valley exec and he said every company needs a head of AI or chief AI officer to be doing this, you’re going to be dead. And I bet so many companies don’t or they don’t really know what they’re doing or they’re not empowering that individual and they’re going to wake up real quick and realize this may be too late.

1:13:01 Or at least they’re not doing it yet. I think they’re going to realize it soon enough.

1:13:06 Zoltan Prokai: There’s definitely going to be a shift of power in the marketplace as well. But they’re going to be companies like us. That’s why we are trying to make it easy and frictionless for them.

1:13:17 So even someone who doesn’t have a ton of technical knowledge can go through and implement it as easy as possible.

1:13:23 Brian Rose: Right, plug and play. And there’ll be examples on the website as well to where it’ll be like, all right, you can do this, this, and this. Versions of things that people have done already. You can go ahead and build your personal assistant, build your online influencer version of you, all these things, so they can plug in right away.

1:13:42 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, all of that. But if it’s your operations, there’s a lot of areas, anything you can think of pretty much.

1:13:49 Brian Rose: Yeah, okay, I’m going to get my game together. How do you manage a global team? How do you keep everybody with the right vision and mission?

1:13:58 It’s not easy to do that. It’s not easy to manage a team in blockchain space or in the AI space. How do you do it?

1:14:06 Zoltan Prokai: So we are, I consider myself really lucky. I have two founding partners, Stanley and Emmanuel.

1:14:12 One of them is based in New Zealand, like born and raised and it’s not just moved there. And Emmanuel is based in Costa Rica and I’m normally based in Europe, so we are like literally three different parts of the world. But we have the same passion and driving force and that makes it really, really easy. Obviously, we don’t work the normal, traditional hours of the day. Well, obviously, first of all, we work much more, but we make sure that we align and we have, well, let me count, but probably, you know, maybe a 20-hour spread between us.

1:14:45 So it’s not easy. But in general, the team as well, we are very lucky we don’t have any problem or it’s not an issue to find talent at all.

1:14:54 Brian Rose: How is that? Because this space is known as being super hard to find good talent, super hard to keep good talent. Obviously, everybody’s innovating in this space.

1:15:05 How is that not a problem for you guys?

1:15:07 Zoltan Prokai: I guess it’s just so aligned with the vision. They just like what we are doing. They would like to be part of something like this because the mission is actually something very useful in terms of the message of what we are doing as well. We are not just building something extremely powerful.

1:15:25 It’s going to be a massive capital gain for the small number of people, but it’s going to be helping a lot of people in general and on the long term as well or as long as we can. And we are aligned with that as well with developers. We have developers on the team who are university professors in some of the South American universities. So they are like high level on the field. We have all kind of individuals that are just happy to join us, even coming in in some cases in a lower level just to be able to part of it.

1:16:02 So we are not experiencing the hardship of finding talent, but it’s probably because we are doing something right, I believe.

1:16:12 Brian Rose: How big is your team?

1:16:14 Zoltan Prokai: Well, right now we are about 30, 32 people. If we are counting everyone, it’s been just growing quite fast because this is just over a year old, something like that. So it’s not an old company at all.

1:16:31 But yeah, we are growing pretty quick.

1:16:33 Brian Rose: That’s pretty big. And you have no capital to sustain you for a while.

1:16:38 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, definitely. It’s more than two years still and this is just the initial kind of stack that we have.

1:16:44 And then we have several things in place to be able to sustain us longer if we need to. But what we are planning to do is kind of accelerate rather than just have a date when this is our end of the runway and we’re going to bring that closer. So we have lots of offers, lots of conversations going. We want to make sure that we are picking the right people that are not going to kind of gain control. It’s something that we are really aware of and really would like to preserve that we can build this the way we want it.

1:17:18 So it’s not going to be some large VC that’s going to have some board seats and then take control essentially. So this is why we have investors like yourself, for example, that’s supporting the same ideas that you have on the board out there exactly. And we make sure that all of our investors, we were kind of picking investors. We have probably, I don’t know, 10 times over a subscription in terms of VCs, in terms of private. And we had to have a conversation with everyone and whoever was aligned.

1:17:49 So we even have like research kind of institute groups from Asia that are part of it, like group of 10 researchers publishing all the time. They’re part of an investor group. VCs that are in the intersection of blockchain and AI. So we made sure that we are not going to sell these two or not going to let anyone in

1:18:13 Brian Rose: That will just have the capital benefit. And that would be an equity sale that you’re thinking about in the future.

1:18:21 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, there would be on it. But we’ll see how this works.

1:18:24 Brian Rose: But you’re in a beautiful position where you can be choosy about that.

1:18:29 And that’s because of the work you did, the vision, and the fact that you stick to that vision. It means that everyone’s attracted to you from the developers to the investors to everything.

1:18:39 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, pretty much.

1:18:40 Brian Rose: I mean, you came on and pitched our group, they really felt connected to you and your vision. And Emmanuel was there.

1:18:46 And I don’t know, it really hit all the notes with us. And you know, we’re big on freedom. We’re big on giving people more power and giving people their consciousness back and cooperation. And man, you really hit all those points. And again, I watched that video back.

1:19:02 And I was like, you guys are on point. You had an amazing plan. You had incredible technology. You guys really were giving all sorts of ways to empower people. Like you said, in this plug and play model that unfortunately, AI is still really confusing for a lot of people.

1:19:18 And it’s scary. And that means they don’t take action. And so yeah, we were really impressed. And it continued to be. So you’re obviously doing something right.

1:19:27 Zoltan Prokai: I was thinking, yeah, we’re trying.

1:19:29 Brian Rose: This was a bit of a surprise for you because I think you’ve said that this company would not have been created unless you got stranded in a trip from Australia back in Hungary during lockdown. And you would have never met your founders if it wasn’t for this travel ban for you. Talk to me about that because that must have been a really challenging time when you wanted to get back to Australia. I think you had a lot of projects you were working on.

1:19:56 You were forced to stay. But through that pain, skillful AI was born.

1:20:02 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, the story is exactly as you said pretty much. So there was 2019 Christmas when I kind of traveled back.

1:20:12 No one knew that anyone would happen back then. And I was kind of planning to go back a few months after. But then the pandemic happened in the meantime as well. And that was dragging on for a long time. And that was the problem.

1:20:24 So kind of keeping everything alive there. You’re kind of disconnected. That’s a huge financial burden as well. And had to realign a lot of things in life. And there was kind of a decision point where, OK, where to next.

1:20:42 And a few of the projects obviously died because you couldn’t pursue them in a way you wanted. Some of them were completely wiped out just because of the changes that they had. And then this is how I met these guys. In hindsight, that was all supposed to happen, as painful as it was at the time. Obviously, now I see it.

1:21:04 And then we were part of this program. We got accepted. There was, I think, 25 people. They chose for, I would say, a micro degree, like a management of blockchain businesses. And this is where I met these guys.

1:21:19 And then we started talking. And then this is how skillful AI was born. I can be only thankful for that period in general. And also to you, actually, because before that, I was just finishing my master’s in blockchain technology. And then right before, and just very short, before I went to that course, one of the last kind of pushes that I made the decision to join and then get a master’s degree in blockchain technology is one of your shows that I went.

1:21:52 I saw Andreas Antonopoulos here. And then I saw that he’s one of the lecturers. I saw a video here. And I’m like, okay, yeah, I’m going to have to do this. So it was all building up to probably this moment here.

1:22:04 So as you said before, I manifested this whole thing.

1:22:08 Brian Rose: You did. It’s wild to know that London Real was part of your journey getting here for the last five years or more. And I guess more, because Andreas was on back in 2017 and 18 and 19. That’s amazing.

1:22:23 I remember Andreas being in that chair and talking about the future of money, the internet of money. This is before the term DeFi was coined. This is before stablecoins were really even talked about. I think he was here in 2015, 17 and 19. And those conversations were epic.

1:22:41 And there were some of the very few deeply personal conversations and intimate conversations with Andreas where you could get inside his head and feel his passion. And I think they changed a lot of people’s lives. Probably planted the seed in me about crypto. I know people like Michael Saylor said that he watched those when lockdown happened to climb the curve when he was researching blockchain. And so many people look at those vids.

1:23:11 And it’s amazing to know that that had an effect to this. And now we can be a part of this incredible journey for skillful AI to empower millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people around the world to preserve the intellectual property. Maybe have a relationship with AI that’s not dystopian and destructive and one that doesn’t marginalize humans, but promotes humans. People talk about these great ways where AI can make us the best versions of ourselves and give us our free time back and make us more human.

1:23:45 It feels like that’s what you guys are doing. Whereas some of these other centralized institutions, they unfortunately feel like going the opposite way of total control, seizing everyone’s data, ignoring copyrights, ignoring intellectual property. And so you guys are a ray of hope when it comes to this. And I feel just really humbled that we had played a small part in that journey. And it’s probably why we were both attracted to each other.

1:24:12 Brian Rose: I think you said when we reached out to you, you didn’t even know if it was real.

1:24:17 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, at the beginning, lots of these things happening in Web3 as well that people are kind of impersonating others. And I wasn’t even sure if it was you guys. But then obviously I had to chat to Dr. Angkor as well and then you directly and then the whole thing.

1:24:33 So it was quite clear pretty early on that it is. And then obviously we’re excited. And then now here we are. And who knows for how long we’re going to be doing crazy stuff together. Yeah.

1:24:44 Brian Rose: What do you think skillful AI looks like in 2034, 10 years from now? I mean, that’s a long time in AI world. But what do you think it looks like? What do you want it to look like?

1:24:57 Zoltan Prokai: What we want it to look like is that in 10 years time, hopefully even earlier, is to be that anyone that kind of wants to use AI tools or either using them is come through us or have this kind of the hub that they use to go to place when you talk about AI.

1:25:16 But if it’s Web 3, Web 2, and when you have interactions and not something that’s embedded in another system, but even that can be done. But if you are interacting with an AI or with your assistant, or at least when you have an app on your phone even, they will have a little badge on the side that is powered by skillful AI. And this is the goal.

1:25:38 Brian Rose: Nice. And like you said, you’re going to be like the Canva or the Squarespace or one of these platforms that allows anyone to come in with no skill set and build something as if they were an expert in that space.

1:25:51 And then it’s immediately functional. And so for people out there that have been scared of AI, and that’s pretty much everybody, that don’t know how to interact with it, maybe they have a chat GPT account, but they don’t know how to go to the next level. Okay, yeah, they know that it works and it can do some great things with text and answer questions. But it’s a very big difference from asking chat GPT questions to actually having an agent. That can do things for you as you and then you can own it.

1:26:17 That’s what people need to do is take that next step, go on to skillful. What’s the best way for them to do that website? Also, what’s the best way for them to follow you guys and updates and things like that?

1:26:29 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, so we are on X and all the major platforms as well. Probably X is where we have our most focus on skillful AI.io is our website as well.

1:26:37 And then give us a follow and then keep an eye on what’s coming because we’re going to be starting ramping things up for the launch of the first products very soon.

1:26:46 Brian Rose: Right, all right. So Q4, keep an eye out because some big things are going to be happening there. And then rolling out more and more and more.

1:26:53 Zoltan Prokai: Yes, exactly.

1:26:54 Brian Rose: Okay, and 30 plus people now probably ramping up from there and bigger partnerships and yeah.

1:27:00 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, we have all of these ready that’s going to be announced in the next few months. In terms of partnerships, very exciting ones in terms of products, in terms of a lot of things. It’s going to be an exciting time ahead and it’s never going to be fully finished. That’s another thing we know.

1:27:17 It’s going to be always just because of the nature how it is. It’s going to be always things to add. There’s going to be always things to polish but we’re enjoying this journey so much. So looking forward to it.

1:27:27 Brian Rose: Nice, and the token’s live and it’s on some centralized exchanges like Qcoin and things like that.

1:27:31 Zoltan Prokai: No, it’s a gate, MEXE and there’s also Uniswap. Uniswap as well. So if in any decks, you can pretty much swap into it and grab it out there if you want. There’s going to be very soon direct swap on our website as well. I think it’s going to be implemented in the next couple of weeks.

1:27:46 Brian Rose: Okay, nice, good stuff. Zoltan’s super excited about this. It was great to connect and great to connect with you and with you in Dubai. The whole team is really excited about this project. I’m going to get in there and start building all my AI agents.

1:28:00 Make sure that I make this happen in Q4 as well because I want to really go all out with this and see what I can do with this for me, for the brand, for the company, for everything about that. And we’re going to use skillful AI obviously for all of it. So super excited. Congrats on what you’ve done. Looking forward to a super bright future and a positive future with AI as opposed to all these dark dystopian ones which I’ve been with.

1:28:25 But I want to own my data. I want to own my AI agents and I want them to work for me and not for someone else. And I’m pumped for that future. So thank you, man.

1:28:34 Zoltan Prokai: Yeah, thank you.

1:28:35 Thanks for having me.

1:28:46 Brian Rose: All right, man. Let’s do this. Thanks.