Transcript:Caroline Woods: Joining me now, Maja Vujinovic, CEO of Digital Assets at FG Nexus. Maja, Thanks so much for joining me at the desk. It’s great to see you again.

Maja Vujinovic: Caroline. Thank you for having me.

Caroline Woods: So we’re talking future of work AI disruption. We hear a lot of talk about AI being a productivity booster and a job killer. What do you think? What narrative will win out with?

Maja Vujinovic: I think of the past year narrative of a job killer has definitely won. I would say we’re slowly starting to see that it’s a job booster. It will make it will augment certain types of jobs, right? Certain types of jobs may go away, but in about 10 to 20 years. Right and the next kind of short term span year two, five years. I see it more as augmenting our lives and helping and being a productive asset than anything else.

Caroline Woods: Dig into that a bit more. How do you see AI changing the way we work over the next 5 to 10 years?

Maja Vujinovic: Yeah so right now you have AI in health that is really impacting health and diagnostics and MRIs and, you know, research. You have AI right now really impacting our transportation. That’s kind of obvious. You have in finance, in algorithmic trading and et cetera you have an HR in legal that is quite here. Now is it here at Scale in those last two that I mentioned. No, but I think in the next two years, you’re going to start to see assistants of assistants, you’re going to start to see legal research on AI. You’re going to start to see definitely HR and companies trying to push more of AI tools onto their employees to learn and be more productive and kind of make them superhuman in a sense.

Caroline Woods: Can you give an example of AI at work right now that maybe we wouldn’t even notice?

Maja Vujinovic: I mean, Copilot, Microsoft Copilot is something that is ChatGPT. I think most people take that for granted. But think about it. Everybody I speak to will say I don’t really use Google anymore. I just go to ChatGPT and I, you know, do everything I need to do in legal AI. Obviously all of those things have to be double checked, but there are people that are using ChatGPT today for $200 a month to do medical diagnosis, to double check medical diagnoses that they’ve been given from their doctor. I mean, that is an incredible advancement of what we have. And it is pretty cool. And it brings us kind of forward. It makes us more efficient in many ways when it comes to automation, though.

Caroline Woods: How do you balance AI with was also having a human touch because as someone who leverages ChatGPT often, it’s wrong a lot?

Maja Vujinovic: Yeah, absolutely. You almost have to tell it that it’s stupid. And don’t be stupid in order to give you good answers. Look, jobs like yours, for example, or jobs like in therapists, in school. Teachers, those will not be replaced anytime soon. I don’t envision a robot in your place, interview me anytime soon. So so I think things will evolve, but they are not going to just suddenly changed in the next year or two. I think a lot of people out there are making a lot of money by saying we’re all done right. But the reality is there are certain emotional things that we still don’t have with AI and we won’t have now. I think Dennis from DeepMind, Google DeepMind has predicted that, and they’ve been quite consistent, actually with this. And in the next 10 years, they’ll probably have AGI. Now there is a thing where you can say, how do you define AGI. Right but I do kind of turn to them quite often. And turned to him to tell me, when does it become really serious. When I starts to develop these emotions that humans have. Still, my prediction is we won’t be seeing any of that at scale for another 20 years.

Caroline Woods: You make a good point, though, because when we first chatted months ago, you told me I was being too nice to AI and you said you need to almost tell it, it’s stupid. And I told you I was saying please. And you said, don’t say please. It will work harder for you if you’re mean to it. Explain that to me.

Maja Vujinovic: Yeah good memory. So I noticed when just ChatGPT came out that I was saying, OK, now let’s do this. And please, could you write. And I realized that every time I said that, it was kind of repeat itself. And so I think that’s a basic fact. Now everybody knows this. I mean, you have to almost tell it. Please don’t be wrong. You know, you’re acting pretty stupid. You’re not AG, you’re not AI quality. I’ve even used prompts like saying you do not have a good education. You need to act like AI and and it would actually dig deeper into answers. I don’t have an explanation of why that happens, but I can only tell you a sci-fi answer which which I do think that, at some point, you will start to see a bad AI and good AI, and that will depend on how we train AIs. There will be some bad actors in this world, and I do think that AI is almost capable of sensing when something is good and something is bad. So I know most people don’t want to believe that, but maybe I watch too many sci-fi films, but I do think it’s not anytime soon. However, though it would all depend on our training of AI.

Caroline Woods: Well, you say that we’re in act one of I right now. What can we expect in act two? Hopefully not these bad actors. What do we need to do to prepare for that?

Maja Vujinovic: Yeah so act one when I referred to that I think it’s infrastructure, right. It’s solid infrastructure, electricity chips. Right everything that we’re seeing now and what we’ve seen within Nvidia, I think, act two is applications. I don’t know if, if Dennis is correct, if in the next 5 to 10 years, we start to see AGI, then that act 2nd may start to see some bad actors through those applications. Because remember, a lot of the AI is trained on real data, but it’s also trained on synthetic data, and synthetic data can be manipulated. I’m not an expert in synthetic data, but from the basic understanding, in act two you could have a lot of bad actors. And I think there are other issues in regarding AI really picking up steam. And one of those is just, do we have the power to support all of these, you know, all of this technology and do we. Yeah, it’s one of the most important questions you ask. And I think every single TV channel should be asking this question about electricity. What we’ve seen in the last couple of days with the fight with China and minerals and all of that, you know, we should be doing the same around electricity. There should be really a large awakening around how much electricity we need for AI. Just in the next year or two, we are going to need as much as a whole New York City be put on a grid. That’s how much electricity we would need just for the US consumption in AI. And so globally, that’s a lot more as well. And so I think we need to be. And I think this administration, by the way, has done an incredible job of focusing on that right or wrong in many people’s eyes, depending on which take you you align with. But I believe that we should be pushing on electricity development all the way. And I think they’ve been correct when it comes to that.

Caroline Woods: Is that even possible, though, putting a whole New York City on a grid in the next one to two years?

Maja Vujinovic: Yes, but it’s extremely fragmented. I think it is possible, but our US grid is fragmented, our infrastructure is fragmented. And I think if I was anybody in AI space and looking to invest, and I think you’ve also seen in the last know, four or five days, there’s been a lot of discussion of are we an AI bubble. Are we over investing in AI. And I said it the other day on CNBC. Depends what you’re investing in. If you’re investing in infrastructure then you need to be doubling down on that. If you’re investing in applications that actually are backed by infrastructure, real utility, real impact, that you need to double down on that we are in the real race with China. There is it’s not any more a question. And I think when people come and say, well, you know, us will win in culture and US dollar is dominant. I think we live in a bit of an illusion. You know, there is us and there’s China, and then there is China with the rest of the world, and there’s us kind of on its own. And so I think we need to start thinking about it that way, and really, I think there is something that Dennis mentions. I think he mentioned it a couple of years ago, even where he said that even that 10 minutes of 15 minutes, who comes out with AGI, the first 10% or 15% minutes is really going to lead for years to come. Who’s leading right now. I look 90% of AI companies in the world that we’re using are US based. OK now, a lot of those scientists that work in those companies are Chinese and so or Chinese nationals, right, or US nationals that are from China, and we don’t know if they’re going to go back. And I think this is really to me, this should be a core question of where we’re at. I know it’s gotten to that level, but that is the level we’ve got to discuss these things. And really, I think there is something that Dennis mentions. I think he mentioned it a couple of years ago, even where he said that even that 10 minutes of 15 minutes, who comes out with AGI, the first 10% or 15% minutes is really going to lead for years to come. Who’s leading right now. I look 90% of AI companies in the world that we’re using are US based. OK now, a lot of those scientists that work in those companies are Chinese and so or Chinese nationals, right, or US nationals that are from China, and we don’t know if they’re going to go back. And I think this is really to me, this should be a core question of where we’re at. I know it’s gotten to that level, but that is the level we’ve got to discuss these things.

Caroline Woods: OK so just finally, from an investor perspective, not that your chief investment officer by any means, but how should investors be thinking about this as an opportunity. As you mentioned, there’s the questions is AI a bubble. But should they really be homing in on the electrical play. Should they be focusing on investing in China or here in the US, what should investors be doing right now?

Maja Vujinovic: Yeah I mean, depends what you it depends what your mandate is, right? Some people don’t have a mandate to go beyond infrastructure. Some have only to focus on applications. If I was an investor I would focus on infrastructure. It’s a lot harder and a lot longer play. I would look at applications that have to do anything with legal, with trading, with health, certainly with HR, everything that helps the bottom line of a company that is going to increase the bottom line of the company. Look for those applications, because that’s exactly where they will have an impact. And they will do really well.

Caroline Woods: All right. We have to leave it there. Maja, we hope you’ll come back and talk to us more soon because you have so many interesting insights. Thanks so much.

Maja Vujinovic: Thanks so much.Caroline Woods: That’s Maja Vujinovic, CEO, Digital Assets at FG Nexus.