ClaireZau Ep 9 Youtube
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Rebecca Bultsma: [00:00:00] Today we are thrilled to have Claire Zau with us, who is a partner and AI lead at GSV Ventures. And Claire has an amazing newsletter that you all need to check out and subscribe to immediately. It’s AIeducation. substack. com. But, She focuses on a lot of things beyond that. She focuses on AI investments.
Rebecca Bultsma: She’s a keynote speaker at events like the World Economic Forum and ASU GSV Summit, which I think we’ll talk about a little bit more. She is an advisor to ASU’s External AI Thought Leadership Group. She has degrees from Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. She’s a former varsity fencer.
Rebecca Bultsma: With experience in tech and finance. That is very niche. I can’t wait to hear more about that. And Claire has lived in Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, the Bay area, and is now based in New York city. Welcome to the AmpED to 11 podcast, Claire. We’re thrilled to have you here.
Claire Zau: Thank you so much, Rebecca. It’s great [00:01:00] to see you both, Brett and Rebecca.
Claire Zau: I’m so excited to be on here.
Brett Roer: Thank you so much for joining us today. You really are, as I mentioned before, the insider of insiders. Um, I now am so glad I get to see you on video, sharing all your insights about all things. AI, I have your newsletter and I’m sure we’re going to dive deep in it today, but the, uh, you know, GSV.
Brett Roer: AI show and the ASU GSV summit are truly my favorite week professionally of the year. So we’re going to really talk about all the amazing innovation that you lead over at GSV Venture, and we’re going to kick it off with some really great questions. Are you ready?
Claire Zau: Yeah. Yeah. I’m excited to chat, excited to riff.
Claire Zau: I’m excited to hear, you know, your feedback on anything I say. Um, so very hyped for this discussion.
Brett Roer: All right. Well, you know, as we know, this is AmpED to 11, so we’re going to have all our questions are gonna have a common theme, which are based around the number 11. So we’re gonna kick it off with some pop culture.
Brett Roer: We’re gonna talk about The hit Netflix show, Stranger Things. Alright, so [00:02:00] you really are in the know about all things AI. We know that on Stranger Things, the main character, Eleven, she amazes everyone. She’s got these supernatural powers. Claire, in the time you’ve been covering AI and your experiences, what’s been the most jaw dropping AI moment, the thing that left you in awe, caught you completely off guard?
Claire Zau: The crazy thing about this space is that I feel like I have a new one every two weeks. Um, and that’s just the, the velocity at which this space is moving, but I do feel like most recently, um, something that’s been top of mind for a lot of people in the industry is just this Conversation around agents.
Claire Zau: So what happens when you let AI actually operate and use a computer on your behalf? And specifically to name the technology that I think we’ve seen a couple of big breakthroughs recently is just around computer use. So Anthropic as part of cloud launched a feature called computer use, um, as well as a benchmark to measure how good AI is at operating our computers as well as open AI, I think just in the [00:03:00] last week launching operator.
Claire Zau: So both of those are some of the biggest releases from two of the biggest AI frontier model providers. And what that really shows is that we’re moving to a world where AI is going to be able to use computers on our behalf. ~Um,~ and I think what I find really interesting about that and why I feel like this is a massive jaw dropping breakthrough is because I think so much of our usage and interaction with computers and our digital sphere has been almost not natural.
Claire Zau: Um, you know, it’s, it’s us typing, it’s us clicking at things, it’s us moving files and, and That interaction has made up much of our, you know, as a society, this human computer interaction. But I think what’s exciting about this moment is a world where you flip that upside down and we can now actually interact with computers using just voice.
Claire Zau: Communicating it with a computer in the way that I would talk to you in a room. And I can just say, Hey Brett, can you book me a flight? And it would know to go to this [00:04:00] tab to look up Google Flights. It would know my preferences. It would be able to. input my credit card information, compare flight prices, all of that.
Claire Zau: And I think what computer use unlocks is that ability to actually translate verbal text and verbal instructions in natural language into computer action. ~Um,~ and I think that just unlocks a ton for, for what, how, and how we think about just interacting with computers. Does that mean we need typing classes?
Claire Zau: Do we even need to have digital literacy as we know it? So just a lot of, I think, upcoming questions around how we use computers in this digital age with AI. I
Rebecca Bultsma: have a bit of a question about that. I know all the demos we see for a lot of the agents, and a lot of what’s talked about is the idea of getting groceries for you, booking flights for you.
Rebecca Bultsma: How do you see that expanding into something that would be truly useful for people? Can you think of specific use cases for agents that are beyond the book a vacation for you that we hear about so much?
Claire Zau: Well, I think a lot of times the big promise that a lot of these flashy tech startups [00:05:00] are advertising and, you know, building their visions around is selling actual work.
Claire Zau: So, uh, you know, having AI agents replace entire workforces of call center agents or, you know, replacing sales agents and such. So selling digital workers. ~Uh,~ so that’s kind of the pitch that we’ve seen, but I think in terms of actual workflows. There’s a very, you know, productivity oriented ease case. So, order my groceries, uh, help me book a flight.
Claire Zau: But I think in education, what that could look like is just using text, or even verbally saying to your computer, can you pull up all these reports, summarize it, and send it to the respective parents, ~um,~ and make sure it’s personalized to every child. And you can see how that is something we can still do, and I can still do with tools like magic school and brisk and chat GPT on my own if I’m an educator and that’s that’s already possible But it’s the actual chain of that [00:06:00] workflow That makes it so much more interesting is because it’s time saving you no longer have to Have ai as this kind of side bot, but rather it’s actually just completely Finishing end to end actions for you.
Claire Zau: So in education, it could look like that Obviously if you’re in an administrative function, there are so many use cases around just pooling reports, automatically generating emails out of them, summarizing numbers out of that, those reports, um, you know, we’re seeing tools like Dewey, um, which we’re an investor in, uh, you kind of apply the same concept where you use natural language to talk to your school data.
Claire Zau: So instead of having to kind of look up these very. in almost a tedious way, having your IT department pull a bunch of PowerSchool reports, and then having to give it to a data analyst who knows SQL, who might put it in just a spreadsheet and just use like pivot tables to analyze it. You now have a system where any teacher, any admin can just say, what was the average PSAT score?
Claire Zau: Can you give that to me in the [00:07:00] form of a chart? And you know, lay out any predictive insights you might get from that. And the AI does all of that behind the scenes work. So I think it’s really just that ease of use of You know, computers and the data that sits within all of these, our digital sphere becoming much more easy to interact with because we can now talk to our computers, we can now talk to our data.
Brett Roer: It’s incredible where the future is going. Brought up some great use cases I presented on last week. At a tech and learning summit with some New York City school leaders and what we talked about was exactly that. When you get to this point where you have AI in the background doing these things, especially things that used to take so long, like prepping the data for instructional focus meetings.
Brett Roer: One principal, he just kept saying, its, Exactly right, which is the more of these things that we can have running in the background. Hopefully the bigger picture, uh, we can get as leaders and as educators in classrooms about like seeing what’s happening with our students and just being more attuned to them because these arduous tasks that used to be [00:08:00] really tedious and time consuming can now be done in the background.
Brett Roer: And I love what you said about just being able to talk to it, having it cross different systems. That’s where a lot of people get lost. ~Um,~ even if they have the know how to do the data, it’s just. They got to learn all these different systems as well. So that could be truly transformative if that’s unlocked in the right way.
Claire Zau: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think it’s the fact that you now have this very, you know, compute intensive brain that is highly capable that is able, I mean, obviously any human can do it and it requires a team to do it, but if you can save time and do it at scale and approach learning and approach.
Claire Zau: You’re seeing his profile in a holistic manner because you’re able to ingest so much more data. You know, I think it’s a win win for all.
Brett Roer: Claire, we’re going to give you, you’re the first ever guest on AmpED to 11 to get this question. Are you a basketball fan, Claire?
Claire Zau: I am. My brother is a big fan, but I, I threw vicariously through him, um, have some tidbits and learnings about the basketball world.
Brett Roer: Okay. Well. I know you’re an [00:09:00] international, you know, jet setter. You’ve lived on multiple coasts in the United States, but because you’re based in New York right now, this one’s about the New York Knicks. I was fortunate enough to check out the game this weekend. As we know, the captain of the New York Knicks, Jalen Brunson, number 11.
Brett Roer: He’s a true hero of mine. He puts himself. Below the team ethos or he took a big pay cut. My question for you, Claire, is who’s someone in the space in AI and or education and innovation, who’s truly a captain, a leader, who’s really building a team around them, uh, and doing things for the right reasons when it comes to education and innovation, who comes to mind?
Brett Roer: Uh, that’s the Jalen Brunson of AI and ed tech in your mind.
Claire Zau: That’s a really tough question. I mean, I may, I mean, I could nominate both of you, but, um, I think. There are just so many people who are doing such critical work at the panel that I spoke on with you, Brett, a couple months ago now. ~Um,~ I remember They asked maybe a similar question just around who is doing really critical work in this space.
Claire Zau: [00:10:00] And I think, you know, I’m sure we’ll get to the topic of what are we missing in the AI and education conversation. But I really do think that a lot of the work that Michelle Culver is driving around, you know, thinking about the human connection element around AI and education is really critical. I do think, you know, for someone who is obviously optimistic about the technology and generally a tech optimist with, with many, you know, That wears a black hat often when evaluating companies and, and started to build around those technologies.
Claire Zau: I do think sometimes it is important to take a step back and really think about, you know, the human piece of this and what we miss by implementing a lot of this technology at super fast, high speed, you know, how to think about, you know, the, uh, the people that already exist and the technologies and the societies that, that, um, are implementing these systems.
Claire Zau: And so I think Michelle is driving a lot of really important work there. I think there are a lot of really important groups, everyone from, you know, Alex at aiEDU to Amanda at AI4EDU [00:11:00] and various foundations were all funding really critical work in making AI much more digestible for the education world.
Claire Zau: I do think one of the big things in, you know, having me sitting between the education sphere and the AI sphere is that a lot of times there are very deeply technical things that make it hard for people to have a seat at the table and really. share their concerns because they, they use more esoteric language that requires you to know all these tech terms.
Claire Zau: But I do think these people who are kind of the glue between these two spheres that that make it possible so that the education space can have a proper seat at the table and, and really make sure that these people who are building solutions and building the foundation models are not necessarily just building for education users, but building with them and making sure that, you know, education principles are embedded in the building process.
Rebecca Bultsma: I love how you describe that because I’m someone else who’s kind of a peripheral education glue person between different sectors and industries, and I love the way that [00:12:00] you describe that, so thank you for that. So, one of my favorite and Brett’s favorite tools, uh, AI tools, is Eleven Labs, which I know you’re familiar with.
Rebecca Bultsma: We’d like to ask our guests if You could have something like Eleven Labs or Tool read you every email, every news article through like the Eleven Labs reader app for the rest of your life. Whose voice is your favorite voice to listen to for some of that stuff?
Claire Zau: There are so many options, ~um,~ and notably, actually, speaking of Eleven Labs, they just announced today a massive 250 million raise at a 3 billion valuation, which is huge.
Claire Zau: I think it speaks to how important the voice is. But I was thinking, should I pick like a celebrity, do I pick someone I know, but I think as a, you know, as a pretty big sci fi fan, and maybe this isn’t necessarily a sci fi person film, but Interstellar is one of my favorite films ever. And so I was thinking, if I could have something like TARS, which [00:13:00] obviously has like a physical manifestation of an AI bot, but what they had TARS, you know, that robot that they had on the spaceship with them.
Claire Zau: Uh, he was just, it had humor, it had personality. The different bots had different personalities as well, but they were also highly productive and helpful and loyal and willing to give up their lives. So I think if I had an AI system or just even whatever was my main voice for my AI system, uh, it would maybe be something like TARS or that voice, ~uh,~ if not, maybe more dystopian, just the Scarlett Johansson voice from her, maybe that’s a helpful reminder that, you know, what I’m speaking to comes.
Claire Zau: From, or is, is maybe very parallel to a dystopian movie that I watched prior to AI becoming a more commonplace thing.
Brett Roer: Coincidentally, me and my wife were just talking about that movie, Her. That was one of our first dates and the first movie we ever saw together, and that really felt like sci fi then.
Claire Zau: Yeah, and it’s like reality now.
Brett Roer: It’s, I mean, I am talking to my [00:14:00] computer at all times, having very deep conversations, uh, to try to just You know, fine tooth everything and really fine tune it. So yeah, the future is here. Definitely that felt like sci fi back then, but two solid answers.
Claire Zau: And I think it’s funny with that, that, you know, you had sci fi movies predicting what the future would be like, but the future ended up modeling itself after her and trying to use Scarlett Johansson’s voice.
Claire Zau: Retroactively. And so it’s just interesting, I think, seeing that, the irony of that.
Brett Roer: So Claire, I mean, I remember maybe a year and a half ago, I get an email from you and you’re like, what do you think about this thing, magic school? And then last year at the ASU GSV summit, you know, there’s the next big breakthrough.
Brett Roer: So for all the innovation we’re seeing in AI and technology, especially in the realm of education, what’s one thing you’re still saying to yourself? You know, how can AI not do this yet? What’s one thing you still find yourself. Fascinated by the lack of ability of AI right [00:15:00] now.
Claire Zau: I mean, there’s a lot of things that I say that AI can’t do.
Claire Zau: And then two days later it does. I haven’t seen as many AI tutoring solutions that I’ve been fully, you know, not, not pleased with, but ones that I feel like are truly delivering the promise of tutoring. I think I’ve seen a lot of AI chatbots that teach people things. And I think a lot of people have received a lot of knowledge and gained a ton from.
Claire Zau: AI chatbots, but I think the advertisement that things like ChatGPT are automatically AI tutors for everyone, I do think there is a little bit of a disconnect because I think if you look at the technology that we have today, a lot of times people are just putting a chatbot with unlimited knowledge in front of a kid and saying here’s an AI tutor, everything’s gonna be great, everybody has 24/7 access to knowledge and it’s cheap and everything’s solved and yay, .
Claire Zau: Everybody’s going to be [00:16:00] infinitely smarter. And I think it’s almost a very one dimensional view of what learning and tutoring and great teaching is a couple of months ago, I wrote on a piece on when they launched, uh, GPT 01, which is a multimodal model. And that was kind of our first instance of seeing tutoring kind of at.
Claire Zau: a next level where you can actually have it explained to you using voice, it could see your screen. So I think that has unlocked more towards the vision of AI tutoring. But I do think today, if you look at a lot of what startups are offering, where a lot of people saying that, oh, chat GPT is the, the, you know, universally the best AI tutor ever.
Claire Zau: I think it’s a really simplistic because a, we don’t know if chat is the best mode modality to deliver learning. Um, You know, these chatbots are typically single turn interaction. So that means that they’re optimized to just give you as much information as possible in a mass of all the [00:17:00] text. And they’re, they’re quite literally built to be sycophantic and to please you as the end user.
Claire Zau: So that’s not optimal for learning because we know that if you’re dealing with a small kid, you’re not going to You’re not just going to give them a giant block of text and say, hey, you learned this, yay, and, and you’re perfect and you, here’s your answer. ~Um,~ that’s not a great way to deliver tutoring and that’s not what great teachers do.
Claire Zau: And so it’s things like that, that I feel like haven’t really achieved the promise of AI tutoring. And, and so I don’t think I’ve been necessarily disappointed in what people have delivered around AI tutoring. It’s more that I think. When we say we want to deliver something like AI tutoring, we have to really think beyond just adding one layer on top of chat GPT and saying that it’s there and really thinking through the actual form function of it.
Claire Zau: Are you building in productive struggle into that? Are you Building in ways to make that experience more similar to what a real teacher would do. I think those are all questions I would like to [00:18:00] see addressed more in the solutions that we’re seeing.
Rebecca Bultsma: I want to take you back to the Apollo moon landing, which was a giant leap for humanity.
Rebecca Bultsma: And I think, you know, had we been alive back then we would have stood there amazed like remember where you were when and do you have a moment like that like I know for me I’ve had a couple big like the first time I saw what chat GPT could do or the first time maybe I heard the notebook LM two person podcast do you have a an aha moment or something that just kind of sticks in your mind as a wow this is gonna change everything moment.
Claire Zau: More recently, I’ve been really excited and and hopeful for what things like world models and, you know, models that embed physical intelligence can enhance. And what I mean by that is if you look at a lot of our A. I. Models today, they’re really built on top of digital knowledge. If you look at our video models, a lot of them are built on thousands of videos, and they’re really great at extrapolating what you know, if you have one [00:19:00] pixel, what that The pixel and around it would look like and that’s how you get a, you know, diffusion based image, but I also, I think that these models don’t necessarily capture a lot of the physical aspect of our world.
Claire Zau: So if you look at these video models, a lot of times, if you ask it to generate a video of a bouncing basketball, it can do so because it’s seen thousands of videos of bouncing basketballs, but it’s not because it actually understands physics or motion or gravity. And so what world models are, are actually teaching AI models how the world works, um, when it comes to the physics of it and, and hopefully what that unlocks is actually much more physical intelligence.
Claire Zau: And I think you’re already seeing manifestations of this with Waymo, ~uh,~ with what we’re seeing in the robotics world, like this almost kind of return and renaissance in the robotics world with Amazon now having these humanoids. So I think what’s interesting is we’re You know, Jensen Huang kind of describes [00:20:00] our evolution of AI as the first iteration of AI was just kind of machine learning application AI, which was just literally giving AI a lot of data and saying, Hey, can you sort this and say, this is cat, this is dog.
Claire Zau: We’ve had that for the last 20 or so years. We kind of entered this year of generative AI, which is you know, when AI goes beyond just helping us sort data to actually helping us create things. So for the first time ever, AI is actually generating net new content. And so that’s kind of the sphere that we’ve lived in.
Claire Zau: You’ve seen like Dall-e, midjourney, uh, runway, all of them are generating new videos, new images, new texts. And then kind of where we are now is like agentic AI when AI goes beyond not only sorting us, sorting things for us, not only creating things for us, but also actually helping us. Complete full actions and doing things around.
Claire Zau: So it goes from creating to doing and then he kind of posits that the kind of final iteration of this is when you actually give AI a physical [00:21:00] manifestation and he calls it physical AI. So building on top of this, these world models in physical intelligence when you actually give AI systems. knowledge of how the world works.
Claire Zau: They can actually operate in our world. They can drive cars for you. They can move boxes around for you. They can patients who need assistive care physically. So I think it’s interesting to kind of think through what, what that Apollo. 11 moment is for when AI actually truly breaks out of just our digital sphere into our physical sphere as well.
Brett Roer: Obviously you’re describing that and that is so rational in how you’re saying that and yet still that does sometimes sound like you’re describing like, you know, sci fi. Recently I was listening, you know, everyone has a different timeline about when AI Tools potentially have the ability to like reason and you know, you hear from timelines.
Brett Roer: It was just there’s no podcast yesterday They said it could be two to three years away That is something again where if you give them those physical attributes and the ability to reason that is going to be a very Interesting [00:22:00] society we live in and that could be here much sooner than You know, I think any of us would have thought a few years ago.
Claire Zau: It’s sometimes so helpful to speak with people who are less plugged into the AI world because I remember explaining this and then the exact concept that you were talking about, Brett, um, to my grandparents and they’re like, okay, so that’s, you know, if you combine physical world models with reasoning.
Claire Zau: Like, what stops the Tesla that we’re sitting in from driving off a cliff right now? And I was like, I don’t know. I didn’t really think about that that deeply. But, um, I do think there are a lot of ramifications and obviously these stopgaps for, for potential dangers like that. But I think that’s also built into how we think about world models, agents.
Claire Zau: Um, you know, it is a very Wild West world out there.
Brett Roer: You know, obviously we’re talking about, we’re all, we’ve all seen this play out, you know, in our adulthood. You know, we think about the students that, you know, that are being served right now. So we think about someone who’s like 11 years old right now, they’re going to grow up in a world [00:23:00] never really knowing without AI.
Brett Roer: So what’s kind of a message that, you know, that you’re thinking about that should be conveyed to, you know, today’s 11 year olds about. Their future in an AI driven world, what they should be thinking about right now, what they should be preparing for, and really what’s going on in the world of education and AI, maybe that you can shed light on, you know, with your unique vantage point.
Claire Zau: So I grew up in kind of, I would say I grew up half of my life digitally native and then, you know, had the benefit. I think I had a great childhood where I didn’t really have computers to interact with until. You know, my, my later teenage years, and I actually think that was great because, you know, it allowed me to understand digital sphere quite well, but then also much of my early development years, there were, there were not many screens, like if you had a screen, it was cable TV and, you know, you had limited options, but I do think that if I could speak to, you know, a current 11 year old that is growing up, not only digitally native, but AI native, I’d probably say [00:24:00] not underestimating the benefits of just being bored.
Claire Zau: I do think that we are living in a deep attention economy. Uh, your, you know, attention is something that companies and advertisers and big tech does monetize. And so, you know, I think because of that, our internet and how we use the internet is increasingly fueled by a world where they just want to make it as attention driven as possible.
Claire Zau: It’s like. Okay, you want to watch long form content, you have it. Short form content, there’s no space in between to just be bored and not consume content, and I do think that is leading to, you know, with AI, you have even more slop than before, just a lot of un nutrient rich content. I would hope that the 11 year olds today are taking the time to maybe take a step back away from, you know, even just the AI apps that we’re investing in actively in GSV, to take a step away from those, because I do think some [00:25:00] of my best memories and I think some of a lot of my core skills come from playing imagination in the backyard when you had no games to play and you just made up games with your friends.
Claire Zau: So I would probably say, you know, I have almost like this fear around How deep we go into this attention economy and how to grow up in a world where everything is programmed for you. I think, you know, one of the things we discussed at ASU GSV is this conversation around, you know, who is programming our children and in a world where, you know, your kids have less and less agency over, it’s not just, let me pick what channel I want to watch on cable news.
Claire Zau: It’s. I’m sitting there and I’m a passive consumer and TikTok’s giving me this, Instagram’s giving me this, Netflix is giving me this, my school app is giving me this, Cocomelon’s giving me this. Like, I, I think what happens when you move from someone who just has a lot of choice over what things you consume to just becoming a passive [00:26:00] consumer of the internet and what that does for our development and our brains.
Claire Zau: I don’t know. I don’t have answers, but I think that’s something I, I have some worries about.
Rebecca Bultsma: Yeah, I wonder if then the message for parents of 11 year olds is, well, it’s so complicated for parents right now anyway, to know, to get their kids access to and how much, and to stay on top of all the platforms they’re using, uh, that I.
Rebecca Bultsma: I think that that idea of unstructured playtime and time away from screens is super important and it’s getting harder to do as the algorithms suck us all in, even the parents, so.
Claire Zau: Yeah, and I don’t think it’s, I mean, to your point, it’s not easy, it’s like you simultaneously have your school saying, Your kids have to be AI literate, use all, you know, use these AI systems, but then you also have other people saying, No, you can’t even use AI at all.
Claire Zau: Uh, I’m sure when, you know, kids are going on Snapchat, they automatically have a Snapchat AI. Embedded in the most recent update. So they’re talking to that. And so how do you actually navigate all this? I don’t have an answer, but I think I definitely agree [00:27:00] that it is a very difficult time to, to raise, you know, AI native kids.
Claire Zau: And I actually saw a pretty good article. ~Um,~ I think it’s on the Atlantic that was talking about this generation as the first AI guinea pig generation.
Brett Roer: Yeah, well, I guess guinea pigs for something in technology, all of our generations, one thing I did want to make sure, you know, just. Definitely not the validating all those points being both a parent and now, you know, supporting school leaders and educators with like how to implement AI and make it something that’s engaging for students and a tool and a resource and a learning system.
Brett Roer: I will say. Because of the impact of voice operated AI tools, it’s been really amazing as a parent to not have a screen, right. Cause I can like my kids are young enough that I can like put my phone on top of the fridge and like talk to it and they can’t touch it and have it only be my voice that operates too.
Brett Roer: And we can come up with really fun games. And so like the fact that there are times, [00:28:00] right. For my parents out there that are listening, there are times where you want to do something different with your kids and it’s raining outside and you’re like, what’s something different that, you know, is. We can be creative with and I love that, you know, you can use as a starting point of like, let’s make a scavenger hunt in the house.
Brett Roer: Let’s do this. Let’s make a scavenger hunt. Just walk around the block. And it like the kids get so excited because they don’t know what it’s going to generate. Right. And you’ve never done it before and you could just make it even more personalized for them, you know, and like exactly how old they are or what their passions are.
Brett Roer: So I will say that is something where I’m like, how cool is this? You know, like what a great way to spend a day and you can still be off screen. You have. Superpower. I mean, to me, it’s still always feeling like a superpower.
Claire Zau: Now, I love voice mode. I mean, even as an adult, one of the biggest use cases I use is just as I’m reading through any nonfiction or deeply technical article, just having it sit beside you.
Claire Zau: And you don’t even have to touch it. But being able to have this, this buddy that you can have discourse with and explain things to and just blabber on. That has no judgment. I do [00:29:00] think that unlocks so much for both kids and me.
Rebecca Bultsma: Well, as we’re talking about some of these cool features and what makes them 11 out of 10, I want you to think about some of the tools, your go to tools right now.
Rebecca Bultsma: And I know we all have a suite that we kind of bounce back and forth through for different things, but what, what tool or tools are you using right now in your regular workflow that you would rate an 11 out of 10 and why this is hard?
Claire Zau: I would say probably. A very general answer is that I use chat GPT maybe 50, you know, for 50 different workflows a day.
Claire Zau: It is, I always have it on, or a mix of chat GPT, Perplexity, and Claude on at all times. You know, those are, I think of them as Swiss army knives that you can do anything with. You can upload photos to, uh, quite literally transcribe them if you’re You know, busy and you want to work on something else, you give it to them, ask them to transcribe.
Claire Zau: It’s almost like having a really talented intern that has capacity for everything. You know, I, I [00:30:00] mentioned I use it while I’m reading, I use it for explaining things in less technical ways and more technical ways. Those I definitely just in terms of frequency are kind of all star 11/10 but a couple fun ones that maybe even fall out of the education space and productivity space, Suno AI is a really cool music generation tool.
Claire Zau: I think you can, without an account, still generate three to five songs. And you can put in, you can’t put in distinct artists just because of copyright issues, but you can put in a general vibe, you know, what, what I’ve done historically has been to put in a song of maybe an artist and then ask AI to describe what that genre is and the vibe that they give, and then using that knowledge, you kind of have a prompt for what you’re looking for.
Claire Zau: And then I will copy and paste that into Suno and then I might tailor it and say, Hey, I want a really great intro theme song for a ed tech conference, but inspired by [00:31:00] Brazilian funk music. And it’ll output two or three variations for you and you can pick, uh, you can tweak the lyrics. It is really cool.
Claire Zau: And then the other one that is not education related, but, um, a friend is an investor in the company is called Doji. allows you to, they basically ask you to take 10 different images of yourself. So it’s, you know, side shot, shot, side shot of your face. And then again, your full body and what it allows you to do is actually you can become the model of any clothing item on the internet, which is really cool.
Claire Zau: So you can basically pick, you just drop a link of what you would like to buy if I’m on. gap, I’ll, you know, I really like this hoodie, I’ll copy and paste the link, it will automatically create an outfit and you’re the person modeling the outfit. So it just really made me think of a world where you become the main subject of a lot of advertisements and, and we’re actually already seeing that because Meta most recently, I don’t know if it was an accident, but they most recently [00:32:00] started showing people Ads where they were the people, they were the people in them.
Claire Zau: If you’ve ever used meta AI CDO, and it’s a little bit jarring because you’re like, this makes sense, but I don’t know if I want to be selling myself something with my face in it. So, you know, I think it also sparks interesting questions there, but that’s another cool fashion related application that embeds, you know, visual AI.
Rebecca Bultsma: It reminds me of Clueless, um, which I loved when I was in high school. Cher has this app, like in the 90s though, where she’s swiping through deciding what outfit to wear. But I think that’s amazing. I actually did have a couple of really weird ads a couple weeks ago that hit me on Meta, where it was, The person was like morphed to like look exactly like me and it really, I, I sent it to a couple people and they were surprised, but it was, it was either what you’re talking about that, that beta program, which it likely was, or I finally found my doppelganger somewhere on the internet.
Rebecca Bultsma: But yeah, it’s, it’s interesting how they’re, things are [00:33:00] getting more and more personalized and there’s upsides and then some of the downsides of those hyper personalized algorithms and things that are influencing. Yeah. Yeah.
Claire Zau: On the conversation of just who’s programming. us, even and, and how you navigate the internet is, is there a world where we never have these shared work, shared digital experiences?
Claire Zau: Like we never talk about the same TV show because every single person’s book or every single TV show is a completely different experience because everybody picks choose your own adventure. Or even ads, right? I think if our shopping experiences only have us as models of those pieces of clothing, what does that look like?
Claire Zau: And when you’re on the subway, you only see yourself in those ads. I don’t know. It’s just a little dystopian to think about. Um, but we are nearing a future and I think people are thinking about building towards that future.
Rebecca Bultsma: I think Ben Affleck was talking about it recently, how in Hollywood it might mean that we can be like, hey, make me an episode of Succession where this [00:34:00] happens.
Rebecca Bultsma: This is the ending. And he’s like, it won’t be perfect, uh, but it’ll be kind of what you wanted and, you know, they’ll be able to do all these different versions of it. But I hadn’t thought it all the way through in terms of no more of this, hey, did you see that season finale of Game of Thrones? Or, you know, we’ve all, we’re all having these very different echo chamber y kind of experiences of what we like and what the long term ends up being.
Rebecca Bultsma: That’s fascinating.
Brett Roer: Like we all enjoy the idea of personalization, right? It is amazing. So I often think of like, like you said, use chat GPT or another tool like that. You want to train it. You want it to know who you are and what your preferences are and your styles and train on exemplars you’ve created.
Brett Roer: But you’re right. It is also, there’s going to be a line. Or, you know, at some point that might have unintended consequences, like you’re saying about the lack of shared experiences and yeah, the personalization getting to the point where it’s going to be very hard to interact with people around, uh, you know, common moments.
Brett Roer: That’s going to be, yeah. Wow. This one, uh, this, this podcast, we’re really, we’re really [00:35:00] thinking far ahead and all the implications here. We’re going to get a little mystical here, right? We’ve been so rooted in reality and the future, but you know, Claire. If it’s 11:11 in terms of where we are with AI means we get to, we get to make a wish here, right?
Brett Roer: So let’s get magical. If you had one wish for how AI could shape education in society, you know, what would you be, what would you hope it would be and where you hope it’s going?
Claire Zau: I think I just hope that it doesn’t go in a certain direction, maybe around how I’m thinking about already seeing this sort of next generation digital divide, how we’ve seen The digital divide play out with devices.
Claire Zau: That’s obviously just been a matter of the have and have nots across who has access to the internet and digital infrastructure and digital devices. And I think that already in and of itself was a big problem, but I do think we’re almost seeing kind of a weird evolution of that, where there’s almost a digital divide around who has access to human [00:36:00] connection and who doesn’t.
Claire Zau: It’s almost like this opposite where. You know, the next evolution of the digital divide is that human connection becomes a luxury, and I think you’re already seeing parts of that, right? I think if you’re a business class or first class customer in an airline, if you want to get a hold of a concierge service or their customer service, you directly get to talk to a human.
Claire Zau: But if you’re Just a rando, and you only have access to a phone number, it’s 20 different yes, no, click five for this, click two for this, and it, it’s kind of that difference in experience, and that’s just one experience, or I think in an education setting, does that mean that, you know, the standard experience for people who sit in the have nots is like, here’s an AI bot, that’s all you get, learn, learn with an AI bot on your own, and then people who are sitting in the bucket of the haves have access to these tutors that know exactly where they are and what they’re struggling with and can take care of like the social, you know, emotional learning [00:37:00] element of learning.
Claire Zau: Like, is there almost a, uh, kind of this flipping of what a digital divide means and AI becomes the default and, you know, having being only having only being able to deal with AI systems becomes the everyday person experience. And then human connection, whether that’s doctors, uh, concierge services.
Claire Zau: learning and having access to a teacher or babysit, whatever. Does that become the luxury good of the future when AI becomes so commoditized and so normalized? I don’t know, but I think my wish is hopefully that that does not become true. And I hope that, you know, I’m excited about what AI can do, but I hope it doesn’t become It doesn’t make human connection a luxury good.
Rebecca Bultsma: I’ve been thinking about that a little bit, just, there was an article in the New York Times that came out a few weeks ago about Claude and how they were intentionally trading it with social and emotional, uh, intelligence so that it, it just feels kind of friendly and it has a good vibe about it, but it led me to think a [00:38:00] little bit about when we have an Always friendly, always empathetic, always what, ready to listen, digital companion.
Rebecca Bultsma: Are we less patient? Are we less tolerant about the human fallibility of our human friends who flake out on us or don’t have the emotional bandwidth sometimes or are tired? And what does that mean for the very real human experience and relationships in our lives? And so thank you for bringing your thoughts about the future of that.
Rebecca Bultsma: It helps me to think a little bit deeply about it. And I can tell Brett is by his face.
Brett Roer: I’m actually thinking of, so Claire, I mean, to your point, right, there’s going to, the automated version definitely is a have not access to a human being and that touch is definitely for haves, I think probably the, I don’t know, the upper echelon would be like, you have access to those adults.
Brett Roer: We’re also incredibly fluent and savvy with how to use AI. So like, I mean, that would be. You have a personalized [00:39:00] expert who can help you navigate this technology. And I mean, I think as we’ve all been saying, you know, in all of our professions, we are utilizing AI to hopefully be even better at our, uh, at our current roles and also to like.
Brett Roer: Enjoy the process more into, you know, feel like we’re, uh, we’re able to meet the needs of more people. So that’s a really great perspective that you’re bringing to us.
Claire Zau: And the hope is that what you’re pitching for the upper echelon is something that, like, all of us can hopefully have. But I do think, I mean, there is also a counter argument I’ve seen that is, you know, having something is better than nothing, right?
Claire Zau: Have, you know, a class of 300, 500 students in a grade and not everyone can have access to a guidance counselor is an AI guidance counselor better than having no counselor is an AI friend better than having no friend. I don’t know the answer to that, but I think that’s also, I think a lot of the argument that I’ve seen come from the people who’ve been pitching a lot of these AI systems is the, the 24 /7 accessibility at low costs.
Claire Zau: As [00:40:00] having something is better than nothing, and I’m sure there are, again, societal ramifications for that, but it’s interesting to see, you know, all the different sides of how people are thinking about the future of human plus machine, um, cohabitation.
Brett Roer: I will say, I spoke to, I was actually on the other side of this today, right, I was being interviewed, and that did come up, this idea what you just said about like, I was sharing, you know, my experience as a teacher in Brooklyn, right, you have 150 something students, wide range of abilities, wide range of language skills.
Brett Roer: And I said, you know, at that exact moment, it didn’t matter how many hours I wanted to stay late and work, which I was doing constantly. I would never be able to truly personalize an assignment for the following day’s class for all 150 students. Whereas now you truly could do that and you can by having that human, you know, you know, EQ or EI emotional intelligence.
Brett Roer: You can personalize it and have those students feel seen and heard. As you said, [00:41:00] oddly enough, by potentially like a machine or an agent, but hopefully you have a human in the loop who’s guiding that and explaining why this student needs what it needs. And you know, you can get to the point where you’re really looking at each child and providing the tool with why.
Brett Roer: This is the level of differentiation, scaffolding topics that they’re passionate about, etc. are culturally relevant. So, you know, again, let’s I know we’re an optimistic group here. So hopefully we’re able to marry all of those things together and has the best impact on, you know, all students clear. I, I can’t believe it, but this amazing conversation is about to conclude with our final question.
Brett Roer: So when we ask all of our guests. Again, we started with pop culture. We’re going to end with pop culture. So we’re going to talk about the film series, Oceans 11. So, you know, in this film, they put together this perfect team to accomplish the unimaginable, pull off something incredible. You know, you do this and I hope actually, if you don’t mind, maybe you could share with our audience, those that don’t know, uh, maybe share a little bit about the work that you [00:42:00] lead, you know, at GSV, especially on the AI show and the ASU GSV summit, because that always reminds me of like, who are those people that you would bring together?
Brett Roer: To accomplish great things in AI and education. So, one, share with our audience a little about the ASU GSV Summit and the AI show that’s coming up in April. And then please also, like, this is a great chance to just really Amplify people in the space who are doing amazing things that you want on your team, uh, for the right, you know, they’re doing good things for the right reasons.
Claire Zau: You know, as Brett mentioned, to take a step back on the summit as well as the AI show about 15 years ago, we started from a tiny conference room, about 300 people in ASU, trying to convene people around this topic of education, innovation, really centered around what does future facing education look like, and we wanted to bring together similar to Ocean’s 11, just strange cocktail of people who might not necessarily interact with each other.
Claire Zau: And so that meant Bringing people in K 12, you know, district leaders, superintendents in K 12, but [00:43:00] in higher ed, presidents, provosts, deans in enterprise and workforce, bringing chief learning officers, CHROs, and then beyond, you know, founders of consumer applications, um, and across that, you know, ed tech has always been the core theme is how do we really think about K 12.
Claire Zau: The future and making sure that that future has a mission of increasing education access for all. So those two kind of combine together. And so the summit has now grown to about 7, 000 people who come live. And it’s all of that, you know, those people, that strange cocktail of oceans, 11 cast that comes.
Claire Zau: And a lot of times it is really an interesting mix because you do have people who are, you know, district leaders speaking with. Enterprise CLOs on how to think about building pipelines of you, you know, middle school internships into workforce or building, you know, apprenticeship based models in innovative high schools to, uh, you know, in higher ed and K [00:44:00] 12 thinking for what dual enrollment looks like.
Claire Zau: And so really thinking through these innovative models, or even, um, one that I’ve been thinking a lot about has just been this kind of enterprise as, uh, the fourth learning institution and fourth learning estate, like, what does learning at work look like now that we do so much more of it? And it’s not just about going to a degree, but really upskilling and continuing to learn at work.
Claire Zau: So cover all of those topics. AI is deeply embedded in that. And we started our AI show, which. It’s kind of a, uh, offshoot of that that covers a lot of what people are doing on the ground. So what are actual teachers doing to embed AI in their classrooms? What are faculty members doing to enrich their curriculum?
Claire Zau: What are people doing in the workforce to use AI in marketing? And so that’s what the AI show is really just an AI. Festival and celebration of how people are actually using this technology on the ground, but we also want it to be a place of exploration and also even, you know, potential pushback. And that’s why we have it as a free event is [00:45:00] so that educators across California, Arizona, the West coast can come and really just explore it.
Claire Zau: They can give feedback to these founders and builders of ed tech offerings so that they know and can co build and co curate the future of education and AI. You know, I think in the education space, it’s hard. I don’t know if I can name specific people because there’s so many of them, but I would say probably that how I would build my oceans 11 is that perfect group of all the people who come to GSV and the AI show, because that’s where people come to find new solutions and really come to build and challenge each other on how to think about the future of education.
Claire Zau: And that’s how I think I would approach building my own crew of. Avengers slash Oceans 11 Impossible Dream Team.
Brett Roer: You’re absolutely right. There’s no place I find myself more inspired by others. And just like, how do you The possibilities are almost endless on how you can collaborate with people with that kind of mindset.
Brett Roer: They’re always solution [00:46:00] oriented. They work tenaciously, whether they’re in education, ed tech, higher ed. Like you said, it’s such a, it’s such a conglomerate of like, everyone. Trying to do the right things and yeah, just further the cause, good causes. So yeah, that’s, that is the place. If you, if you can make it to the ASU GSV summit and the AI show, uh, in April in San Diego, uh, it’s really a transformative week of your life and you will definitely find your Oceans 11 crew there.
Rebecca Bultsma: Thanks so much for joining us, Claire. It’s been great to talk to you. You’ve given us a lot to think about. I can’t wait to go and explore. Doji, that’s amazing and think through a little bit more deeply about some of the things that you’ve raised and subscribe to your sub stack. I’m super excited about that and hopefully get to meet you in person this April.
Rebecca Bultsma: So we really appreciate you inviting us. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here.
Claire Zau: I will see you all in hopefully what is a short two months and if I can be helpful around the ecosystem, whether I know I’m way more plugged into the tech piece and the founder startup ecosystem. Um, if [00:47:00] it’s helpful, you know, if you’re Looking for, is anyone doing interesting stuff around SEL and AI or interesting stuff around school admin and AI?
Claire Zau: Let, let me know. I’m happy to, to refer.
Brett Roer: Thank you to our listeners. I hope you enjoyed. All right, Rebecca, what do we have next coming up in the news?
Rebecca Bultsma: Your. Tip of the week this week is to personalize your ChatGPT. In the last couple of months, there’s been some updates to how we personalize experiences with ChatGPT. And if you haven’t done it yet, it’s definitely worth checking out. How you’re going to get to this section to do it is to go to your main menu where your picture is, click on it, and there should be a menu option there called Customize ChatGPT.
Rebecca Bultsma: When you go into that, you’ll notice it looks a little bit different, and you have the option there to tell what chat GPT should call you, tell it a little bit more about what you do for a living so it can give you better context, and you can even assign it [00:48:00] personality traits, and they have some pre determined personality traits you can also pick from, like chatty, witty, Gen Z, skeptical, traditional, and you can have it respond in very, very specific ways.
Rebecca Bultsma: You can also give it additional context if that’s what you want and turn on and off specific capabilities. So that’s one great way that you can personalize your chat GPT experience. The second way is by using something called chat GPT. Memory. So when you go into your personalization section of your menu, you’ll notice something that says memory, and this is different than the custom instructions.
Rebecca Bultsma: When memory is turned on, it will start to remember random things about you through your interactions. You can tell it to specifically remember things about you by saying, Hey, remember that I always like to eat at restaurants that are vegan. And it will automatically update the menu, but sometimes you don’t know what it’s [00:49:00] remembering about you.
Rebecca Bultsma: So if you have it turned on, it’s a really good idea to go in sometimes and click manage on memory. And you’ll be able to see a really, really long list of everything that Chat GPT remembers about you. And some of it might be stuff you want it to remember. Some of it might be a little weird and was out of context.
Rebecca Bultsma: Like if you were asking one random question for somebody else, or to take on a specific persona for a specific task, it might remember those things. And you can go ahead and very easily delete any of those items out of ChatGPT’s memory. But it’s nice to be able to expand on the knowledge base about things that ChatGPT will remember about you to give you better context in your answers and maybe your work, depending on what you’re doing, and have it respond in very, very specific ways.
Rebecca Bultsma: For example, one way I use this is, uh, I tell. ChatGPT in the memory that I can’t have dairy. So when I’m asking ChatGPT when I’m out traveling to recommend restaurants for me, because it [00:50:00] remembers that, it’s never going to recommend an ice cream parlor to me. Because it’s going to update its outputs based on what it remembers about me.
Rebecca Bultsma: So it can be very, very helpful so you don’t have to give context all the time about everything. Definitely look into customizing and personalizing your ChatGPT experience to make it even more helpful. Enjoy!
