Episode 380: Bertha.AI and all Things AI With Andrew Palmer

Hey , everybody, Rob Cairns and today’s podcast. I’m here with one of. My dearest friends, and somebody I always enjoy talking. To the one. The only Mr. Andrew Palmer

Hey, well, thanks for that. You’re very kind, always very kind. Nice to see you. 

Nice to see you too. I was saying before we went to record how much I always enjoy talking to you. So I think this will be another one of those conversations. So there you go. 

Let’s hope. Let’s hope. 

Yeah. So I’m not gonna. I’m not gonna pull punches today. I wanna jump right into the open AI CEO tobacco. And let’s let’s just get on with it. Good. We we saw the CEO at Open AI got fired last week for this week, and he’s landed three days later. Of all places. At Microsoft, what do you think about this entire? Mess being somebody who has an. 

Has he, though? You know, it’s a bit of I did a picture on Twitter showing Berta.AI being able to create good images. Now in one was a Sam Altman look alike with the background of yo-yos. I think we’re gonna see a bit of yoyo going on. And and. Satire I think of of Google. Just in an interview with CNN. It’s literally out. Today, where he was. Quite vague. Whether or not Sam was actually coming to work and Greg were coming to work with Microsoft, he said. Basically wherever they work, they’re going to be, you know, we’ll be working together. So it doesn’t matter whether he’s at Microsoft or whether he’s at open AI. So it’s never changing landscape. There’s lots of people out there that are saying things. Without actually knowing the internal situation, which nobody does, and even him, she said he doesn’t even know why. Why Sam was. Mist and it seems that you know there’s no malfeasance going on. There’s no no bad behavior or anything like that. And I think it’s basically. The board were. You know heating up. Their power, you know, seeing, seeing how powerful they were, maybe Sam. And and Greg just went well. You’re not that powerful and. Their Co founders. This is a danger of of Co founders founding a A a machine. If you like, founding a business, taking the VC money or taking money, changing it from don’t let’s not forget open AI was was established with the Elon Musk as. Well, to be open source and to be a not a total non profit, not even a not even a non profit. Something else. And you know they had to turn it into a profit side in order to get investment because nobody wants to invest in open source. We’ve seen that with WordPress really you know Matt’s always going to. Big companies and saying investing WordPress invest in WordPress you’re you’re making loads of money out of WordPress so invest in WordPress they’re saying well what can we invest in do we are we investing in automatic or are we are we investing in in WordPress whatever. But you know there’s a WordPress foundation if anyone wants to donate. So with the sound Greg, Open AI situation, nobody knows what’s going on. So my only comment would be I was surprised as a business owner. Who has had a board and you know, I’ve been the chief executive of a company that would employing 120 people at the board of four people, one non exec. And that that happened to be a lawyer that you used to just come along for the annual board meeting. But most of our board meetings were by the water cooler. You know, I remember 11 board meeting where my partner said, oh, I’ve just, I’ve just ordered a couple of speedmasters, which was print machines. I don’t know. OK. And they were £1.7 million each, you know. So there was no board discussion on ordering, and we hadn’t really discussed it before, but we knew that the business was there. And you have your trusted partners to be able to do. What they what they want autonomously, and I think maybe that’s part of the issue where Sam has gone out to. Other investors to invest in another part of what he’s maybe doing with AG AGI. And that that could have been, I’m surmising here, completely surmising. But that could have been. It might have annoyed certain board members, and let’s not forget that other you know, other board members have got investments in AI as well. You know the guy. Can’t remember his name, but Cora, I mean, he’s got Poe, which was basic. The an AI, whether that’s run off open AI or not, I don’t know. I literally don’t know, but he was setting up a GPT. Marketplace for that. So is there something in that? Was he annoyed that that, that the dev day Sam announced that there was going to be GPT marketplace and was there a a lack of communication there but then? You know the whoever the core guy is, and I can’t remember his name. I don’t use Cora. Then he’ll ever used it. But he. He probably felt like most layer apps. Feel at the moment. What the hell is going on with open AI? Do I continue? Exploiting the API in the best possible way. Or do I go to somebody else like anthropic or stability AI for for images or Leonardo are going to be doing their their images API soon or it’s out now? I think but quite quite expensive. Who do I use or when? Two years ago when we set up birth for AI, we were one of the first out. There was certainly one of the first out there for WordPress and now we’ve got a Chrome extension. So when. GPT ChatGPT came out. It was kicking the nuts. There’s no doubt about it, you know, we just we looked at it and went. So we are not, we built on a A. On a platform and that platform is now selling the stuff that we’re selling. 

Yep, Yep. 

Much like WordPress, you know, I mean it’s not. I’m not slagging off WordPress here, I’m just saying WordPress in core. There’s a lot of stuff that plug-in developers develops and then WordPress decided to put in core in another way. So whenever you build on a platform, whether it’s WordPress or whether it’s Wix or Shopify. Guy, you know, MailChimp had the same situation with Shopify. They were making fortunes out of their their MailChimp integration with shop by fortunes millions. Because everybody pays for for plugins, they’re all premium on Shopify, Shopify kick them out because for whatever reason and shop, if I have their own mail solution now, you know, maybe that was the reason they did it. So whenever you’re building on top of something else, you are always in danger of. Them building what you’re building and making, making a a seemingly better offer, but with the Sam Altman and Greg dismissal going back to that. There there’s it’s an odd board situation where they they’re they’re not paid, they must be paid some expenses. I know that non executive directors are generally paid expenses, but. The simple fact that they’re being reticent in saying exactly why Sam was dismissed. Probably probably remember this is the CEO of a massive. Company massively valued company, you know, before he got dismissed, it was worth $80 billion. Allegedly. He’s a billionaire himself, you know, he’s a he was a mentor and a. The an investor in Y Combinator is the president of Y Combinator for for ages, which helps start up so you know he knows how to deal with boards and he knows how to deal with VC’s. He knows how to deal with Equity Partners, so why would a four person board made-up of in my view? And the qualified people business wise. Have the need or feel the need to dismiss such a valuable asset. It’s crazy to me and it’s crazy to the 750 open AI employees that that signed the letter, including Ilia, who was on the board and was part of that, and Myra that the interim. DTO that that CEO rather the interim CEO that has now been replaced by the. Twitch guy. They signed the letter to say the boards gonna resign. What’s that about? I mean, it’s it’s a crazy situation in any. Business. But because it’s so visible. Everybody’s thinking, what the heck’s going on? And you know, there’s all rumours of of on Twitter. I love it when people are going ohh. People who’ve built something on open AI. They must be crapping themselves or anybody. That’s got a layer up on open AI must be thinking or whatever I actually know because there are. There are other solutions out there that we can simply plug in. Instantly it’s not a it’s not a big deal. 

It’s the. 

But the but the, but the ramifications for running a non profit or a not-for-profit and a business alongside each other. Where the CEO can be kicked out by the board and again, I’ve gotta make a a reference to WordPress because, you know, we’ve got the CEO of auto. Who, as far as I’m aware, can’t be sacked and the, you know, he’s also in charge of the nonprofit, you know? So, but he can’t and he can’t be sacked. So maybe Sam needed a little chat with Matt to say. How have you structured this? So you can’t be sacked? Don’t. Don’t underestimate Mr. Mullenweg. He’s a clever. 

Which is a conflict. 

Boy, you know he’s a clever, clever guy and he’s got it. Got it. Such so, you know, imagine making having a company and realising I think he was 19 years old when WordPress was done and then formed automatic, I think 18 months or two years later. And writing the terms and conditions of. How you would invest in automatic by the way, guy? You can never sack me like literally never sack me and also the WordPress org and the foundation and the way all that’s gone. Sam definitely should have a chat with with Matt before you’ve formed all that business out. You know, imagine is CEO of a of a company that you founded and then being sacked. I mean, he’s gotta be pisssed off, right. 

You don’t. You don’t. No, no. 

Definitely, yeah. Not getting a happy face on it, knowing knowing that it can secure. 

I’ll tell you where that happened. Andrew was with Cisco the if you know the Cisco story, interestingly enough, I just finished listening to a podcast on Business Movers, which is a wonderly show which I absolutely love. And they talked about how the VC’s forced the two founders of Cisco out of their positions and one more. And they were both the cofound. Matters and it had to do with investment and what had happened in Cisco’s case. There was a clause in there that the VC’s coming in had the right to appoint any of the executives or disappoint any executives, and there was no employment cause in there, and it was actually A cause that the founders didn’t stay for four years. They didn’t lose all. They lost some of their vested shares even more so well, the long and short of that story was it ended up in court. And was going to go to court and the new VC settled out and gave them their shares. And the two founders walked away with billions of dollars. But I mean, Cisco was another one. 

In the music. Industry it’s some, you know, the music industry, where you sign away your rights. What people don’t realise in the in, you know, you’ve got the Taylor Swift situation where she’s rerecording her markers. But when you sign up a deal, I used to be one of my many things. People take the Mickey out of me, things I’ve done. But I’m old, right? I’ve done a few things, but when I was a manager of a rock band for a very little while, a couple of years and trying. To do the. Try. Well, trying to do deals with record companies is is like pulling blood from a stone. They want their pound of flesh and I think that’s not unreasonable. You know, if you’re going to be an investor in something or you going to give us an. Months of, let’s say I think at the time was £50,000. To be able to record the album and then maybe not publish it, you know, so you know there’s there’s those aspects, but you you basically have to pay that 50 grand back out of any royalties or PRS fees. So what we decided to do is set up our own record label and just pre sell the album. You know, this is in the days way before the Internet. Really the, I mean, you did sell up a website for it and I think PayPal existed. So it wasn’t way before the Internet, but it was way before pre sales. And so we’ve just pre sold and we actually got 100,000 lbs in. And then just we could we could make as many albums as we liked on that kind of money, but it it we didn’t sign. Away, any of our rights but. And we own the masters, so you know, like Paul McCartney now doesn’t own. The masters to The Beatles or not? Not one of The Beatles, owns it. You know Michael Jackson bought the bought all the rights to The Beatles music. Still gets a royalty, but doesn’t own actually own the the the business. If you like the business of he can’t decide when a when a if an hour, if a a record gets used for a Beatles record gets used for an advert or if it gets used for any other use they he’s got no decision in it. So that’s part of what art. And CEO’s need to look at and say what is my actual position here? I’m going to accept your money and your investment gratefully. And I’m going to grow with the business. But where is the? Where’s the power? Where’s the power of making? I mean could see. Will say like you know, I won’t take any decisions or arbitrary decisions. In fact, it’s a matter of law. You can’t take an arbitrary decision that will bankrupt the company because that’s irresponsible. Directorships if. Like but I won’t take any any real ******** decisions without board approval, or at least board advice. So I think the way forward for anybody thinking about, I’m going to take investment is say, look, it’s a happy compromise. You’re you’re giving us money, we can employ lots of lots of people. We can we can give back to the Community. By employing people and paying big money and we can also give back to the Community produce. Being a fantastic thing like open AI and and making people making a difference in people’s lives, hopefully for the benefit of humanity that’s actually in the Constitution. But. But you know, I can’t see, you know. 

I mean, just give it to you. And make you safer. 

Hmm. Go go for that segue. 

The sorry Andrew, that you give me an amazing segue bringing up The Beatles because The Beatles have jumped in the world of AI with the music song. What do you think of that? Have you heard it? And do you have any thoughts if this is good or bad? For the industry knowing you, I mean I do. 

I I haven’t. I haven’t, but I was using a I’m gonna name drop a company that I used the other day for something. I didn’t use it. I experimented with it. There’s a thing called. Hey, Jen. And there’s a couple of other things out there, like, hey, Jen. But I recorded a 30. I don’t know a 2 minute video of me speaking to camera fusing and being enthusiastic and being a little bit down. Bit smiley bit happy, whatever. And that then and then produced from that they produced a video avatar of me and then I. Gave it a script. And it was me. Talking on this script, they even I after I had to edit a little bit, but it it even I used to live in the West Country of the of the UK and I still have that. There’s a slight little accent there of. Deviner, where I talk like that. And even the AI picked up that accent and and made me speak in in devona if you like, of of the UK, right? The in the West Country of the in West Country speak. So I had to correct it and and just say, you know, cut cut out the West Country but it was. I played it actually to our great friend Mark Westgard yesterday and he just went. I went listen to this and and watch this and it was me speaking. And he went. That’s just crazy. So that’s the danger of AI, isn’t it? Because we can, you know, that can be used nefariously. I think, you know, me screaming at you. Rob. I need a loan, you know, send me a loan to this and and and send me some money via WhatsApp. And here’s my number and all that kind of stuff, you know? So he’s in trouble. He needs needs 50 bucks, you know. So I’ll. Yeah, I’ll send that. And it’s not me. It’s it’s an avatar that somebody’s stolen or made out of pictures of me that are on Facebook or Twitter or wherever, but. The the what? What was the point on that? The Beatles? Yeah, the music. So there’s a lot going on with musicians saying I’m not gonna sign up to this. You know you can now write a song in the in the style of Taylor Swift. You can write a song in the style of Rob. Cans, you know, but it’s just. It’s incredible what AI is capable of. But where does it stop? Where do? Where do the the? How much money to the the to the original artist get? You know, there’s a couple of artists and I can’t remember their. Names, but they. Said you, do you know what, guys? I’ll sign up to this. You’ll see. I’ll let you license my likeness and my style. But you gotta give me 50% of the revenue. Or the 50% of the profits. And I think that’s a good way forward because we don’t want a Spotify situation where you’ve got a billion billion players and you get $27.00, you know, that’s crazy because Spotify are the only ones making money out of that. So you’ve got allegedly, you know, you’ve got, so you’ve got. 

That’s true. 

Remuneration same as photographers. You’re not allowed to. You know, if you look at the stock.adobe.com and the Getty Images, you know the ambulance chasers that are getting images, if you dare to use a 100 by 100 pixel image that is from getting images, you’ll be sued for 1200 bucks sometime in your lifetime, you know, cause they got 500 people sitting there with copy scape going. You’ve got one of our images. So. Licensed images are the same. Why isn’t licensed music? Why isn’t licensed AI images so it’s alright using Michelangelo as a? As a as a a style because he’s dead and long gone and copyrights gone. But if you’re living, if you’re, if you’ve got a living photographer and and an AI has learned from their photographs and their photographic style, then that photographer surely surely should have some kind of copyright on style. But they don’t they there’s a court case in New York that actually dismissed that, you know. Photographer came out and said, look you, you’ve stolen my smile. Here’s my model. And here’s the model produced by AI, and it’s exactly the same. So you’ve stolen my style, so can a style be copyrighted? Probably not. But you know, copyright laws, publishing laws, ownership rights, tough area for AI at the moment, and maybe that’s where. The board were worried with. Where AG AGI is going, because that’s almost total intelligence coming to the fore. Maybe they’re worried about safety concerns. Maybe they’re worried about a leak. Who knows? Until the board of Open AI. Are open as in open source and tell us their exact reasons for getting rid of Sam, Sam and Greg, or or certainly for getting rid of Sam and dismissing Greg from the board because Greg was was dismissed from the board but carried on being chairman. Which is an oxymoron. How can you be chairman of a of a company without having a board seat? We won’t know, and they’re not being forthcoming. So could there be nefarious reasons? Who knows. 

Yeah, so true. 

Does that leave private interests in the board yet? 

Yeah. So. 

I haven’t got my Silver hat on and I haven’t got my conspiracy theory hat on, but you know, there’s some. There’s gotta be. They’ve gotta have jolly good reasons for for doing it. But they’re not forthcoming with the information, which is. Shady, frankly, in my view, and it is my in my opinion. 

To sit. 

To say the least in in that one, as we move into AI and you and I have talked before, you’re the co-founder of Bertha dot AI, which is a WordPress product in the AI space that we all love. It’s wonderful. The Chrome extension’s amazing. I will say that time and time again. Thank you for doing that. What trend? What trend do you see being the biggest in AI at this point beyond Bertha? Like, what do you see going on? 

You’re welcome. Well, autonomous driving, that’s that’s gonna happen. I mean, you know, that’s that autonomous flying. You know we’ve had, uh. You know, imagine. You know, we’ve had drones out there that have have managed to drop missiles on people, and I mean for for warfare. I hate war, by the way. I just can’t stand it. I think it’s completely unnecessary. Just talk. Just talk to each other, for God’s sake. But anyway, you’ve got. Situations like that where where a real person is operating a drone. That could be done autonomously the the fear with people I think is that a a robot doesn’t have. Or an AI doesn’t have emotion and I recently literally two days ago sat down with my 21 year old daughter and we watched I, robot, which was done in I think 2004. For unbelievable, I mean I’m, you know, and I’ve the, but obviously I Isaac Asimov wrote the the original book and the film’s got nothing to do with it. But if you’ve ever read I wrote or any has him off stuff he was have he was a proper futurist and it was crazy what he thought of. You know where did the three laws come in? I’m not gonna go into the three laws of them basically and I can’t remember. Which basically do no harm so. How are we going to deal with with weaponizing AI? How are we gonna do with medicalizing it, you know, with really precise surgeries, you know, because we can’t as humans, we can’t do the fine work of getting rid of a brain tumour or, you know. And removing a mole and and a AI. Will be able to. You be very accurate, you know, humane have just released their little button that you you put on. I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s a little button that that has a screen on it. IT projects a screen onto your hand. Yeah. And we can talk to it and it will search the web and it you can make it. So I say call Rob in in Canada and it will call you and I can have a conversation with you that’s. Innovative Facebook for a while I’ve got some Facebook glasses here that that will be more AI generated. Guidance heads up guidance systems using AI. I love that idea of having a guidance system in your in your glasses or in your in your screen in your car because. It’s right in front of you and it’s not distracting you from driving, I’ve said. Autonomous driving, medical advances. AI was used in the M RNA virus development of the MRI virus and. No question, call. Or a vaccination rather so. For COVID that I mean for that to be developed in under two years was quite incredible and AI helped that because it it takes a bunch of information, can analyse it and give you back a bunch of information. And the humans then tested that and went yeah, OK, that works. So vaccines medicines. Better treatment of of for for health conditions. Transportation all around. Imagine getting on an airplane. And you don’t have to listen to the pilot. You know, he wakes you up at. Too early. Do you know what I mean? That would be. Great. Yeah, you know. But I’m, I mean, I’m for AI, you know, I’m 100% behind AI. I have. You have a hats. I have some caveats and I wanna I wanna make sure that it’s safe for everybody to use and be part of creativity with with the use of AI, what they’re doing in Photoshop, what they’re doing in web building. You know, you’ve got zip, WPF. Part of Astra doing websites on the fly effectively yes, they are using their own templates which is great. They had a great start but they still had to build that situation out and it will get even better and better. And in fact with with with changing T4 you can actually draw. Your website and it will come up with the the code to give you your coloured button or your gradient background or your whatever and. Then it can what I love about the creativity of of AI not necessarily open AI is that you could write A blog post and it could be a very descriptive blog post. Or you could write a book, let’s say. And it could be a romantic novel or an adventure novel or whatever. It could be a pirates. Of the Caribbean novel. And throughout that text it would produce the imagery for you. As it’s writing, I love that I love. That I really do. So, you know, I don’t go deep into it. I’m I’m very on the. 

I did. 

On the what can I do with it? And I love the. Fact I can I? Use birth for every day. Of course I do. Because you know, I own it, but it helps me with my iterations if I want to write a blog post. I’ve just written the Black Friday Post and I asked it to describe WS form to me. The benefits of using WS form and it knew about that because we’re all up to date. On two plugins it wrote a a nice really thing about that, because I’m doing that uttering the same, you know. The fact that we’ve got access now to the Internet and it can scrape details from whatever you’re doing and I’ve got an advanced version of Bertha. So I’ve got the like the 1-2 ahead so I can scrape the web with it because it’s a bit expensive, right? So I don’t want to put that out yet until we get the cost down. But the you know so I can put in a URL and say and and ask it to read this site and write a write A blog post based on what This site is is doing so you know I love it for that it’s great. I love a. 

By the way, I have to mention we’ve gotten about halfway through this podcast, and our friend Mr. West or just gotten 2 plugs. If not. Three already. So you know there were. 

I I I apologize. 

No, no, it’s all good. We, we. 

Sound morning. 

Yeah, he’s annoying. 

Because he’s so flipping. Ohh, he’s also contributed to Bertha dot AI. You know he’s he’s and that’s the reason he’s also my very good friend. But also yeah, he he helps out with the situation which we’ve now fixed and we’re gonna be uploading a fix a little later you know I can when you can jump on a call very quickly with an expert developer who knows. Stuff inside out and so I’ve got this little problem and yes, Oh yeah. Just do that. Ohh OK, thanks. I know. Bye. And that’s it. 

Me too. I do. I do it to him too. And slack on a regular basis. I send him a text and they send me the FAQ for this because I can’t find it. And. To be fair, Marcus. Joking aside, Mark’s a great guy and a good. Friend so to both. 

I’ll stop it. Stop it. Yeah, right. Next question. 

Anyway, next next. Question is, we’ve gone through all this change and we know the economy is kind. Of where it’s at. We’re we’re in. A downswing if you talk to people we got. Messages going on the Ukraine, we’ve got messages going on in the Gaza which I don’t even want to get into for obvious reasons, but we see this downturn and people are worried about jobs and every time I hear AI and Jobs mentioned, it’s all my jobs going to go away. But let’s be fair about it. In the WordPress space we’ve had page builders forever. Before Gutenberg came on and page builders didn’t cost designers jobs, the printing press didn’t cost writers jobs. Is AI gonna cost creativity? People jobs? 

Yes it. It will cost the the creatives that don’t embrace the. Opportunity that AI gives them. See a downturn in what they’re what they’re able to. Achieve financially, however, you know from the old Luddites when they didn’t want manufacturing. Put in, you know, automatic manufacturing back in the back in the day in in the UK, it’s where the word Luddite comes from. It’s not that you don’t accept technology, it’s that you fear technology for the fact that you’re going to lose your job. In in essence. You have to embrace it. Look at how Photoshop are using AI to to help you as a creative do a better job. Look at the fact that you can now. Iterate and do SEO search engine optimization queries with AI. You can write. Long form content which you then edit. I’ve always said and I will never stop saying that you should whenever you’re using AI to write anything copywriting wise. You are the editor, the the you know the the AI you’re using is the assistant. There are plugins out there and there’s there’s facilities out there so that we will, we will just churn out five blog posts a month and you know. That’s not the way to use AI and and you know people are having some success with that, but I really don’t want Bertha to be used or AI to be used rather. Just to churn out rubbish because we’re gonna because at the end of the day AI will be scraping that rubbish and then returning that rubbish back. So we need to to have have some quality control on that. So we’ve got a responsibility as human beings to put our creative touch to it. But there’s. A lot of stuff. When when AI becomes less hallucinatory and more able to discern the facts from fiction. I think factual writing will improve because the facts will be there. You know, people deny facts now. Let alone what’s what’s going to happen with AI? I think the creative side of writing will. Improve and also help you get away from the blank page syndrome that we always say that the old cliche. You know when you can’t write about something, but then you can maybe explain that situation to an AI and say I can’t. I cannot think of anything good to say about this particular subject. Give me a give me some prompts or give you know. Help me out here and it throws you back loads of information without with even if it’s one. Snippet of information given to you that you can then use to your success. Then that’s the benefit of anything and. I I tell. You when I got that from, I stole that from Chris Lemmer. I was lucky enough to go to Cabo Press and it’s a four day thing and it’s basically 4 hours of being talked at by people. That know their stuff, right? And they can educate you. And one thing that Chris Emma said to to all of us. And I really at the end of the day and he said if you take one thing from this four days of investment that you’ve made in Cabot press, one thing that changes your business for the better, then we’ve succeeded. Right. We’ve succeeded in in having a good thing here. And I think that’s the benefit of of when you look at anything, if you can say you can take. One thing from a friendship that makes a difference to your life, a positive difference to your life. One thing from a relationship, whether it be business or personal, one thing from AI, if you can take one thing from AI that that that gives you a positive change, I think AI is 1. Simple as that. 

I agree with you now. We’ve talked to it. About AI let’s dive into Bertha cause I love this product and. I have I. Here we go again. Yeah. Talk about shameless. Plugs but it’s my. Podcast so you have one so. There we go. I’m. I’m actually gonna jump in there using it. I think on an SEO project. Interesting enough for an accounting services company. So I’m gonna try that out and see how it goes. What I mean, you and I have talked about Bertha before and you’re pretty prominent. An ex formerly known as Twitter or whatever you want to call it today. So you talk about Bertha. What exciting changes are coming down the pipe for Bertha and why Bertha? 

Exciting changes are. We’re still going to use open AI. Yeah, we actually plugged in. We are plugged in to about 3 different API’s at the moment where if open AI does collapse, we just flicker. It goes it’s kind of the birth. It’s funny, it’s WordPress plugin and the Chrome extension, but it’s it’s a it’s a SAS, it’s a software as a service. So on the servers we’ve we actually can turn things on, turn things off so we can swap. The APIs or the queries because the API goes back to our website or server. And then goes on to whoever we’re using, whether it’s stability, AI or Co here or anthropomorphic or whoever we decide to use. And we’ve actually got a facility in it now that goes if if open AI don’t. Give us a response quickly enough. It just goes to cohere and says here’s the answer and it gives great answers because it’s all in the prompt. Right? So we develop our own. Prompts and it’s good. One of the exciting things that is coming is that we will have a ChatGPT 4 like interface. So it’s difficult, it’s difficult to say and the reason the reason doing that is because you can then use the ChatGPT for interphase 2 generate within. They’re using and we can plug in stability AI into that as well, because we’ve got an image generator too, and we’ve got to make some improvements to that. But actually the the quality. Of the image is coming out there from them. The the UM we took out whisper on the last iteration because it just wasn’t working from an open AI perspective. So we’re working on. Actually uploading video or audio and translating that but not with whisper with something else. So that’s coming and it’s a better interface to do that as well and faster and cheaper which is which is good because we’re not much we’re like. 20 bucks a month, you know, so we’ve got to be careful about our own costs as well. So we’re we’re almost a. Free service, frankly, but anyway. And there’s three too. But the really exciting thing is the chat. Being able to do everything in one window, you know, generate your images, generate your voice, generate your video, generate your avatar. You know, because a lot of people I want to, I want people to be able to use Bertha as their one stop shop so you can, and not to overcrowd it. But basically so I can upload 20 images of me smiling. Cleaning whatever different clothing and then produce a A LinkedIn profile picture. So that’s nice. To be able to do I want Bertha to be able to you, you upload a 30 second or one minute. Of your voice and then produce. When you get back in birth or when you write your your your post, it can actually turn that post into a podcast. Using your voice. So people can choose to listen to it. 

Now that I like it. 

Or read. 

I like that I love. 

That action. 

That’s. You know, that’s, that’s what. That’s. Yeah, that’s what’s coming. So you know. We can do it the other way round. You know, we can put up a we can. We can put up a a 25 make with whisper with with another one it’s like 50 Meg’s the one we’re we’re experimenting with. Of voice or video and it will transcribe that video and even translate that video and produce an SRT file. And we’ve taken that out of birther for a while because of the reliability issues with whisper. UM. But we can’t do it the other way round. I want to be able to upload text and then it to read it back to me in my voice and that’s that’s one of the exciting things coming. And also making more of a. And also making your own chat bots from Bertha dot AI and also being able to add your. Open AI key or anthropic key or cohere key two birth. They’re using our prompts, but you’re actually paying it directly to your you’re paying the open AI or the AI costs directly, so therefore the chat box will be a one off cost. As simple as that. So making your own chat bot you can embed on your own. Website examining your website, examining PDF’s you know a guy out there called PDF ai.com or something. He’s making absolute fortune. It’s not about money for us, it’s about accessibility. So if I can upload a PDF to. A Bertha chat bot. And then make that you know, allow people to ask questions on that PDF to interrogate a PDF. If it’s a 50 page PDF, or even if it’s a a knowledge base like. WordPress or anything like you know Doc Spot AI is doing a great job on that kind of stuff, interrogating data, interrogating knowledge. But stuff like that. So we’re building out bots that will be able to do that for you, but you’ll you’ll pay the AI cost because the training is the is where the cost is. So we won’t, we won’t be able to sign up to birth $20.00 a month and then use our bot and then it will cost us £400. You know, it’s just not that’s not practical for us. Not so. Lots of stuff, integration reforms, integrations with. SEO plug, which we’ve already got and we need to go in with Yost. Yost have got their own AI solution now, but we we integrated with Yost many, many well about a year ago you know where you can write your own meta tags and SEO titles because Bertha’s got the prompts. So some of the prompts will disappear because they won’t be necessary. We’ve actually got. I don’t really you’ve you’ve got you’ve used the Chrome extension light or the Chrome light extension? 

I have actually a lot. 

Yeah. So that’s and that’s that’s got a Gold Star from Google for being. Which is weird, but so yeah, you know, and that that’s that’s just so that’s that hasn’t got any of the prompts in it. It’s just got chat and write I think. 

It is it is. It is brilliant. 

And images. So not it’s not so bad. 

So if you’re looking for an AI product, I’d encourage you to go over the birthday at AI and check out their product, because it’s amazing. I mean, your co-founder is Vito, right? And Vito. 

Well, he’s he’s kind of taken a back seat on it. You won’t mind me saying this cause he’s got after him and and I’m. An investor and after him. As well, so I have nothing to do with that. To room and and Vito has nothing to do with Birtha. Now he’s just a coffin. Under and without him, we wouldn’t have. We wouldn’t have had the idea. He’s he came up with the idea. He didn’t. His team couldn’t exploit it. My team, could we? You know, I’ve got a dev team as well. So they worked really hard. We started in May 2021, launched it. end of September 2021. Veto. Built the birther AI website. And gave us the incentive to be able to do it. But you know Vito and I are best, best of powers anyway, so he’s better. Better off doing after him, which is a phenomenal solution for people and. I’m just left on my own running birther I whether I do a good job or not, that’s that’s to be seen. 

You are doing a good job. Stop it anyway. And and then, interestingly enough, I came across a tweet. I think I commented on it away from AI that you’ve jumped into going to almost websites as a service or a couple months or whatever you want to call it. 

They’re basically it’s almost thinking of a calling it like a rental website. It almost feels like you’re trying to compete with Squarespace or Weebly or Wix is. Is that kind of, or am I missing the? Boat on that. 

Well, this is the this is. The thing you need to know about me, I don’t compete with anybody. I compete with myself. 

I know. 

More than me. I’m not competing there, I’ve I’ve I’ve got loads and loads of friends in, in small businesses and that, you know, and I had a situation where this taxi that came to me it’s good lad. Said, you know what I really need my website done. It’s old and it was it was HTML and it was horrible. It was 800 by 600. It was just horrible and I said. Well, I’ll do that for you. He said how much? And I said. Well, you know, I’ll. Give you mates right it’s £1500. Ohh you nearly had a heart attack and he died. Hold on. What? What? What’s your problem? And he said it’s just. Too much money? Said OK, well, let’s split that over a few months. Let’s do that over two years. Give me £350 now as deposit and then we’ll do monthly payments. You went OK then another printing client came to me. Their website had got hacked and I said no and I did the same thing and they took a sharp intake. 

I mean, well, let’s do. 

It as a rental, you pay this much and I’ll convert your website to divvy or whatever, cause we only work in divvy, we love divvy. Because you can do anything with it. But basically, yeah, I came up with the idea and I thought, well, do you? Know what other businesses? So we charge £150 for a five page or five or 10 up to A10 page website, right? So people go to A5. And we do it from templates. So when you start from a foundation, it’s quicker. It’s quicker for us and it’s quicker for you. To go to market, I want and then. It’s it’s £50 a month for hosting and and maintaining the security of the website. I think it’s a no brainer. You know for 24 months and then after that you can decide to either move the. Site away or even if you. Decide to move the site away after two or three months. Then it’s the fact you you have to give us 1000 lbs just. To cover our costs. And and that’s part. That’s fair. Enough, but there’s a lot of stuff out there, you know, developers for hire and caring and all that kind of stuff, or hire a developer on a retainer. And I think it’s all about recurring income. And I’ve got another friend of mine that’s doing a very similar thing for VA’s, went to discuss her pricing. I helped formulate it with her and put it together because VA’s earned 15 bucks an hour, 20 bucks an hour or whatever it is. But they need a website and they don’t necessarily have the time to build it themselves because they’re being. A VA for other people. And also they may not have that creativity. They can look after websites, but they may not have the creativity. Otherwise they be a web developer. So she’s doing websites for for VA’s very competitively and based on a rental system as well or a lease system. I think it’s the way forward. Just to cut costs, I mean, Rob, if I hit you for A2 Grand Bill, it’s gonna hurt you, right? Don’t care how rich you are. It’s still gonna. It’s gonna hurt you. So if I hit you for A2 Grand Bill over 24 months, you’ll go. Ohh. OK. I can. I can live with that. There is going to be some abuse, I’m sure that people will stop paying and just, you know, disappear on us and everything. But clients do. I’ve just closed down to client sites for not paying me for a year, you know? Yeah. So. 

But but it’s it’s interesting. 

When you. 

When you talk about web development, I don’t wanna do new builds anymore. I think I’ve told you this. Like I’ve effectively gotten my agency out of the business to doing new builds. Now I’ve got a. Couple on the go, I’ve got a. A nonprofit for military veterans on the go. Because I believe in them. I’ve got a jewelry store, massive e-commerce build with 2000 product variable products on the GO cause the owners, one of my best friends, so stuff like that. But but generally I stay out of new builds and. 

Right. 

People say well. How do you make your money? And I said, truthfully, marketing, consulting and security services and you know, if you’ve listened to me in the last year, I spend a lot of my time walking down websites. I’m now over 500 lock down websites as of January. 1st and that’s. Reoccurring revenue, one of the secrets to that is I only take annual payments on those. I don’t take monthly payments because the term is less on an annual cycle than a monthly. You know that and. 

Right. 

I know where. They go, I mean, and I do really well, but I I get where you’re coming from like. Trying to do a $3000 website is a hard pill for a small business to to solve like it really is. 

But also. The you know, we’ve got very strict rules around it. You’ve got we’ve got 10 templates now. We’re just loading up half a dozen more and there’s and and. Yeah, we’ve got podcasting templates. We’ve got yoga, we’ve got big lawyers, we’ve got estate agencies, all that kind of stuff. But it’s there’s no complexity to the sites at all. They’re literally static websites built on divvy. And the nice thing is that because divvy is what it is and I’m looking forward to divvy 5, and I’ve tested Dev. Beta 5 and stuff and it it kind of works. It’s exciting stuff and also we’re plugging developers for divvy as well and WordPress. So we’ve got no. Real issues about doing something if we want something plugged in. You know I’m using WS form for all the forms, so it’s a secure form. I’m using Divvy templates that we’ve adjusted already to to be able to say this is this is how a website like this could look. We I’m using we you know we have a 15 to half an hour meeting with people to get the idea of what they do. We’re using Bertha to generate the tax so that when we’re telling clients they’ve got to amend it, but it means that they’ve got the full service. 4A5 to 10 page website and we’re only doing four a month because we’ve just finished a a massive website it took. The client who are designers 2 years to design and it took us 2 1/2 months to build. It’s very, very complex on the back end side of it doesn’t look complex on the front, but that’s part of the trick, right? Like TV, TV doesn’t look complex on the front, but it’s it it the way it works and the way they can edit it and the way. That it can be SEO properly and stuff is is really complex, so that was a few 1000 lbs. You’re not going to get a few 1000 LB value out of the the websites that we’re doing, but what you are going to get is a very accessible website that’s mobile friendly and desktop friendly and search engine friendly as well. So I think it’s a I think it it’s the way forward for smaller businesses to realize that they can actually get on the web for very little. Without doing anything as well, which is cool. 

Andrew, thanks for sharing all your amazing insights today. Conversations with you I never heard. They’re gonna go because they always go. And as I say that. That MW guy seems to show up all the time. In our conversations. We’ll we’ll keep bugging him till the cows come on because we can’t. And if somebody wants to get ahold of you and talk further, talk websites, talk anything. How’s the best way? 

What Bertha dot AI you can connect through there you can connect to at Arnie Palmer. Yes, I used to play golf on Twitter, and the birther, birther, AI Facebook group is open to anybody that signs up for free. You can go to thewordpress.org, download birthright dot AI and install it on any WordPress site, Chrome extension. And of course. You can see me on any podcast. I’m pretty much around. If you’re a word press or a word camp. In the near future, I should probably be wandering around there as well. So yeah, get hold of me. 

Thanks again. Have an amazing day, Andrew and cheers. Have a great one. 

Thanks mate. Appreciate it. Thanks for letting me on again.