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Built This Week is a weekly podcast where real builders share what they're shipping, the AI tools they're trying, and the tech news that actually matters. Hosted by Sam and Jordan from Ryz Labs, the show offers a raw, inside look at building products in the AI era—no fluff, no performative hype, just honest takes and practical insights from the front lines.
I took this quick screenshot, of myself, and I think it might be good if you give me a few suggestions. So maybe you can give me, like, a style, some ideas so we can change this up just to show this is, kinda hot off the fly.
Sam:I would love to see you with a, you know, brown colored cowboy hat.
Jordan:Here, you can see the outcome. Here I am in a brown hat, and I'm on a ranch. Built this week, breaking it down. Built this week, we show you how. A fresh idea, a clever tweak you locked in
Sam:Hey, everyone, and welcome to Built This Week, the podcast where we share what we're building, how we're building it, and what it means for the world of AI and startups. I'm Sam Nadler, cofounder at Ryz Labs, and I'm joined each and every week by my friend, business partner, and cohost, Jordan. Hey, Jordan. How's it going?
Jordan:Hey, Sam. Super excited. Another huge week, summertime in episode 10. Lots going on. So so much progress.
Jordan:So excited to talk about it.
Sam:Great. So the docket for this week, we're gonna cover a tool we built in the last week, somewhat similar to our our video generation tool, but using the latest image generation tools. As always, a little bit of AI news. Then we'll cover a new AI tool. I'm by no means a power user, but I've used it recently for some you know, really great for for deck creation or one pager creation, that makes it super simple, and and the design very, very quick and easy.
Jordan:I guess we shall jump right into it. How about we?
Sam:Jump right into the tool of the week. I think before you demonstrate the tool, I would love, like, a little bit of context. This is, like, right off the press. I mean, I think the tool that is the kind of foundation for this internal tool we built was launched yesterday. Give us a little bit of context of what's going on in the market and then the idea behind this this tool?
Jordan:Yeah. I think, I mean, everybody's going for, you know, to try to replace Photoshop with AI. Photoshop is a huge tool, super robust. It has, you know, tons of technology that's been built over twenty to thirty plus years of software development. Even though Figma is incredibly successful, great IPO, it hasn't replaced tools like Photoshop and some of the other Adobe Suite tools that are currently used by professionals every single day.
Jordan:Part of that is that, you know, essentially creating continuity with AI is incredibly difficult. And what do I mean by continuity? Continuity, mean by, you know, using a a an image, asking AI to make changes to that image, and having the final image have those changes, but keep the continuity of the characters of the person throughout those changes. So if I ask something like, you know, put a cowboy hat on Sam, I get a cowboy hat on Sam, but I still get Sam. I don't get another face that looks kinda like Sam.
Jordan:And continuity has been somewhat challenging for most of these AI models. And with the release of a few new most recent models, including Google's new Nano Banana model, which we'll talk about a little bit later in the episode, it has made it easier to, essentially use AI to describe what you'd like to do and how you'd like to get it built. I have built us a small kind of chatbot based image based editing tool, And I'll show you a small sample of it here, and we can kind of play with it just to show how a fun tool like this could be valuable to, you know, kind of any small business, especially like kind of ecommerce businesses or other businesses in which, you know, they constantly need to make product shots, headshots, all all different types of things. So I took this quick screenshot of myself right before we start to record this episode. And I think it might be good if you give me a few suggestions.
Jordan:So maybe you can give me, like, a style and maybe some ideas so we can change this up just to show this is, like, kinda hot off the fly.
Sam:Yeah. Well, I've been thinking about creating, you know, from Nashville, Tennessee, a cowboy hat brand. I would love to see, you with a, you know, brown colored cowboy hat and a white cowboy hat on a ranch.
Jordan:Alright. So I I wrote that out there. Add a cowboy hat that is brown and update the close as well on a ranch in Tennessee. And as you can see right now, I'm in an office type virtual background environment. And right now, I'm using the Context Pro Edit tool, and here you can see the outcome.
Jordan:Here I am in a brown hat and I'm on a ranch. My shirt kinda looks the same, but maybe that's like ranch appropriate. And and there I am. If you want, we can probably make some more changes to it if you'd like.
Sam:Yeah. I would immediately, what I find interesting is the lighting. So on your first picture, you have this shadow across your chest. And on the second, it does you know, I wouldn't say it looks still a little AI generated, but, you know, the lighting changes. It looks fairly natural, the lighting, on how the the hat would create that shadow across your, I guess, left shoulder.
Sam:But why don't we change your shirt to be more of a, like, a western button down?
Jordan:Let's try that. So it should, if it works right with my tool, should take this new image as the root, make the changes here, process them, and
Sam:There we go.
Jordan:There we go. Now, you have to understand these are this is like an image of an image of an image. So, you know, it continues to make changes, and we'll probably see, like, some kind of continuity degradation over time. But, you know you know, let's see. Make the western shirt have hot pink colored accents.
Sam:And a bolo tie.
Jordan:And that should do it. Let's see. Hopefully, it still looks like me once it's all said and done. And there we go. Look at our progress here as we've gone from kinda like cowboy hat to western shirt, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Jordan:Right? And, you know, make me look like a animated character. And there I am as a cartoon character with a cowboy western hat, you know, and maybe you take that and you do something with it. But, you know, I think if we just kinda go back one more time, you know, just to kinda use one more like business example. Can you have me holding a bottle of beer and with green glass?
Jordan:So like if you wanted to do kind of product placement as an example, let's see if this works because it may have some safety precautions here, but I think you got it right there. And you know, you could essentially, you know, add in your product and you could add in your, you know, your Photoshop and your branding and there you go. Right? Have me drinking the beer. Let's see if this one this one's a little more challenging, but hopefully, I could pull it off.
Jordan:Not exactly.
Sam:Eat somewhere. Well, just for additional context, I mean, you built this from yesterday to today.
Jordan:Yeah. Yeah. And, like Yeah.
Sam:Pretty good. So, you know, I think one is we like to, like, move fast, try and provide access to our teams very quickly on on tools that may be of use for them. But that doesn't mean everything is immediately immediately perfect.
Jordan:No. Definitely not. I mean, you know, obviously, this is just like a little prototype. I think it's just showing some of the extent and some of the fun you can have with some of these models. You know, with OpenAI, you know, they've had a image generation for a while, but not continuity.
Jordan:So, I mean, here's me drinking a beer, you know. And obviously, this could be dangerous too. I think that's like something else to think about. Right? Like, you know, in the wrong hands, this definitely could be used dangerously.
Jordan:What if I don't drink alcohol and, you know, etcetera. So, you know, obviously, it's just the beginning of how AI will be used to manipulate images. You know, the real question is is like, you know, is this real or is this not real? Right? I mean, you know, it has my name on it, like, you know, was this I was in a Zoom meeting drinking a beer.
Jordan:What? You know, like, so, you know, maybe this looks artificial today, but, you know, it may not look artificial tomorrow with just, you know, one one or two more improvements. So and obviously, this could be done for, you know, like I said, any type of product placement, actors, models, and a bunch of other types of context, of course.
Sam:So I know it was a bit of a flop for us, and I know it launched yesterday. Just now in this demo is a little bit of a flop, but what what is the hype specifically? I mean, these tool there's been versions of these tools. Like, why is Nano Banana theoretically better? Like, what is the hype about?
Sam:Is it all about the continuity?
Jordan:Yeah. I mean, I think they call it, like, an upgrade, and we can jump into it. Like, Google Gemini's upgrade gets the bananas upgrade. And so what they say they're able to do is kind of, like, merge two images. So here's an example of, like, a person plus a dog, and they want them on a basketball court, and now they're together on a basketball court.
Jordan:I, you know, I do have Gemini, and I could definitely try this in Gemini. We could like kind of see how well that works. And so maybe that model is being different than the one I'm I'm running through on my application layer. But here it shows you kind of like, you know, using it for, you know, photo design. Right?
Jordan:As I mean, for interior design as you're able to like add a couch or, you know, add a add a wall to a room or if it's something like that. So I think, you know, we're gonna just begin to see the power of this because, you know, this is at the at the level in which developers will be able to apply this to applications, and I think you'll be able to see this, you know, natively, probably on your iPhones and, you know, Android phones, but also probably within a bunch of different types of applications as well that will help you ideate things for purchase and ecommerce and a bunch of other stuff, and then, you know, hopefully help you buy them. I think, you know, as we go through it, let's just jump through the news, and then we can kind of jump through the tool of the week after that. So, you know, obviously, Google's dropping new models. You know, what we haven't seen is a new model that's been better than the the VEO three model from Google.
Jordan:And I think, you know, it's probably any day now that we're gonna see a new release. The sort of model from from OpenAI is certainly not as nearly as good as the Veo three Fast. You know, obviously, there's been some open source models available, and there's definitely like Runway and some other players that have have made some models, but I think, you know, we'll see a Veo three fast update to, like, veil four or something like that from Google or or some type of competition. And I think that'll really up the game in video, which is even more exciting than images, in my opinion, simply because of how how important it is for for social ad creation. Yeah.
Jordan:Let's jump into the news. So I don't know if you heard, but Anthropix getting into the browser management game, as we've seen already from Perplexity with Comet and OpenAI with, you know, their operator tool or their agent tool as they now call it. But I think this is super interesting. Again, you know, we've talked about the power of kind of using AI in the browser. It seems like nobody has kind of penetrated that to be a market leader in it yet, but I'm just curious what your thoughts are, you know, on bringing Claude or OpenAI with you as, like, an agent in the browser.
Sam:I mean, I mean, think it makes a ton of sense. My kinda default search is now usually with an LLM. So having it directly in the browser, I think, makes a ton of sense. To me, this is I haven't tried it yet. Have you?
Jordan:No. I haven't tried it yet. It is under limited release so far. But, you know, I think let's go back to, like, the travel example, which is like a good one to be used. But, you know, when I book a flight, especially something like an international flight, I might book have several tabs open, search different times, different days, even different airports kind of as like a, you know, direct flight airports just to find the best deals or maybe the shortest flight times, etcetera.
Jordan:Then I'll, you know, maybe check my points that I have on different platforms just to kinda find, like, kinda the best optimization. I think you could probably build some Claude rules on, you know, how you like to travel and and just let the Claude agent kind of, you know, go open ten, fifteen different tabs and go run a bunch of different iterations against Google Flights or Expedia or whatever your flight tools of choice are. You know, ideally, be able to find you kind of the best flight deal kind of inside the browser rather than, like, today's chat experience, which kind of is like a an affiliate based experience in chat. You know, them they may search for you, but then give you a link out, and, you know, it's not really clear whether or not they've done a a comprehensive search across, like, your opportunities, nor does it nor do they do a good job of being able to actually, like, book the flight for you or find you the right flight. Right?
Sam:Yeah. I mean, just today, I had to search for a hotel option about an hour outside of Seattle with some specific criteria and straight to AI for for that. Did the result completely meet my needs? Pretty close. You know, I compiled, like, a list of options based on the parameters and the exact distance and the nights, and I haven't, you know, taken it to the next step of actually booking my trip.
Sam:I think it I think it's where most of us are doing our work, to be honest.
Jordan:Yeah. Let's hope these agents come to be valuable for us and kind of become a tool that everybody uses inside the browser. So that'd super exciting. Alright. Let's jump into the next story.
Jordan:Now, he is not my favorite person, but I do think this is a super interesting story. Now, Will Smith's tour video appears to use a fake AI crowd according to viewers. They call it AI slop. They show pictures of people's faces in the crowd, and the faces are kind of like AI generated faces.
Sam:Deformed.
Jordan:Yeah. Deformed faces, obviously, like black realism. And, yeah, I just think this is, you know, the beginning of artists using AI as a trickery to to make it look like they're either, you know, doing a better job or having more people at their shows or, you know, or even just using it for, you know, generation to make music videos. But, yeah, I thought it was a pretty funny story.
Sam:It is funny, especially because it's Will Smith, and obviously, he's, you know, trying to repair his his brand and his image. But I I would imagine, like, moving forward, all public figures, you know, are gonna use AI to influence their audiences to some degree. You know? I think it's it's not that surprising to me. Even with, you know, recent accusations of political leaders who have used fake images to boost audiences.
Sam:And, you know, I just the more the better these tools become, I just think the more prevalent it is. I mean, Instagram and social media is pretty much feels all fake anyway. I think it's just, you know, making that easier, but it doesn't surprise me at
Jordan:all. Yeah. It's still pretty funny. Alright. Let's jump into the tool of the week.
Jordan:This tool, maybe you wanna give a quick intro about it.
Sam:Yeah. So, you know, I'm sure all of us have spent prior to AI in in in our corporate lives lots of time building presentations and different decks. And for many years, it felt like that was pretty much all we did, in certain roles. Well, Gamma is a tool to, like, accelerate with AI presentation and website building. I've really only used it a couple times.
Sam:I've had the subscription for about a month and a half, but it really makes building a presentation with, I would say, pretty solid design right out of the gate, pretty easy. So if just to give, you know, a quick example, you have access. Why don't we build a quick presentation, a three card presentation built this week, the podcast? Know, give it a little bit of context, highlight an AI tool every week that we've built ourselves. We highlight another AI tool that we use frequently, and we share some AI news.
Sam:And when we are open to sponsors who who may wanna promote their business tool on the program. So it's more of a sales kind of presentation deck where the cohosts are two tech entrepreneurs. The show is weekly for about thirty minutes, launched every Friday. And there's probably a ton more context I could give.
Jordan:Alright. So just to repeat real quick, I have a three card presentation about Built This Week podcast. We highlight an AI tool that we built ourselves. We show a tool on the market, and we talk weekly AI news. We're open to take on advertisers to tech entrepreneurs.
Jordan:Thirty minutes launched every Friday. Alright. So I'll generate an outline there in three card format. Do you wanna talk through a little bit about what it's doing right now?
Sam:Yeah. I mean, I think it's obviously filling out the typical kind of titles, sub bullets, etcetera. And then it gives you kind of the high level outline. So you can go in there and edit and add cards. We click on the top one.
Sam:So I think you can direct directly edit in there. So if that that text isn't exactly what you wanted, you can go in and edit it. I can't really read it. For the most part, I think it looks fine. You can change the titles.
Sam:You can add additional cards. You know, for amount of text per card, I would keep it at concise because you just want it pretty high level. You can obviously choose the theme. We're we've got a That's a better theme for kind of our our branding. AI images, you can choose the source.
Sam:I'm curious if some of that recent models we talked about are available. A click AI images and then AI image model. Let's see what we got. So, yeah, you got a couple different options there.
Jordan:And style, photorealistic or abstract? What would you like? Line art even?
Sam:Yeah. Let's go line art. See what it see what it comes up with. So the use case I've used this for is in the short time I've used it, is not for presentations, but more for one pagers. Just that's just what's popped up in the short amount of time, but it's been incredibly quick at designing really professional one pagers.
Sam:You know, I didn't have to tap into a a graphic designer or anything. I mean, look at this. You know? I'd say it's overall with, what, five minutes of work, not so bad. Obviously, you'd wanna review the text.
Sam:I haven't read it at all, but, maybe change the images. Like, you can actually click on that image, and I think you can if you click on the little yeah. Yeah. Ask AI, you can you can chat with AI and make it more realistic. There you go.
Sam:So and then the different parts of the output, you can, you know, change or or tweak using AI as well. So overall, super cool tool. I think first and third slides look pretty nicely designed. But, yeah, what are your thoughts?
Jordan:Yeah. I mean, as you saw, it just said make it more realistic, and it made this image, you know, more realistic for what the image was. You know, here if you go to the theme, you know, we can easily swap it out to something that might be kind of more on brand with this particular style of line art. And overall, I just find it to be, you know, another tool in the arsenal. You know, obviously, previously worked at Amazon, which is a heavily writing culture, and so I, in general, don't do that many PowerPoint presentations.
Jordan:But, you know, from everything from like pitch decks to, you know, sales decks like this, it's a great tool. It's, you know, it's probably not perfect yet, but, you know, it does a bunch of things that you'd be surprised. You know, I didn't tell it anything about Sam and Jordan from Ryz Labs. So it went out and surfaced the Internet, and it knew something about our podcast, and it brought that in automatically. And then I think it has some other fun tools, like I can present directly in here, or I can export this, you know, into something like a PDF, a PowerPoint, Google Slides.
Sam:Yeah. You can definitely get a skeleton going within seconds that is probably 65, 75, 80% of the way there. Export it to Google Slides or PowerPoint, wherever you want, finish it off. And what may have taken you hours to do, you know, has been reduced to maybe an hour, hour and a half. So just another tool to accelerate things that I feel like we all spent hours doing a couple years ago.
Jordan:It's one of those things that it's surprising. You know, I would say Google, even OpenAI, and Ananthropic, you know, haven't really done a good job of doing AI in slides. I mean, you would you would expect to be a better AI type Google slide experience or even a better kind of PowerPoint slide experience with AI. But, yeah, Gamma so far seems to be the market leader as far as kind of making presentations, at least quickly. But, you know, hopefully soon, we'll see kinda more of these tools and just kinda more democratization of using AI within presentation slides in general.
Sam:So with the power of AI in general with LLMs and their ability to, you know, analyze data and, research and Gamma's ability to create PowerPoint decks. What is the future for management consultants?
Jordan:Yeah. I mean, I'm not an expert in the management consultant space, but, I mean, the time they take to make decks is definitely gonna go down to zero. Right? And so, you know, if that if that's a significant amount of time, that's gonna go away. Hopefully, you know, at least their research and other parts of the job may be still important.
Jordan:But, again, you know, ChatGPT is an amazing researcher. You know, just a small anecdote here, I spoke with a trial attorney, a litigation attorney over the weekend. And, you know, one of the things he told me is that the firm is is lowering their their hiring in in data researchers, mostly because, you know, they're able to leverage something like ChatGPT and other AI tools so they can do research on cases. It's kind of changed their perspective on hiring future candidates into the firm. It's it's affecting all types of industries in all different ways.
Jordan:But, yeah, I think Gamma is just one of those tools that, you know, may have a big impact on management consulting. Or how about education? Right? Or schools or, you know, presentations for kids and college and yeah. I mean, even even in the VC world of, you know, just creating your kind of 12 page slide deck.
Jordan:Yeah.
Sam:Yeah. I think I they actually have a pitch deck as a template. Like, you can choose from preexisting templates and just run with it. I think they have, you know, 20 different templates from sales deck, onboarding, new employee deck. I don't recall all of them, but there was, you know, over a dozen easily.
Sam:Alright, Jordan. Well, any last thoughts? We've, you know, covered our tool. We covered Gamma. We covered some AI news.
Sam:Any last thoughts before we wrap up this last episode?
Jordan:Yeah. We're coming towards the end of the summer. We've got Labor Day coming up next week. It's just, shows how incredible the AI space is with all of these summer launches. We're continuing to see new product launches from kind of all the top major AI studios.
Jordan:You know, usually, you'd expect to see kind of a calm summertime, but that's not what we're seeing at all. So I think post Labor Day, I think we're gonna see more announcements, probably see, you know, some newer updates, newer LLM models, you know, probably from all the top studios, and hopefully some new products and things that we could build and and bring to all of our fans here at Built This Week. So thanks so much, Sam. This was an awesome episode, and looking forward to catching up next week again. Let's talk next week.
Jordan:Yeah. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Check us out at builtthisweek.com or on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, all your favorite podcasts. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Built This Week.
Jordan:Check us out. Thanks, Sam. Have a good one.
Sam:Thanks, Jordan. Happy Labor Day. Happy Labor Day. Bye.