Sunday night I went down a mini ChatGPT rabbit hole.
Not my first time using it, but I’d say it was my first real a-ha moment. Well… maybe my second. The first moment came a few months back when I had this thought: “We’re all fucked.” I’ve come down from that hill since then.
Now, I’m starting to believe that, yes—some people will lose jobs—but it’s also going to open the floodgates for startups. The bottleneck of innovation won’t be execution, per se, but the idea itself. Excuses like “It costs too much to build an app” or “I wish I knew how to make it” will soon be things of the past. When? Three years? Five? I don’t know—but I think it’ll happen faster than most of us expect.
I sent out a text Sunday night asking a few friends to grab coffee on Tuesday. Pretty short notice for a group of busy guys. Everyone showed up. FOMO? Probably. And just like that, BuffAIo Coffee Club is a thing.
We’re planning to meet weekly to talk about what we’re seeing in the AI space—and more importantly, what we’re using. Each week, we’ll pick an app to test and report back. This week, we’re diving into https://elevenlabs.io (generative AI audio). I’ll report back on it next week. Or maybe BuffAIo will. Stay tuned for that.
One guy showed me something wild he did with a dense RFP PDF he got from a client. He uploaded it to NotebookLM by Google, and turned it into a 30-minute podcast—with a male and female voice bantering back and forth about the topic. He played a snippet for us, and I was blown away. You’d never know it wasn’t real. Incredible, amazing, and honestly… kinda scary.
I can’t tell you exactly why I waited so long to really dig into these tools—but even now, it still feels early. One conversation that stuck with me was a developer at coffee who said:
I’m back in the computer again. It’s exciting. I don’t want to put my computer down at night—I’m staying up late playing with these tools.
I’ll leave you with this. In between finishing this blog post I took a call with a client. I used granola.ai to record the call and tell me the action items from the call:
We’re just scratching the surface.
Innovate or die.
