Transcript

5 bold AI predictions for 2025, with Pioneers of AI host Dr. Rana El Kaliouby

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1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Ha ha ha. Hi everyone, we have a special new episode today. My guest is AI expert and tech insider Rana El Kalyubi, host of the podcast Pioneers of AI.

1:46 Rana sharive predictions for AI for 2025, spanning technological changes, societal impacts, and of course business and investing. It's insightful and thought provoking stuff for our careers and our portfolios. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this Із рапід респанс.

2:11 I'm Bob Safian and I'm here with Rana El Kalyubi, host of the terrific podcast Pioneers of AI, and herself an AI pioneer as a scientist, a CEO, and now an investor at Blue Tulip Ventures. Rana, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. It's always fun to do this with you, Bob. This has been uh another crazy year for AI. So much attention, huge valuation booms, continuing fears as well, including some suspicions about AI hype. As we look to the year ahead, I I'm eager to get your perspective on what to expect. You put together some predictions for twenty twenty five. And and if you're game, I'd love to have you take us through some of them. I've picked five. Is that okay? Let's do it.

2:57 All right. So the first prediction for AI in 2025, the rise of AI agents. Now for for listeners who aren't familiar, what is AI Agenic AI, how is it different from large language models like ChatGPT? Yeah, a lot of what we've seen so far with AI are these chat bots, right? Like you can kind of Think of them as a thought partner, a creative partner, but they're not doing anything on your behalf. An AI agent is gonna act on your behalf and complete tasks that you can completely kinda delegate.

3:29 Two. We started to see some of that in the enterprise space. So some companies are already harnessing these agentic AI workflows to automate a lot of the work they do internally at the organization. But I'm excited to see personal AI agents. Like I can't wait for a an AI agent that can help me get stuff done. We had Mark Benioff from Salesforce on the show recently and he talked like his AI agents today were already, you know, spectacular, right? Like how far along is agent technology right now for real? You know, I mean I've I've heard you say that we haven't seen the iPhone moment yet in agentic AI.

4:10 There are a lot of companies that are using actually one of my investments is a company called Synth Pop, and they use voice AI agents to automate a lot of the healthcare workflow, but it's very kind of unsexy. It's behind the scenes. What I'm excited about for the new year is can I get a similar voice agent that can help me schedule My kids' doctor appointment. Can we get an AI agent to do that for me, right? But it would make it's actually not easy because it would require that it would have access to my calendar, to my health information, right? So it's complex, but I think we can get there. And it has to be It has to be a very simplistic interface. You can't like write code and like prompt all these ch you know, it has to be kind of streamlined, it has to be The iPhone moment. That's what we're missing with with

5:00 And and this move from business use to sort of Every people I mean It seems like trust is probably a big issue here, right? That sort of how comfortable everyday users will be to let an AI agent act on their behalf. Is is trust one of the biggest hurdles? Oh absolutely.

5:21 If you're gonna give an AI agent access to your health information or your financial information so that it can go buy a gift on my behalf, like if you're gonna be delegating tasks and expecting these tasks to get done. That requires a lot of trust. Yeah, I mean I guess it's different for me to go to ChatGPT and say, Hey, I want to take a vacation with my family to this kind of place. What are the options? It's different than saying, just book my trip. And then I'm stuck with it, whether it's necessarily the trip that I want or not. That's actually a good question,'cause how do we design we want the human to stay in the loop, but how much in the loop, right? Because if you're too in the loop, then it hasn't done anything on your behalf. But if it's too autonomous and you're not in the loop at all I I think we're not there yet. And also

6:08 Imagine a world where we each have our personal AI agents that are interacting with one another, right? Like I right, like my AI agent will be working with your AI agent, right? And and again, how much autonomy do we wanna give these agents when they're interacting with one another? Let's go to uh prediction number two. Prediction number two is about the emergence of embodied AI. Now, what is embodied AI? Are are you talking about robots? Robots is one form of embodied AI. So far, a lot of the AI we've seen are again like tethered to a 2D screen, right? But

6:43 We're sh already starting to see a few companies that are building what we're calling physical intelligences or embodied AI or physical AI, where the AI is embodied in a it doesn't have to be a full fledged robot. It could be a robotic arm, it could be a pet, a digital pet. I believe we're gonna start to see these large language models or foundation models optimized for physical stuff. We're already seeing some of this embodied AI in manufacturing and retail. But I'm also excited to see what happens again in the consumer space. Like this idea of Soша робот

7:18 that or companions that can be in in our homes. That's actually marrying like physical intelligence. with generative AI with also like emotional intelligence. It sounds like the same pattern though happening as happens with agenti AI, that it happens first on the business front before it moves into the consumer realm. I think so. I I think we're gonna see I mean, I'm already invested in a number of companies that are doing robotics for food manufacturing or food packaging, right? Like this this robot uses computer vision and AI and it's like

7:52 Oh, I need to scoop a little bit of rice, some blueberries, you know, spread Nutella on a toast. And it can actually do these things. But we we haven't seen that in in the kind of in the consumer space. Obviously cost is gonna be an issue, right? Like I can't wait for the laundry falding robot, but I'm not gonna pay thousands of dollars for it. As you talk about these robotics, I'm I'm reminded of sort of the hype cycles over VR and AR wearables. You know, and and and I wonder whether that might make

8:23 Big tech and and you know, consumer electronics organizations sort of wary about investing in new kinds of hardware this year? Or or is the AI tailwind so strong that like we should expect some big bets? I think we should expect some big best. I mean, already companies like Elon Musk's Optimus and also figure AI and even physical intelligence, right? Like some of these companies are already raising, you know, billions of dollars of valuations and making a lot of progress. Um but I don't know about you. I would not want an optimist in my house. Right. So I think there's also gonna we we need kind of innovative ideas on what these home robots or home embodied AIs look like.

9:11 Your AI company, Effectiva, was very focused on ethical considerations with AI. Are there ethical considerations specific to embodied AI? I mean, like all things AI, we need to think about bias. These embodied AIs will have vision, they'll have perception. So so bias is definitely something we need to Think about 'Cause they may react differently to the stimuli around them.

9:35 Based on how they're trained. You can imagine how then a robot. Who's got Sensors for its eyes, right? Cameras.

9:44 Optical sensors. If it can't See? All people. That's gonna be a problem. So um yeah, like algorithmic and data bias is a big deal. But I honestly also think back to trust, trust, privacy. Right. If if if we're gonna have these robots collaborate closely with humans in

10:02 environments be it at home or school or hospitals, right? Respecting people's privacy is gonna be One of the kind of ethical. And safety considerations. Right and embodied AI is like an embodied agent.

10:18 Two. It I mean it's all of it's all it totally wrapped together. Right. Kind of embodied in a gentic AI because yes, these robots are agents in their own. You know, it feels a little like the Jetsons though from you know, from my youth, right? I think we're a ways away from a Jetson, unfortunately, but Uh Rosie the robot, right? Yes. We're not quite there yet. You mentioned the money that's going to AI startups, so I I wanna ask you about prediction number three. We're on the cusp of the first. One person unicorn.

10:49 Can you explain what you mean by a one person unicorn? A unicorn for those who are not familiar with the term in the in kind of in the investing world is a privately owned entity that is worth over a billion dollars. And so the idea is with AI and with AI native companies, so companies that are built with AI from the ground up. It may be possible to reach this unicorn status.

11:14 With with I mean, at the extreme with one person? You mean that's a single employee of the company. Like you you don't need anybody else. You don't need anybody, you start the company and then you have a whole team of AIs doing different things for you. One AI is doing marketing, one AI's in charge of sales, one AI that's doing all the coding for you, right? One AI's taking care of anything that's legal. And so you have a team of these AI both tools and agents and bots. So I think we're gonna start seeing a lot of that. Are you

11:46 looking, expecting the businesses that you invest in to be that much more efficient? If if it even if it's not a one person unicorn to sort of rely on these tools to to move faster and cheaper and Yes, we are seeing that the companies that are AI native The dollar go, you know, the The dollar invested in these um teams and these companies goes a long way. Now that will not always work for every type of AI company or every type of AI product, but in general, these AI native companies can be a lot more efficient. Yeah. And this is like at the opposite extreme of the LLM

12:25 companies. So I have that right,'cause like the the LM companies, they're spending an enormous amount of money to create the capability, but then you can piggyback on it as a at the other end of the st extreme to to use that. Yeah, exactly. Like the the exception to kind of this trend, if you like, is um some of these foundation model companies because a lot of the cost is actually a cost of computes. And In some cases

12:53 with the inference when you're actually asking, say, chat GPT a question, it's pretty expensive today. So we're seeing a lot of innovation happen in that space too. Companies that are trying to innovate on the foundation model front, either by building models that require less data or less compute and energy, or they run on the edge. So you don't have to call the cloud every time you ask a question. Um, I think You know, TBD on how defensible these new companies are going to be. But what I'm also really interested in is these vertical kind of AI companies that can harness open AI and other tools out there.

13:28 They don't have to build these models from scratch. They can can use them with combined with unique data. And then they can solve a very specific problem for a very specific industry. These are the types of companies where I think they can be AI native and quite efficient. The valuations around AI have been Unprecedented. Not n not just for NVIDIA, obviously, but you know, for

13:51 For billion dollar startups seem like they're everywhere. How much of this might be a bubble? Like will the levels of investment last for you as an investor? Is it hard to maintain an investment strategy that's like reasonably priced because, you know, everything just takes off? I would say there's bifurcation in these valuations. We're seeing very reasonable, like pre seed like so I invest in early stage, so pre seed and siege stage companies. However, we're also at the same time seeing these To your point, like these wild crazy maze evaluations out there. And you know

14:29 It's hard to maintain valuation discipline when it when when the market looks like that. But one thing that is unclear Is The evolution of the business models for some of these, especially foundation model companies. The question is defensibility, especially if It cost so much. To make this AI.

14:49 But then on the vertical AI. Side. I'm most concerned about longevity of these companies, right? If it's if it's a company that's using Open AI or some other generative AI API.

15:02 And they have like a a very thin wrapper around, you know, basically this technology to create a product. I'm like, you're not You're potentially not gonna exist in six months when the next version of Chat GPT comes out. There's been a lot of talk about AI's sort of energy usage. And I'm curious at this investment front, like how likely are we to see a company innovate on AI sustainability? And break through this year on that.

15:31 I'm excited for that space. So and and it's across the entire AI tech sacks. So if you start with chips, obviously NVIDIA's dominating, but there's a few startups building AI chips that are more sustainable. There's also companies that are innovating. Around sustainability on the model side. Companies like Liquid AI, which spun out of MIT, th they're using not transformer models, they're doing something called liquid neural networks. We don't have to get into how it works, but it's just more computationally efficient and it's requires a lot less data'cause the way we're doing AI today is just not sustainable. The electricity basically required to train you know, a version of a large language model is equivalent to what a country like Costa Rica consumes in a year. And then every time you ask ChatGPT for Oh, what should I do for dinner tonight, right?

16:21 It's like three cycles of laundry, right? And and a lot of a lot of us don't realize that, but we we need More sustainable AI. Solutions. Rana is both a cheerleader for AI, a believer.

16:36 and a critic in certain ways, but her critiques aren't service of making the technology better because she knows it's not going away. Two more AI predictions to come about health-related AI and making the machines more empathetic, we'll be right back. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered.

17:11 I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

17:40 Hey, listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely. From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Before the break, we heard pioneers of AI host Rana L. Kalyubi share predictions for 2025 about agentic AI, embodied AI, and the one-person unicorn. Now she shared two more AI predictions focused on healthcare and on emotional intelligence in AI.

18:36 Let's jump back in. Let's uh dig into prediction number four for AI in twenty twenty five, the rise of AI health co-pilots. So Mm-hmm. Are there new AI powered health tools that you're expecting? I actually personally can't wait to see this one. My theory is the trifecta of um sensors that are

19:01 You know, on your body, in your body, around you know, surrounding you as a person and then combine that with um Data. So lots of new data about Um about who you are from a physical, emotional, mental health perspective. And bring all of that and add a little bit of predictive AI and generative AI. And you have this idea of a

19:23 um a co-pilot for your health that can be your health companion. Um, you can ask it questions, you know, at midnight if you're feeling unwell. Um it can also be It can nudge you. To become healthier.

19:37 Eat better. Um It can help you personalize, you know, your nutrition, your exercise regimen. So I really think. We are On the cusp of that.

19:49 Is the medical industry about to be like rocked by all of this? I have a funny story about this. Um my son developed this like really weird rash a few months ago. And we just took a picture of his rash and we sent it to Chat GPT and and kind of After a lot of questions back and forth, it triangulated it to scarlet fever. And so then I Texted my PCP and I was like

20:14 Hey, like picture. Here's what Chat GPT said. What do you think? And she was like Uh I don't think you need me. I Chat GPT was right. Now you're particularly passionate about how AI could transform women's health.

20:30 Correct. I'm particularly interested in women's health because it's just so underfunded. The power of data and AI is that we can finally apply a lot of data to this issue and be able to quantify Um the different stages women go through. Like for example, I've I find it like really frustrating that I can't measure my hormonal health and I can only do that

20:52 Say once a year when I go for A really comprehensive blood test. Why can't we have some form of sensor? that can track my the health of five to eight hormones that really matter. And I can do that. on a longitudinal basis so that I can optimize again my sleep, my exercise.

21:10 You've talked about a a digital twin representing our health and biology. What do you mean by that? Yeah, digital twin that can Basically simulate who I am, right? Uh in at multiple levels. My biology simulate my physical characteristics and have all this data input into the digital twin. And it can say, oh, this is not going to work, or you know, you need to do X because that's going to be better for Y you know, your estrogen level or whatever.

21:40 Is it like how many times a a week can I can I have that ice cream or you know, how many drinks can I have a week before it's gonna like Impact me. I mean, is that part of it also? Actually that would be super cool. I mean th these are the simulations that they do with our finances now, right? You can say are if you're more aggressive, if you're less aggressive, what's the range of where you're gonna end up? You know How often do I really need to exercise?

22:05 'Cause each of us may have different thresholds for those things if our digital twin can really be Personalized. I love that idea, by the way. I have not seen anybody Build something that looks like that. I'm curious how you see different generations reacting to new AI health tools. Like, is your daughter more open to let AI track her health than someone of your mother's generation? You know, with a lot of technology, younger people may be more open to trying it. And yet

22:36 You know, I think older generations may be more used to trusting their doctor and having their doctor just take care of things for them. And younger generations may be more suspicious of that, of trusting in that way. I think one area where AI actually has a lot of potential, especially for the younger generations is around mental health. Even if you can afford A therapist?

22:59 There is an issue about timing, right? And and how often do you can you talk to this therapist? This is probably like At most once a week. Right? There's a a little bit of in some cultures, not in every culture, there's still stigmatized. Like you may not want to

23:15 have a a therapist in that way. But it wouldn't it be awesome if we each had access to a a digital therapist or a digital coach that again knew you context is very important and was there for you 247, could answer your questions, could nudge you to be more healthful. Especially around mental health. That's an area that I'm also

23:38 Very interested. And then again, trust is really key, but it's an exciting space. That brings me to the fifth prediction for AI in 2025. AI will need more emotional intelligence. So you spent years researching emotional intelligence in AI. Can you explain why EQ in AI is important and why maybe it's particularly important to scale that capacity over the next year? Yeah, I've been doing this or advocating for bringing emotional intelligence to technology for over twenty-five years. If you think about human intelligence, right? I your IQ matters, but actually in your professional and personal life, your EQ matters even more. So your ability to intuit other people's emotions, to read their nonverbal signals, right? Are they comfortable? Are they not? Do they trust you? Do they not? Um

24:27 These are All such important skills when you are trying to make decisions, when you are trying to influence a person's, you know, n negotiation or persuade behavior change. So I believe that is especially with technology that is so deeply ingrained in our everyday lives. It needs to have empathy and it needs to have emotional intelligence needs it needs to know is is Bob in a good headspace or not? Because if he's not, then you'll kinda manage the conversation a different way. As EQ improves in AI, will the interfaces we use with AI

25:01 Evolve to Yeah, I actually believe that this is not gonna be the future. Interface.'Cause this interface is not AI native. And I think we're gonna Again, I'm already seeing innovations come out of MIT that are rethinking what an AI native human machine interface looks like. Maybe it's an earbud that can be a conversational agent. Maybe it's a set of glasses with with camera, not like Google Glass, but like with a camera that has peripheral vision and can help

25:30 augment your visual capabilities and like provide real time feedback. There's there's TBD on what that looks like. I mean, and there was this humane pin, which I don't think was the right interface. But so we're gonna see a lot of experimentation, but I Do think the human machine interface is gonna evolve and it will really mirror what human human interaction look looks like

25:52 It's gonna be perceptual. So these things will listen, they'll see. I mean, there's even companies building smell capabilities for machines and then It it will also need to be kind of emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent. Yeah.

26:08 Among the the ethical challenges of AI, you've said that AI companions may replace social media as the biggest threat to to young people. Wouldn't it improved EQ of AI like Accelerate that? This is something that really concerns me actually. Um, it really falls down to the companies that are building these AI companions because these AI companions or AI friends.

26:34 Are becoming so good at um kind of engaging you in a very personalized and intimate way. And so if the company allows you to interact with your AI friend for say an average of about six hours a day, which is the average number of hours young people spend interacting with an AI friend. That's unhealthy, right? It and it can become very addictive in a way that is way more addictive than than social media because it's way more personalized. Or or worse, it could also manipulate you into buying things you don't really need or want, right? Because it knows your emotional state and it can kind of tug on

27:13 That fear or that sadness emotion that you have and persuades you to do something that you don't want to do. Are there lessons from social media that can help us better navigate this future of AI companions? I interviewed Eugenia Cuida, who's the founder and CO of Replica. It's one of the companies that are building these AI companions. And I loved how Thoughtful she was.

27:36 In her approach to deploying these friends. So for example, she does not allow people under the age of 18 to create these companions. She does not want her kids to have AI friends yet because we don't really understand the implications. She also does not have monetization. kind of advertise.

27:57 platforms for advertising so your AI friend cannot say hey Bob I saw this like really cool setup. eye glasses I think you should really buy them. It's not it does not Have that. What kind of role

28:10 Do parents have to play in managing AI's impact?'Cause a lot of the parents just abdicated with social media. Right, they trusted. And that didn't always turn out so well. So my daughter's twenty one and my son is fifteen and a half. And my my daughter, I don't know, she's like not really like leaning into AI much, but my son is. He's very AI forward. He's always trying these different tools. He does not have an AI friend. We talk about it a lot, though. My approach is to lean into the technologies.

28:40 But but almost not just as consumers, but to kind of try and break them apart and have these conversations and debates about okay, do we think this is good? Do we think this is bad? Like You know? Do we want to push the boundaries here? Do we not? Yeah. Yeah. I mean I I struggle with these boundaries. You know, mindful of like all the conversation about oh You know.

28:59 Kids spend too much time watching TV. That was that was uh at one point the the conversation, right? And then it's too much time on social media, it's too much time on your phones, you know, maybe it's too much time with your AI companion, but it's happening anyway. And I I don't know whether how much of it is sort of our resistance to something that we didn't grow up with. You know, versus something That really is Bad for the kids. I mean, I guess it depends on your kid, too.

29:30 You're right, that we didn't grow up with that, but maybe our kids That will be their world. And may you know, and maybe sometimes you'll date and be in a relationship with the human and sometimes you'll Be in a relationship with an AI and You know, you'll I don't know. I'm not ready to embrace that world. But I I I I do hear you that we're gonna probably be hearing more discussions in the next year about

29:55 How AI and AI companions impact. Young people. And impact us culturally. I would love to see the companies that are building these AI companions be a lot more thought.

30:07 Your AI friend should tell you, You know what, Bob, you've been talking to me for three hours. I think you should Go talk to a real human now. Bye. Like but but companies won't be incentivized to do that because that's against Kind of right, maximizing for engagement and potentially monetization. So as an investor You know.

30:26 I'm gonna like definitely ask these companies really tough questions around these societal and cultural implications of technologies they're building. And if I'm not convinced that they're really being thoughtful about it and thinking about the ethics of all of this. I'm not gonna give them my check, right? So I I I hope more investors do that too. One last question I'm gonna ask you. If we if we zoom out from these specific predictions. What do you think is most at stake in the AI landscape right now? Like what a people

30:56 Most misunderstands What what things should we keep our eyes on the most? I kind of spend a lot of my time with people who are deeply immersed in the AI world. And then

31:08 You know, I'll be at a yoga class and then, you know, somebody in in in my class will walk up to me and she'll say, Yeah, I listened to one of your episodes, and I'll just It will hit me that you know what she doesn't use AI on a daily basis. And I I think sometimes we forget that it's still very new technology and We have to make sure that AI is inclusive. We have to make sure that we're bringing as many people along the journey with us.

31:33 As it's possible. It's Why I love doing the podcast. But I feel like we have a lot of work to do. Like we just assume that yeah, AI's here and everybody's using No it's not. It it hasn't Like Yeah. Become totally mainstream. Yeah. No, I think I think that's true in a personal sense. I think it's true in a business sense too, for all the businesses that name check and talk about the AI that they're using. I'm not sure that they've really integrated it the way, you know the way they ultimately will.

31:58 Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Rana, uh always uh great to talk with you. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for having me. This was awesome. Listening to Rana, I'm struck by her early comment that AI hasn't yet had its iPhone moment. And it's kinda counterintuitive because ChatGPT was in many ways an iPhone moment, opening up AI to mass audiences. And we've heard so many stories since then and had so much discussion about AI. It can seem like

32:29 Yeah, I'm done with that. But at the same time, Ron is totally right. It is still early days in AI development and deployment. And for all the advances, we still haven't seen an AI native interface that makes it as easy to use and ubiquitous as smartphones have become. Now. Will that happen this year in twenty twenty-five? Even Rana doesn't make that prediction. But

32:53 Following the thread of her analysis. It sounds like we're getting closer. For good or for bad, more change is coming. Keep tuning in to Rapid Response and to Pioneers of AI. To stay up on what's next.

33:08 I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Alex Morris. Assistant producer is Masha Maku Tonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastanelli.

33:31 Theme music by Ryan Holiday. My head of podcast is Letal Malad. For more, visit rapidresponsshow.com.