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AI is the biggest technology shift of our lifetime. This show is about how to profit from it together. Each week I talk with the founders and CEOs closest to AI and Content, the ones figuring this out in real time. I’m also building an AI content business myself and share the lessons I learn along the way.
WHAT WE COVER
THE TITANS: How companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and xAI are moving, and why their decisions matter.
THE INCUMBENTS: How content giants like Disney, News Corp, Universal Music Group, and Reddit are responding to AI, and what it means for creators and publishers.
THE PLAYBOOK: Real lessons on AI business models, content strategy, IP licensing, distribution, and getting paid.
ABOUT YOUR HOST: Rob Kelly has interviewed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, helped pioneer early web content licensing, and built multiple companies with more than $100 million in total sales. His work has appeared on CNBC, CNN, TIME, and Entrepreneur.
Beyond business, every episode explores what AI means for jobs, creativity, families, and the next generation.
If you want clear thinking based on real experience in AI and media, Media and the Machine is your guide
Thanks! -Rob
I'm Rob Kelly, this is Media in the Machine, a show about the biggest technology shift of our lifetime and how to profit from it. Each week, I talk with the founders and CEOs closest to AI and content, the ones figuring this out in real time. I'm also building an AI content business myself and share lessons of what I learned along the way. You know, life's funny. I began my career lucky enough to interview leaders like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Rob Kelly:Then I went on to be a three time founder and CEO, driving a $100,000,000 plus in revenue and some failures too. And now I'm back at the table, interviewing this new world's current and future leaders. This isn't only a business story, it's a human one. So every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation. We'll figure this out together from the inside.
Rob Kelly:Welcome to Media in the Machine. My guest today is Anthony Shore, a linguist who's been naming things for thirty six years and using AI for just as long. He's helped bring more than 270 names to market. He's directed, created, or developed names like Accenture, Tonal, Yum Brands, JetBlue, and Verizon. I get Anthony's take on whether OpenAI should rename ChatGPT, how the name ChatGPT came together in a last minute scramble the night before launch, how it has a translation problem that no naming guru can fix, the wild laugh out loud emails between Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever as they debated what to call OpenAI, the strong words Anthony's got for Elon's rebranding of Twitter to x, his stack ranking of ChatGPT as it compares to Clawd, Gemini, Grok, Meta AI, and Perplexity.
Rob Kelly:And then I bring in a special guest, Andrew Miller, who along with Larry Fisher brokered the sale of chat.com, potential replacement name for chatgpt. You're gonna get the whole real world story how HubSpot's cofounder Darmesh Shah outmaneuvered Sam and OpenAI in a late night multimillion dollar showdown, and how Darmesh parlayed that into what possibly might be the largest domain name transaction in history. And make sure to stay on because Anthony comes back and gives some final nuggets, like whether AI is gonna make his own job obsolete, what Google should do with its dual brand problem. It's got both Google and Gemini, and of course, Anthony recommends OpenAI change its name to just chat, just GPT, or something new. Please enjoy my conversation with Anthony Shore with Andrew Miller joining midway through.
Rob Kelly:Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT of OpenAI, recently told Lenny Richitsky, I feel like we should either drop the chat or drop the GPT at some point because it's a mouthful. So I immediately thought of you. If I rattle off some of the top AI product names, would you give your own quick hot take grade on each so we can see where ChatuchiBT compares to the current competitive set? So ChatGPT, why don't we start off with it?
Anthony Shore:ChatGPT, well, I would say it's not a great name, and they've done research recently at OpenAI that showed who their users were. So, really, the general public is the primary audience for this. It's not a great name. It doesn't really work well for them in terms of helping to to contribute to a perception of the brand. Right?
Anthony Shore:There are certain other names that are out there that have meaning, that have relevance, and it kinda gives the name a head start into what you should expect. And ChatGPT doesn't do that. It's a mouthful. It's complicated. GPT is very staccato.
Anthony Shore:Staccato describes kind of a bounciness to the sound of the name. A word like fluid is more fluid, whereas GPT is kind of bumpy. It's staccato. Right? GPT are mostly what they call stops in linguistics where it stops the articulation.
Anthony Shore:It stops the air when you say it. J is is an affricate, so it starts with a stop, and then there's a kind of a fricative. So g p t. GPT. Right?
Anthony Shore:So I I feel pretty mixed on the name ChatGPT. It's not great by any stretch.
Rob Kelly:How about Claude from Anthropic?
Anthony Shore:Claude is a is a classic, what we would say, eponymous name. It's a name of a person. And to that extent, it follows into a line of other virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa. Right? And so Claude slots right in there.
Anthony Shore:So it it kinda fits that expectation of someone who's there, someone who's helping you. So I think it's a it's a fine name. You know? It's a vessel, like all names are, and this particular vessel starts with messages that would be aligned with what you would expect with kind of a human assistant. And it even goes all the way back to the early days of AI when there was an early AI assistant, and their name was Eliza.
Anthony Shore:So the Eliza software was used to help identify whether AI really seemed human. Did it pass the Turing test, as they would call it, which is named after Alan Turing, an early researcher and scientist. And so starting way back with Eliza, Claude follows cleanly in that lineage. Now to that extent, it's not very differentiated. It's not a whole new metaphor.
Anthony Shore:It's not a different frame of reference. But, you know, it's a person's name, and it slots right in there.
Rob Kelly:How about Google's Gemini?
Anthony Shore:Gemini. I like the name Gemini. It's lucky for them that it was available for their use. As a professional brand name developer, I'm always gonna be considering legal availability, and a name is only as good as it is available legally. And so Gemini, I think, is a pretty solid name.
Anthony Shore:Gemini is going to evoke, I think, for most people, the idea of twins. And so there is a sense of you have kind of an an equal partner perhaps that is there with you as you're working, a virtual assistant, that is aligned with you. I think about the idea of mirror neurons, and that when we engage and interact with people, we react favorably when they mirror our images. And I think Gemini kind of gets to that a little obliquely. I like the name Gemini.
Anthony Shore:It's easy to spell. It has an alternating consonant vowel consonant vowel structure, which makes it easy to say. It's using sounds that by and large are present in many or most of the world's languages that might be pronounced a little differently, but everything else, m n, is pronounced similarly. So I think Gemini is a solid name. It also begins with g.
Anthony Shore:And so they're gently referring back to Google with that, and I think that's a clever way of extending their equity.
Rob Kelly:How about speaking of geez, how about grok?
Anthony Shore:Grok. Grok is complicated for me personally because I I love the idea of grok. And the word, which was invented by Robert Heinlein in the book Stranger in a Strange Land, refers to a really profound idea and one that was not expressed by another word in English. The idea of understanding another person deeply and profoundly so that there's really no separation, no differences in your understanding. That idea didn't have an equivalent English word until grok came around.
Anthony Shore:So it's got a pretty funny sound. I'll put it that way. It's very abrupt, a little comedic in how it sounds, and it sounds a little alien. I think that's also kind of part of it. But the use of it by the brand that used to be called Twitter is complicated for me because Twitter, it's it's hard to separate, you know, that Twitter was this beautiful, incredible thing, really democratized communication, and was a true town square.
Anthony Shore:Then it was bastardized into x, and all of the equity and the goodwill and the incredible branding around Twitter was trashed for this x idea, which is terrible. It's a terrible brand name. I curse its founder for getting rid of the Twitter brand. And so he's taken this word grok, which had personal meaning for me, and he's adopted it or co opted it as the use of its AI. And I think x now is kind of a hellhole, and it's full of trash and bots and all kinds of horrible, hateful content.
Anthony Shore:So the challenge for me is separating the product and the brand from the word. And that's a challenge that we have in in naming is that it's hard for people to separate what do you think of the word versus what do you think of everything else that accompanies the word. So I think Grok is kind of as a word, I think it's I think it's kind of a fun word. It has a great meaning. I mean, it means deep understanding, which is a great idea.
Anthony Shore:But I resent its adoption by x.
Rob Kelly:Gotcha. How about Meta AI? And I know this is a little different, but they are one of the top frontier models, and their Meta AI is their AI search within Meta properties itself. But let's just say they stick with Meta AI for now, and we treat it kind of the same.
Anthony Shore:Well, it's different because it is expressly tied to the corporate brand name, and it's kind of a generic a product name in that sense is that it's Meta, the corporate brand, and then AI is just a generic descriptor. And, honestly, I think that was the right strategy for them. I appreciate, and if I were helping them, that might have been precisely the name I would recommend.
Rob Kelly:Why is that?
Anthony Shore:That's because they're leveraging their corporate name, and to create a separate brand name for something needs a really good reason to do that. Otherwise, I think there's great value in building and reinforcing the corporate name. And the only reason you wouldn't do that is if the corporate name itself has a problem. If the corporate name kind of can't deliver on that, if people wouldn't believe that this corporate brand could offer this product and make it a great product. So Meta believes that their name can extend into AI, that it can deliver that, and I think that's probably the right call for them to do that, to continue to build the the Meta name.
Anthony Shore:And moreover, it's beneficial because it can be applicable across all kinds of different properties that they have from Facebook, Instagram, and so on. That if it's imbued with AI, it's always Meta AI, and they consolidate all of that into that one product name. So I think that was the right approach.
Rob Kelly:What about perplexity?
Anthony Shore:Perplexity perplexes me.
Rob Kelly:What don't you like about it?
Anthony Shore:The name itself, I think, is going to reinforce an idea of a product that is confusing, of a product that is complicated, that is not easy to use, and I honestly don't get it.
Rob Kelly:Is it because it has negative connotations as a word? You know, it suggests that it's complex. I mean, is it as simple as that?
Anthony Shore:It literally means an inability to understand something complicated. I don't understand why you would name your AI that. That's the last thing you would want from an AI assistant. Right? Whereas Grok, for all of its complications and problems, literally means to deeply understand something, and perplexity is kind of the opposite of that.
Anthony Shore:I just don't understand it. Is it meant to be ironic? There's cases where this can actually work, a name that seems kinda contrarian. I mean, I don't seem to have a problem with the name Slack, and that will typically connote laziness. And their origin and story behind Slack has to do with having Slack in the schedule where you get things done and there's extra time involved in that.
Anthony Shore:But Slack has succeeded, and, you know, I don't think that's an issue, but perplexity. And and it's literally here's an interesting part is that the sound of the word itself, that sound of the name feels like what it means. Right? I talked about names that, you know, have a staccato quality. Perplexity has that.
Anthony Shore:You know, it's bouncing. It's everywhere. It's also you know, it's on the longer side, perplexity. It's a complicated sound, and it means to fail to understand something. So I just don't get it.
Rob Kelly:It's the one of the six examples I just gave you now. It's the only one, right, that has any alliteration. Does that help it out? Perplexity. Does that help just a little bit?
Anthony Shore:You could argue that there's kind of a bouncy, playful quality to it, but that is never going to override the fact that perplex is in the word. That meaning dominates, and that's gonna overshadow, I believe, any kind of positive goodwill that could come through from the sound of the word.
Rob Kelly:Can you, if you will, just sum up the best to worst of the six?
Anthony Shore:So I would put at the top of the list both Gemini and Meta AI because for the strategy that they reflect, they're solid names. You know, Meta AI had its own strategy to build a corporate brand. Google made the strategic decision that they needed another brand. And so each of those strategies, I would put them as solutions at the very top of the list. Moving down the list, you would have Claude as I think it's a pleasant word.
Anthony Shore:It follows a convention of people's names. It's unique, and there's some historical relevance to it too. Next down the list, we would have, I guess, ChatGPT. You know, it's not great. It's not great, but it's not horrible.
Anthony Shore:Right? It's easy to say, and it has an unfortunate association in French for French speakers because chat GPT well, chat looks just like the French word for cat, shop. GPT is pronounced by French speakers as. And that means I farted. And so if you're a French speaker and you're saying, chat GPT, you're saying, and what you're saying is kitty, I farted every single time you mention that name.
Anthony Shore:So that said, I'm putting it kind of in the middle middle of the list there. Then at the bottom, for different reasons, I would put perplexity and grok. Now I like in the isolation, in the abstract, I kinda like the word grok a lot, and I would have ranked it higher. But I deeply resent that it's used for x and those other brands and things because I think it's become something like a cesspool, a nefarious cesspool. And so I'm colored by the context in which Grok lives, and I resent that it's been co opted.
Rob Kelly:So I wanted to and you and I both have had busy last forty eight hours, I know. I wanna ask you if you think that OpenAI should use the name OpenAI to replace ChatGPT. But first, I just wanna give you this great email I found. Early days of how OpenAI got named, and I think it just opens up some interesting conversations, especially because if I've got it right, every single one of the companies we've been talking about in the AI space is started by engineers. So they're not started by marketers.
Rob Kelly:They're not started by even by non techies, product expert namers. These are pretty hardcore engineers who have founded these companies. So this is the OpenAI early team. Actual emails that just came out in in some lawsuits. 11/24/2015.
Rob Kelly:So Greg Brockman of OpenAI founder. What do you think Cogito as a name? C o g I t o as a name. Ilya Sutskever, another OpenAI founder since left. Not a huge fan.
Rob Kelly:Greg Brockman. No exclamation point. Parentheses, Elon and Sam both liked it. The name Cogito. Okay?
Rob Kelly:So far, by the way, these are all engineers we're talking about. Ilya Sutzkever again says, what about you? Do you like it to Greg? Greg said, I came up with it. Smiley face.
Rob Kelly:Ilya says, oops. Exclamation point. Greg Brockman says, but I like that it's relevant, pretty unbranded, and has good connotations of thinking individualism. I don't think it's hard to know how to pronounce. Ilya says, is it Latin?
Rob Kelly:Greg says, yeah. Cogito ergo sum. Ilya says, oh, man. If I was in this room. Greg Brockman says, Descartes.
Rob Kelly:Quote, I think, therefore, I am. Ilya says, I can see why everyone liked it. I had friends who named their company WetLab. I didn't like it at once since I didn't know what wet, w h e t, means. If you think that enough people know what Cogito means, then I support it.
Rob Kelly:This is Ilya, founder, by the way, just saying I don't kinda I don't care. Just if you guys are into it. Greg says, Elon says, not bad. Sounds kinda cute. Most people won't get the Latin, but the ones we want to join will.
Rob Kelly:Interesting. Not thinking very big at that point. I wouldn't have gotten that. I'd support that, Greg says, or will be Russian. Not sure what that means.
Rob Kelly:Ilya says knowledge of Latin is independent of knowledge of machine learning. Greg says, hi. Yeah. But more seriously, I think Cogito is well known enough. Ilya, maybe it's okay, then I'm okay with it.
Rob Kelly:Greg Brockman says, cool. Okay. That's one exchange. What I'm gonna ask you about too is not just naming OpenAI OpenAI, but asking you how typical this is of naming it's fascinating. Right?
Rob Kelly:Could just be over some emails. So one month later, 12/02/2015, Greg Brockman writes, one update from me. On name, there's a potentially conflicting trademark on Cogito. So we bring up what you brought up earlier. Gotta look at IP.
Rob Kelly:Okay. So the engineers are smart enough now to figure that out. What do you think of consider? The name consider. That's it.
Rob Kelly:I'd love your take on this afterwards here. We can get consider.com and consider for a reasonable price. I think it's otherwise unbranded, has no negative connotations, and also points to our differentiator. We consider the impact of AGI. Okay?
Rob Kelly:It's way back in 2015, by the way, five years before ChatGPT gets named. Elon weighs in 12/03/2015. Don't love the sound to consider. What's the Cogito trademark issue? I am laughing so out loud, by the way, because Cogito also I don't know if it should be Cogito or Cogito.
Rob Kelly:I actually don't know what the word means or It's neither. Which one is it?
Anthony Shore:Cogito. Cogito. That's classic. Cogito.
Rob Kelly:It's o for two. That's awesome.
Anthony Shore:Yeah. Cogito. So
Rob Kelly:It's Elon. A naming approach we could try is for the real name to be long, but have the actual use be a contraction. These are all emails. EG, the full name of SpaceX is Space Exploration Technologies Corp, and they shortened it to SpaceX. We could call this the OpenAI Institute.
Rob Kelly:OpenAI I. Oh, right. Institute. But call it open in everyday conversation. Looks like openai.com is available for purchase.
Rob Kelly:Greg Brockman writes, the relevant trademark here is trademarkia.com. I'm sorry.
Anthony Shore:What was it? Kagito? Kagito? Kagito. He's back to talking about Technically.
Anthony Shore:Technically.
Rob Kelly:So Greg's back to Kagito. In other words, he's not responding to Elon's email. And, oh, regarding consider, it's grown on me a lot as I've tried it out in various contexts. I think we should make it work pretty well. I had a similar experience with the name Stripe.
Rob Kelly:At choosing time, it felt pretty random. But because it's otherwise so unbranded, it started to feel more natural as time went on. How down on it are you? Elon wrote, pretty down. Consider sounds a bit nanny ish and self righteous.
Rob Kelly:Okay. Greg says, got it. Looks like there are a few things called OpenAI. Openai.org, openai.sourceforge.net. Nothing really established.
Rob Kelly:I could get behind it if we can't find anything else on it thinking..dot. For what it's worth, on the short name front, here's a list of domains a friend to friend is selling, brokering, it's redacted. Nothing hugely stood out to me besides consider though. Greg writes, okay. I'm actually starting to feel, and this is wrapping up, I'm actually starting to feel really good about OpenAI.
Rob Kelly:Also pulled a few people I trust and all good reactions. I've called the owner of openai.com, working on him now, this Greg Brockman writing. Branding wise, I'm thinking we can call it OpenAI or the OpenAI Group because our ultimate goal is the combined engineering and research goal of AGI. I think we should avoid institute or research institute in our positioning. I could be convinced otherwise though.
Rob Kelly:The final email is all this happens on the same day, by the way. December 3, apparently, 2015. Elon writes the final email at least in in this exchange in the lawsuit. Yeah. Good point about not sounding too researching.
Rob Kelly:I mostly liked institute because it sounded like a y I y I as an acronym. Not sure what he meets there. Just OpenAI is probably better, and that's the final exchange about the naming.
Anthony Shore:Well, first of all, Rob, I wanna thank you for that fascinating glimpse into naming history. To see the sausage being made as you do in those email exchanges is is fascinating. And, yeah, you know, it looks like what happens at companies.
Rob Kelly:I have to thank, by the way, techemails.com, which is a fantastic resource that goes and finds all these emails from the lawsuits. Awesome work. Go support them any way you can. After we covered the history of the naming of OpenAI way back in 2015, I thought it'd be good to also share with Anthony a story I just heard about how ChatGPT was named in late two thousand twenty two, seven years later. Here's that story, and then we can get back to Anthony's take on all this.
Rob Kelly:In researching for this, in the days leading up to ChatGPT launching, it was built in only about three weeks, the actual product. They, of course, had done previous work over at OpenAI about it, but the actual thing that became ChatGPT. So this is on the night before 11/30/2022, before ChatGPT launched. It was gonna be named chat with GPT 3.5. Just kind of the name of the training model and chat for the first time, they're adding to this model.
Rob Kelly:GPT meaning generative pre trained transformer. And they changed it to chat GPT instead of chat with GPT 3.5. Literally the day before according to Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT. Has any major product ever stuck with a name where it was sort of call it, like, the project name?
Anthony Shore:Now there are definitely examples of code names that eventually became the go to market name kind of unintentionally. There was a car that was being made by GM, and they code named it Saturn. And that eventually became the ultimate name. Ford had a code name for a car that was in development. And as I've heard, a couple people were running the project discovered that their wives, astrologically, were both Tauruses.
Anthony Shore:So they called it Taurus as a code name. And we know the Taurus became a very big selling car, an important car for Ford. So there are definitely instances where code names have become the final name or placeholder names have become the final name.
Rob Kelly:I know you've got categories names, and the way you taught me this, what stuck with me was you can have a descriptive name, a suggestive name, or an abstract name. Can you talk about, for instance, where ChatGPT is in those categories?
Anthony Shore:It really depends on who you are. Because if you're a developer or you are a researcher who's really into AI, ChatGPT has a lot of meaning. GPT, as you mentioned, means generative pretrained transformer, but users don't know that. So if you're a developer, you see ChatGPT, and it's a highly descriptive name. But if you're a user and you don't know anything about the tech, then chat is pretty descriptive.
Anthony Shore:GPT is an initialism. It's meaningless. It's what a lawyer might call a fanciful name. It has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. It doesn't have any intrinsic meaning if you just look at the letters.
Anthony Shore:You have to know what it means behind there. So to a developer, ChatGPT or AI researchers just can be generic descriptive. Although it's come to mean something pretty specific Over time, names are absorbent that way. But to a user, ChatGPT is partly descriptive and partly meaningless, fanciful, you know, abstract.
Rob Kelly:Is it surprise you if those top names when you're looking at, say, an industry and let's say you and I are starting a new AI company to compete with these, does it surprise you that certain types of names are not in there? Like, instance, I just mentioned using alliteration, you know, Coca Cola, right, versus Pepsi. Does it surprise you that such a huge new industry doesn't have an alliterative name or maybe doesn't have some other type of name that you would have recommended for these new brands or a new one coming at them? Did they miss something?
Anthony Shore:One could make an observation that there are certain styles of names that are not here. I don't really see any name here that's vivid or or symbolic in a certain kind of way. There's nothing that's a picturable image, for example. Nothing here that's exactly arbitrary. What a arbitrary name, like a word I'll give an example of this.
Anthony Shore:It's a name like Blackberry or a name like Apple, maybe even Target. These are arbitrary names. They don't necessarily have a literal meaning that suggests any particular aspect of the product. Maybe having, you know, an empty vessel like Apple or BlackBerry might be appropriate for something like this. And I don't really see those types of names represented here, and there's certainly nothing I think that's very picturable.
Anthony Shore:You know, what if the name of one of these was like chariot, you know, or wagon? I'm not saying those are good names for this, but there are examples of names. It's like, wow. That's a totally different stylistic name.
Rob Kelly:So if you're a company, let's say, Amazon or Apple calls you in, they're not in the list we just gave, but two companies that come to mind as having the resources to go up against these other AI giants, do you leverage what's missing? What do you do if you're Apple, for instance, and you wanna create a new product name to beat these guys?
Anthony Shore:I think Apple strategically probably did the right thing with Apple Intelligence as their brand for AI. It's like Meta AI. They're just kind of that strategy of having a corporate brand to just using a generic descriptor. I do note that Apple Intelligence does shorten to the letters AI, so it's cut that going for it. I don't think that was accidental.
Anthony Shore:So I think that they did the right thing, their belief that the Apple brand could extend into AI. Moreover, they have Siri. So they already have an assistant, an intelligent assistant. Right? And so to create something else that's not Apple intelligence or Siri would have been a mistake.
Rob Kelly:What about Amazon in this case? So they've actually got two LLMs. I had to look them up beforehand because they're not mainstream names yet, but they're called Nova and Titan. Sounds like a little more focused on enterprises, but certainly Amazon's one of the few companies that could put in the resources to compete with the ChatGPTs and Clawds of the world and Geminis. Yeah.
Rob Kelly:What do you do if you're Amazon and you're entering in saying, we we need to compete with the big frontier models? What's the approach?
Anthony Shore:In the case of Amazon, you know, they're a fairly sprawling brand. They've got so much equity in online retail. And, you know, they went from books to everything. Right? They dominate in retail online.
Anthony Shore:They also have Amazon Web Services, AWS, and they are a force in that as well. So they've been expanding the Amazon brand. And the question is, you know, to what extent does it make sense to continue to kind of use a master brand strategy for all of these different products? And I'm sure they had good reason for creating these separate names because to just kind of extend it into generic descriptors well, first of all, the name gets long. You know, people who use it don't call Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services.
Anthony Shore:They call it AWS.
Rob Kelly:And AWS is what you refer to as a master brand strategy. It started off as Amazon Web Services shortened to AWS. It seems to have worked for them. Right? Sort of safe name.
Anthony Shore:That's been fine. That's been fine. Right? You have to, I think, be wary and mindful at least as you're looking at your whole product and technology portfolio. What happens when these things proliferate?
Anthony Shore:And is it going to lead to a proliferation of alphabet soup? You know? Is it just gonna become a bunch of initialisms? Because that's not very user friendly. If you got a couple of them, you can manage it like AWS.
Anthony Shore:But if you start proliferating and you got all these different things and everyone's just calling them a series of letters, that's not very helpful. It's not helpful for users. They're easily confused from one to another. They can reinforce a sense of bureaucracy or just being user unfriendly. So there's a challenge in developing names if you have that kind of approach and strategy.
Anthony Shore:And so sometimes the right approach is to give things different stand alone names. I'm a big believer that names should not be multiplied beyond necessity, But sometimes there is necessity.
Rob Kelly:What does that mean?
Anthony Shore:I mean that not every baby needs to be named. Not every product needs its own unique name. I mean, I understand the impulse. You're a product manager. You're developing something that's brilliant.
Anthony Shore:It's gonna do something different, and that you want to name the baby. You wanna give it a name that's gonna be cool, that's gonna get attention, that's gonna signal differentiation. But sometimes, there's another goal, and that other goal is to reinforce and to build and extend the corporate brand or some other umbrella brand in the company. And sometimes that's the right strategy, and sometimes there can be friction in companies. For example, a product manager wants to give a new cool unique name, but maybe there's an overriding strategy at the company that no.
Anthony Shore:We name things generically because we want something that's clear and descriptive, and we want to build and reinforce the master brand. And especially in something that's kind of leading the charge, something that's gonna be ubiquitous and important technology, why wouldn't the corporate brand wanna get credit for that? Right? This is exactly what Apple Intelligence and Meta AI do as names. That friction happens.
Anthony Shore:And so when I suggest that names should not be multiplied beyond necessity, I'm saying, look. It's generally a good name to reinforce and to consolidate all the names you have, but you should have a good reason to create a new name. I've worked with companies where, you know, they say, okay. Here we go. We're gonna have a naming project.
Anthony Shore:We give it a name, and they didn't necessarily have buy in from the very top. And that's a mistake because I have seen where naming projects are completed successfully. They've got a great legally available name. And then from the very top, they say, that's not our strategy. Our strategy is to have a clear and descriptive name for things like this.
Anthony Shore:And so the name gets tossed in the bin, and they adopt a generic descriptor. And it's a waste of money and time for the client, and it's a disappointment when that happens when the writing was on the wall from the beginning.
Rob Kelly:Is there an example where a company uses their super brand and just sticks with it throughout and succeeds? In other words, I don't know, maybe Oracle comes to mind a little bit. They have had tons of products, and I know they have some sub brands. I guess they own NetSuite, they've bought a bunch of others. But they tend to acquire companies and for the most part, call it Oracle afterwards.
Rob Kelly:Salesforce, I think, does this too. I'm pretty sure. That is a super brand strategy, and that can be a winning strategy.
Anthony Shore:A 100%. I I think that it absolutely works, and I've worked with a lot of large companies that have a clear and descriptive naming system. You know, I worked I worked on the renaming of Anderson Consulting to Accenture. I helped lead that project back in 2000, and they have a clear and descriptive naming system. You know, I did a lot of work on developing generic descriptors with them for a product portfolio.
Rob Kelly:You mean to come after Accenture? In other words, assuming That's correct. We're naming it Accenture. We're going all in, and now anything else we launch should be Accenture fill in the blank.
Anthony Shore:That's exactly right. And many companies, often large companies, especially if they're somewhat decentralized, there's a gravity towards a proliferation of unique names, a proliferation of logos for this product, and those become the before slide. That is the slide where they show, look what's happening at our organization. We have our corporate name, and then we have dozens of unique product names. Maybe they don't even relate to each other.
Anthony Shore:And my gosh, we have little logos and type treatments that are different. It's a mess, and it doesn't help their clients. It doesn't help their customers. Because a naming system should be designed with your clients, with your customers, with your end users in mind. It should be developed in such a way that it helps those audiences identify what products and services are right for them and to help understand what their differences are.
Anthony Shore:And if you do that willy nilly, if you don't have a well defined naming system with rules in place, it's a mess, and it confuses people, and it costs companies money. It costs them money because of of support costs, of ex of marketing costs, opportunity costs because people, like, can't make sense of what this does in relation to another one. And so developing naming systems, which is something I've been doing for, you know, over thirty years, has helped companies greatly, especially large enterprises. Because to have something with no rhyme or reason ends up costing them dearly in the end.
Rob Kelly:If Accenture's an example of a super brand that did it the right way, what's an example of a messy super brand that is just confusing? Because it makes sense where you're saying about Accenture, but I'm trying to think of a company where it is messy and as a consumer that hurts me.
Anthony Shore:I would say there are some examples where companies had a proliferation of names. And then they found discipline and rules, and they modified those names. As an example, consider Google. Over the years, Google had G Chat and Hangouts and Allo. Eventually, they changed those names.
Anthony Shore:Right? So instead of Duo, it's Google Meet. Instead of Hangouts, it's Google Chat. Instead of Fruggle, f r o o g l e, which was a name I loved, I thought that was a hilarious name for their shopping product, they changed it to Google Shopping. And I can absolutely understand and appreciate and respect the decisions that they made to do that.
Anthony Shore:I got another example for you. You could also consider what Microsoft has endured with the versioning names of Windows. It went from, like, 3.1 to '95 to '98 to 2000 to XP, along came Vista, then down to seven to eight. I mean, really just stumbling, making it up along the way and reinventing it all along instead of just having one system. I mean, Apple has been pretty disciplined with their mostly with their iPhone naming versions, at least lately, you know, with these numbers.
Anthony Shore:They had a bunch of letters before that they used. With the numbers, they decided instead of calling it 16, you know, 17 or or iOS version, you know, they're continuing with that number, their numbering. And their iOS version numbers have gone from these regular versioning like they do with just consecutive numbers, and now they're doing what Microsoft did with Windows, right, using names. So the new iOS is iOS '26. So it jumped from, like, 18 over to '20 six just to align with the years.
Anthony Shore:So these companies may be figuring it out as they go along until they decide, you know, it works until eventually, you know, maybe it breaks at some point.
Rob Kelly:Doesn't it have to do in the case of a super brand? Let's take Google. If they wanted to, their mission is to organize the world's information, some form of that. They've seemed to have stuck with that for the most part. You know?
Rob Kelly:So if they suddenly create a product called Google AI, it sort of makes sense using AI to then find the world's information. Right? Not that they've named it that. But if you go to someone like Amazon and you say Amazon AI, Amazon is actually positioned in our mind as as as being a giant retail store, biggest in the world on the web. If Amazon wanted to launch a new AI product to find the world's answers, a competitive product to ChatGPT, Amazon AI wouldn't make sense then.
Rob Kelly:Right? That would kinda mess things up, or would it?
Anthony Shore:I agree that the Amazon brand would have difficulty stretching to accommodate AI because of its strong association with online retail. Maybe it would make sense if it was AI specifically for shopping, but if it's gonna be used in other contexts, that doesn't make sense to me at all. And that's exactly why a name would need to be created for an organization like that. You know? That their brand isn't elastic enough or it means something pretty specific to most people.
Anthony Shore:And so when I said that name should not multiply beyond necessity, well, here's a situation where there is necessity. Now could Alexa be the name of that AI? Alexa is already an assistant. Is it credible that Alexa, as a brand, could stretch and accommodate to be the AI ingredient there? And like any technology, you know, we're talking about AI specifically, but every technology starts out as this new shiny thing.
Anthony Shore:Companies tend to name that new shiny thing because it's different and new, but eventually, it's everywhere, and it's pervasive. And does it still make sense to give it a separate name? Like, Apple's called out intelligence, and you you use Apple intelligence and everything. But, eventually, I believe all of these AIs are just gonna be so ubiquitous that they won't have a name. It'll just be there.
Anthony Shore:Most companies don't make a big thing about being in the cloud anymore. Most companies aren't making a big deal about being online. Like, when companies started going online back in the day, they told people about it by creating names that began with the letter e following the paradigm of email. Right? But if you were to call yourself e anything now, it would be a joke.
Anthony Shore:I mean, of course or I was also used before the iPhone to indicate that they were on the Internet, But it would be laughable now if you did that. Of course, you're on the Internet. Who's not? Right? I think AI is gonna be that way at some point in the future.
Anthony Shore:Now it's different. You call it out. It's but eventually, it's just gonna be everywhere. And why would you call that out? It would be ridiculous.
Rob Kelly:Now does that mean though, going back to the six I gave you earlier, you've got chat GPT, that suffix related to AI five years from now, Is that just gonna be a wasted suffix and not make sense if they stick with the name? And even more so, Meta AI. Right? So that's their product. Will that just go away eventually because AI will be, to your point, ubiquitous?
Rob Kelly:People won't be using the term. It'll just be like saying the Internet.
Anthony Shore:I think in the case of Meta AI, eventually, it would disappear. I think just like, you know, Apple intelligence might disappear at some point because it's just, of course, you're doing AI stuff. Like, what are you, stupid? Right? Now in the case of ChatGPT, it's its own thing, and you interface with it.
Anthony Shore:So that needs some kind of a name. Is OpenAI just gonna kill off the name ChatGPT at some point and just call this OpenAI? You know? Do they want to extend OpenAI? But you gotta call the software something.
Rob Kelly:Oh, great segue. So a whole bunch there. You can rip into any way you want. But the reason I brought this up was you mentioned the name OpenAI. Could OpenAI do away with ChatGPT?
Rob Kelly:Could they, a, get rid of ChatGPT and call themselves OpenAI? Could they b, change their name to either chat or GPT or some variation of ChatGPT because it's got some equity as you pointed out, and some people shorten it. I've heard people say, yeah, use chat just, you know, because they're tired of saying GPT all day, or just GPT because it rolls off tongue, maybe better. Do they do that? Do they do nothing at all?
Rob Kelly:What what are the options? And I should add, we haven't even talked about this yet. OpenAI acquired chat.com, the domain name, reportedly for north of $15,000,000.01 5. However, OpenAI paid some stock as part of that. That stock, according to my back of the envelope, is worth around a $180,000,000 if it was half cash, half stock.
Rob Kelly:So probably the biggest domain transaction ever if you count how much it's the stock's worth now. And that was Darmesh, cofounder over at HubSpot, who sold it to them, and he only owned it a short period. And he paid 15,000,000 for it.
Speaker 3:Chat originally was owned by an individual whose domains are often represented by my good friend and longtime peer, Larry Fisher.
Rob Kelly:That new voice you're hearing is my fellow Deadhead friend, Andrew Miller. Andrew and his partner, Larry, are the brokers who represent the sale of chat.com from an unknown buyer. The top two bidders were OpenAI and Dharmesh Shah, cofounder of HubSpot. I thought it'd be cool for you to hear the inside story of this monster deal. And remember, chatorchat.com is an option as the future name of chatgpt.
Speaker 3:Larry and I have sold multiple 8 figure domains together. And when the opportunity came to consider selling chat.com, Larry called me and said, I wanna partner with you on it. And we had just recently sold home.com a little ways before that for an 8 figure deal. And I said, yeah. I mean, I think chat's one of the most valuable domains on the planet, and off we went.
Rob Kelly:Can you give the story of how Darmesh beat out OpenAI?
Speaker 3:So we were in very let's just say the very late stages of agreeing to sell chat.com to OpenAI. And there were two real key components to that sale. One was the price, which they met, and two was the process. So they use our standard purchase and sale agreement at escrow.com for the transaction. And things were just cruising along nicely.
Speaker 3:OpenAI was in a position where I wasn't going to, you know, shop their offer. This was March '23. You know, they basically missed the part about the process and their outside law firm kind of came back with agreement that just made no sense for a domain transaction at multiple levels and also kind of said they wouldn't use escrow.com. And, you know, the by the time that evening rolled around, that part of the agreement was turbulent at best. And it opened up the door because Darmesh had been interested in buying the domain as well and also at the same price.
Speaker 3:And Darmesh, you know, agreed to sign the agreement without any changes, DocuSign that night, and to wire the money to escrow.com in the morning. And that prevailed. Dharmesh, you know, who was obviously an incredibly brilliant entrepreneur and CTO and founder of one of the most successful tech companies of our generation, HubSpot, and and now an innovator in AI, had a vision for this and ultimately, you know, ended up in a transaction with chat.com to sell it to OpenAI.
Rob Kelly:Yeah. It's amazing it did work out well. I mean, I would imagine you could It's amazing. 10 other stories like this and OpenAI doesn't end up with the domain. Right?
Speaker 3:You know, I wanna give Darmesh some credit. I mean, I do think he thinks about things and thinks them through and, you know, I don't know the all the fine details, but we know the chat.com now goes to chat GPT. We know that OpenAI acquired it, and we know that HubSpot and Darmus are both shareholders. And Darmus is a shareholder, as he has said publicly, of OpenAI likely through that transaction. And, you know, HubSpot has also now evolved into being a partner even though they were not involved with chat.com, personally, they're now a big partner of OpenAI.
Speaker 3:So that relationship opened up a lot of doors that have led to a lot more value than just the domain.
Rob Kelly:Yeah. I was just doing back of the envelope and it's just amazing that if you took Half in stock, which there's some conjecture about, you know, I mean, we're talking already a 100 to 200,000,000 that that part is worth based on the up rounds for OpenAI.
Speaker 3:I can't comment on that, but what I would say is this. It's an amazing example of you pay 15,500,000.0 for a domain name, and if you know how to properly utilize it and extract the value of that domain name, it's always going to be worth exponentially more to you than what you paid for it. And in the case where you can horse trade it into equity and OpenAI and, you know, maybe even business relationships relationships with with OpenAI OpenAI that are probably worth potentially billions in market cap. Right? Potentially billions.
Rob Kelly:Now that we've seen how valuable the domainnamechat.com is to OpenAI, let's get back to Anthony to see how OpenAI would think about changing the name ChatGPT. So, yeah, where do you go from here if you're OpenAI with those different options? And by the way, tell me who you would sit with at a company to do a rebranding or a new name like this. Is it I mentioned that Nick Turley. He's the head of ChatGPT.
Rob Kelly:So head of the product, but, you know, the product is almost everything over there right now. You got Sam Altman, CEO. So is it the CEO? Is it the head of the product? Is it the marketing person?
Rob Kelly:Who's in the room? And then if you're there, and they're asking your take on those options and more, what do you tell them?
Anthony Shore:Well, first, Rob, I would convene as few people as necessary for this discussion. A name and its quality is inversely proportionate to the size of the team. If you got everyone in the room, you got all kinds of people, product managers and marketing people, you know, you're gonna end up with a watered down name. That's probably not very good. Maybe a name that doesn't really say very much because it doesn't offend anyone in the room, and then then you're stuck with a name that doesn't say very much.
Anthony Shore:So you have the team as small as possible. Now you don't wanna bring in anyone at the end who's capable of derailing it and just vetoing it, and it can happen. But I would advise to have the team as small as possible, and you absolutely need the direct involvement with the CEO, someone maybe who's head of marketing, someone who's head of product. Ideally, you know, it's gonna be six or fewer people, and the fewer, the better, but you don't want anyone coming in at the end who's gonna veto. So you need to have deciders there, and that's because naming is subjective.
Anthony Shore:And you can't have proxies in there for you because how are they gonna know how you're gonna personally react to a name? You have no idea. You know? Naming is you hear a word, and you're gonna have your own associations with it. They're idiosyncratic, and they're probably not projectable to other people.
Anthony Shore:That's kind of a bias we have because sometimes we believe what we see in the name is what others are gonna see. But that's not how it is, especially because once you see a name out in the wild, it's got validity conferred upon it. You give it grace, and, you know, it's on its way. But when you're in a room considering hypotheticals, it's very different. You kick the tires.
Anthony Shore:You try to see what's wrong with the name, but that's not what people and end users do. You put out the name. Maybe there's an issue. There's association that comes up, but then that goes away. Right?
Anthony Shore:So what are their options for this? You know, you've talked about a lot of options. And the question as to whether or not OpenAI could be the name of this specific product, ChatGPT, that entirely depends on their product strategy. How many other products are going to be out there that they're gonna be publishing? Perplexity decided this is what we do, and this is our program, and it is the corporate brand.
Anthony Shore:Right? So Perplexity made a decision, a strategic decision, that this is what our portfolio looks like. It's a straight line from the corporate brand down to the product level, and that's it. There's not a lot of things branching off. Right?
Anthony Shore:OpenAI, it may be a different situation. If they are selling lots of different things, then it makes sense to have a different product name. Like, you can't have Adobe rename Photoshop to Adobe. Right? That would make sense because you got all these other products.
Anthony Shore:You got Lightroom. You got Illustrator. Right? So you need different product names there for things that do different things, and the corporate brand can't be used to substitute for any one of these things.
Rob Kelly:Let's assume OpenAI, the six or fewer people in the room say, okay. ChatGPT is our big product. It's 90 of what we do. They've got a couple other things. They've got a thing called Codex and a notetaker called Whisper, but, you know, dwarfed by ChatGPT's success.
Rob Kelly:So let's say it's all about ChatGPT and everyone in the room's agreeing. On the option of OpenAI, for instance, and they now own chat.com, is one option OpenAI super brand, and the product they know that they've got right now that's working is chat. So the new product is called OpenAI chat. Maybe people just call it OpenAI for short or chat for short. Give some room in the future to create new products a la Accenture and roll it out.
Rob Kelly:They got the URL chat.com. Is OpenAI a good enough name to be a super brand even to start with? Why don't you start there and then maybe just give your hot take on the other options?
Anthony Shore:ChatGPT is so well known and has so much equity. I would advise OpenAI not to drop that name. Why would you do that? How how broken is the name that you're willing to throw away that equity for something else? Now you have this long term strategic decision.
Anthony Shore:You know what? We just wanna build the OpenAI brand. And so we want a name that's like Meta AI. That's just that. And I would I would understand that decision as a kind of a long term decision.
Anthony Shore:But, honestly, to get rid of the equity in ChatGPT, it would be as ridiculous an idea as throwing away the Twitter brand in favor of x. Right? But what about modifying ChatGPT, shortening to chat? I don't think that's a good idea. Chat is a whole interface.
Anthony Shore:It's used in many other contexts. You have a company in Europe, Mistral, that has LeChat as the name for their AI software. So I think to call it just chat would be hubris and ill advised. Would people get used to it? But, you know, the thing is it's gonna engender confusion.
Anthony Shore:People are always gonna have to clarify exactly, you know, what you're talking about. And when you start saying, you know, we were chatting. What do you mean? We were using some I'm service? We're texting each other?
Anthony Shore:Or we were specifically using this ChatGPT, which is now called Chat. You know, there's so much confusion that's gonna come from it. It would be rude, I think, for them to adopt that name and insensitive to the realities of how people would talk about and use use this service. Right? So they own chat.com.
Anthony Shore:I guess good for them. I think it's a defensive maneuver. That's not a bad thing. You know, they could they could afford it. So I I don't know if chat.com becomes its own thing that's useful for something for them, and somehow that's distinctive from chatgpt.
Anthony Shore:I don't know. I think that they're pretty close. So I think that they would be burdening users with having to make all these distinctions.
Rob Kelly:You bring up an interesting point. Do names ever come from and nicknames come from the consumer, the user? So in other words, if folks end up using GPT as the shorthand or let's just say they do use chat. They start saying, yeah. Just gonna go use chat.
Rob Kelly:Has that ever become a name?
Anthony Shore:Yeah. Absolutely. It's the human condition that when we talk to people, we wanna put as little effort into what we say as we can. It's called economy of expression. But we also wanna be understood.
Anthony Shore:Right? So there's a limit to how much we can simplify and reduce what we say in order to be understood. But there are cases. I can think of a couple off the top of my head. There was a shipping service, really a pioneer in overnight shipping.
Anthony Shore:They call themselves Federal Express, but that was a mouthful. And so people organically started calling it FedEx, and everyone called it FedEx. And then at a certain point, the name Federal Express didn't serve them. You know, the word federal, at first, it worked for them, but eventually started having other connotations like being slow and bureaucratic. In Latin America, it sounded like federales, you know, which has its own bundle of connotations.
Anthony Shore:Right? So Federal Express didn't really work for them anymore as a name. And so it was fortuitous that this quick shorthand of FedEx two quick little syllables could be adopted as their formal name. That's an example of that. Another one, a certain a fast food company called Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Anthony Shore:Also, a long name. And at a certain point in time, fried food started having bad connotations, you know, not healthy for you. In any event, it was called organically by people KFC. You know, quicker, easier, shorter. So, absolutely, there's cases where people on their own have shortened a name to make it easier, and that ends up becoming the ultimate corporate name.
Anthony Shore:Look. No one knew who Research in Motion was, but everyone knew BlackBerry. And so I think they did the smart thing. They were really a one product company, one brand company, and so they ditched RIM or research in motion in favor of BlackBerry. So these are all instances where a preferable form that was used organically by consumers, by users, was ultimately adopted as the corporate name.
Rob Kelly:Google's got another interesting challenge, which is they've got Google, the name itself, as arguably one of the strongest brands in the world right now. And then they've created a new brand in AI with Gemini. They are two separate products right now. You go to google.com and you get to search the web, and Gemini is a separate answer engine more similar to ChatGPT. If you're Google, how do you think about suddenly you have two brands that have this overlap, and where does it go from here for them?
Anthony Shore:Well, I think it makes sense that they've extended the Google brand by creating a new product in Gemini. You know, they still kinda get credit for it even though it's not expressly and explicitly Google, like Meta AI is. But I believe that AI is gonna become so ubiquitous and so pervasive in everything we do with technology, whether it's online or whether whether it's offline and other kinds of technology, you know, in your hand or in your living room. So I would fully expect that eventually, unless there's a need for this separate piece of software that's its own standalone thing, Gemini will serve its purpose, and eventually, it will go away. Because the intelligence that people have come to know and love and benefit from that you know from Gemini is just built into everything that Google does.
Anthony Shore:And so there's no added value in calling it out. And so eventually, I think names like Meta AI, Apple Intelligence, Gemini, I think eventually, they're gonna go away because everything will just be smarter, and it's table stakes. And so why would you call that out if it's cost of entry? I guess that's my prediction. Because the name serves its purpose for a time, and then it's done because that technology is everywhere.
Rob Kelly:I have some more humanitarian questions to wrap things up. One is, would you describe yourself as an AI optimist, AI pessimist, or some other descriptor on that spectrum?
Anthony Shore:Wow. That's a heady question. At a certain level, I'm an AI optimist, for example. You know, in my use, I found GPT is more useful for my kind of work, but it is not good at creating names. It can do some descriptive work.
Anthony Shore:It's good at creating narratives that might inspire names. But right now, none of them are good at creating names. They're trite, derivative, corny, and not likely available. So it's it's not capable of doing really original interesting work directly if you ask it, hey. Create names.
Rob Kelly:I've wrote an article about things AI cannot do today. And one of them, some would argue, is taste. Some folks believe it can in some way. But is that what you're talking about? Is it that last mile or inch of naming something really requires the emotional feeling of it?
Rob Kelly:You can use tools for AI to come up with some final lists, but in the end, you need a guy like you or the team, the six in the room at OpenAI, using their taste?
Anthony Shore:There's a couple dimensions to this. So taste is reflective of being discriminating and selective. But when you're creating, you need to be expansive and come up with all kinds of ideas. You need variety, and it requires a lot of insights. It requires very oblique thinking.
Anthony Shore:And then when you've done that, you need to be selective in how you choose what names might be good candidates. I don't see AI as potentially honestly having that kind of taste. It may try to mimic and simulate that, but I'm sort of skeptical that AI could really have taste in its discrimination of determining what is gonna make the best possible name of what's available. So I guess I'm not an optimist in that respect with AI. I absolutely believe AI will, at some point, become very good at creating names, names that are not derivative, that are not trite or corny, that are original, and that might clear trademark.
Anthony Shore:And, frankly, AI would probably be integrating up to date trademark databases and be able to make calls on the fly. So I absolutely am, I guess, an optimist even though that would accelerate my obsolescence as a professional brand namer. You know? I use AI as a partner. In fact, I got started in AI in 1986.
Anthony Shore:In college, I was a self designed AI major for a while doing natural language processing using a language called LISP, which is one of the kind of ancient languages I studied along with Attic Greek and Latin. So I've been using technology for a long time and was creating my own large language models using Python and recurrent neural networks before ChatGPT. Okay? So I'm a fan of technology. I'm a fan of AI.
Anthony Shore:I use corpus linguistics engines today, mining multibillion word databases for ideas. Alright? So I'm a big fan of technology here. And so I am an optimist that AI will be able to create brand names. When?
Anthony Shore:I don't know. Maybe a couple years. So that'll certainly have an impact on my job. I mean, on one hand, I'll be able, if, you know, with good prompting to create brand name, I do that now. So eventually, I think it will be able to do that.
Anthony Shore:So that could be deeply pessimistic if you're looking at it from, like, a career longevity standpoint. On the bigger, heavier issue of Skynet and its deployment, and will AI begin to become so intelligent and networked and integrated and make decisions that don't serve the interest of humanity? I hope not. Can you share what I hope not.
Rob Kelly:Can you share what Skynet is?
Anthony Shore:Yeah. Skynet is the name of the AIs that that destroy the world in in the Terminator, the movie the Terminator in t two. I've read scenarios where two different paths are followed and taken. One where there's greater judiciousness that's used in the development of AI because AI is going to be building AI. AI is going to be doing the programming of its next generation of its successors.
Anthony Shore:So AI is gonna become the tool that developers use for developing itself. And then it just sort of it kinda spirals from there. There's a great danger to what could possibly happen. So it's not something I wanna think about very much, you know, because we are in a hockey stick transition here. And so things are gonna spiral with the capabilities of AI, and it'll be great, and it'll be awesome.
Anthony Shore:And, hopefully, it'll continue that way and not take a turn for the worse.
Rob Kelly:I've got a 10 year old in elementary school. What advice would you have for someone that age in this new world?
Anthony Shore:I would suggest to be prepared to seek how and discover how you can be useful in this new world. AI is replacing jobs, and that's going to accelerate. We're never gonna be supplanted. But what happens when employment opportunities really do evaporate? Is there going to be a universal basic income to accommodate this?
Anthony Shore:The handful of companies that are making trillions of dollars every quarter because they're doing all the production, maybe they're doing much of the service work too, is there gonna be a situation where they're just doing stock buybacks or the money is ensuring a peaceful, harmonious society? Like with the universal basic income, eventually, that might become necessary. Otherwise, you're gonna have people who can't afford anything. People won't be able to pay rent, ever more so they're not able to buy houses. People won't be able to buy food.
Anthony Shore:So unless you envision a world like that, something is gonna have to give in order to ensure a peaceful, harmonious, productive society. It's incredible to imagine a world where, I don't know, there's just more free time or leisure time, you know, because what else is there? You've got your universal basic income, and people spend more time with their children, you know, educating their children or, I don't know, reading a world of plenty. Cory Doctorow, an author and the inventor of the word in shitification, you know, has done a lot of work in his novels envisioning a world where there's abundance and kind of a utopian vision instead of the dystopian vision of what the world could be. I hope for the sake of your 10 year old that is the path that is ultimately chosen and that the will is there.
Rob Kelly:Have you created an avatar of yourself yet, or would you plan to, for instance, even for when you're no longer with us, for your wife, for your family, for friends?
Anthony Shore:I might. You know, as an act of compassion for them, if they wanted some form of me to stick around, I have only memories of people who my parents and close dear friends, when they died, I just have their memory in my mind. Would I value the ability to interact with them as if it were them? Could I get comfortable with that idea? You know, maybe.
Anthony Shore:But, you know, loss happens, And I think it's pretty healthy to acknowledge that the things and the people that you know and love, they're gonna change, and they're gonna separate from you. I try to remember this every day. That also helps me feel, I think, a greater presence and appreciation for everything and everyone I have today. So could we rely on the crutch of someone we've lost as an avatar? Would that be good?
Anthony Shore:I think it should be up to people if they want that.
Rob Kelly:Alright. Thanks, Anthony.
Anthony Shore:Thanks so much for having me, Rob. Was great and interesting discussion with you. Thank you.
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