The Truth About AI That You Need to Know

I want to tell people that artificial intelligence is just a set of numbers, numbers, metrics of numbers, zero and one, between zero and one. That's it. You know, there are people that say Chuck G.P. did the same as a friend. Yes, I've heard of that. Isn't it crazy? It's very crazy. You see a set of numbers and you're a friend? Our Bay Area Innovator today is Dr. Akhli Ajute, an entrepreneur, AI expert, and former CEO of a cybersecurity company used by governments and major banks worldwide. Born into poverty in southern France, Akhli sold bread at the age of seven, while eventually building a company that processed over 200 billion transactions a year and was later purchased by MasterCard. In this episode, he shares how curiosity, imagination, and resilience enabled his success and why he believes today's AI is dangerously misunderstood. This is Bay Area Innovators and I'm your host, Steve Esparza. Akhli, welcome to our program. Thank you so much, Steve, for having me. Thanks for being here. So there's so much talk about AI these days, and you're an expert in AI. And I know you told me that you really wanted to find out what intelligence is. This is when you were young. And you read every book and you ask everyone you know how to figure out what actually intelligence is. Can you tell us a little bit the process you went through to find out and what drove you into AI? Yeah. So when I did my PhD, of course, if you do artificial intelligence, the first thing you ask yourself is, what is intelligence? And I was lucky to do it at Necker Hospital, it's called CNEM, Centre Informatique Necker en Forme Malade. This is in Paris. In Paris. So it's a hospital for babies and small children and kids. It's one of the large hospitals, but they treat adults too. And they asked me also why I did AI. So initially, I wanted to do something that's impactful. So I wanted to see if, with my PhD, I could do something that can help people. So the project that I wanted was to build some, mimic a doctor and put it in a laptop and send it to Africa. So while doing that, because I was doing artificial intelligence, I started asking people, psychologists, doctors, people, what is intelligence? And everyone, you ask people the same question, you get different responses based on people, the culture, whatever. So basically for me, what I understand in the end, if you ask me what's the definition of intelligence, I would tell you the number one is to be adaptive, like to adapt to new things and to be able to solve new problems. You learn from seeing other people doing it or solving a problem, but the true intelligence is all about being adaptive. What part did curiosity take into your success or into getting to your career to understand what things look like? I think, you know, it's a great question because curiosity always pushes you to see other things, you know, discover. I'm curious, I want to discover something. And if you ask me about like the human characteristic that define us versus a machine, I would say you have curiosity, you have imagination, you have intuitions, you have all these emotional things. So I guess I tell people, you know, I had many disadvantages when I was young. I was very poor. My dad was taking things from a boat. And so I lived in an area where things were harsh, very difficult. So I wanted to escape that world. How do I escape? I don't have money. I have nothing. So I had our mind allow us to be curious, to be thinking, to be imaginative. And even when I built my first company and second company in artificial intelligence, I think the base of my success is being curious, curious of learning what does not exist, curious of learning is there a problem that I can solve in a way that would be, again, impactful, valuable. And that's what I did in France with my first company, that we had customers in the banking industry, in the government, military, and, you know, in other companies like Solvay and Rampoulin, large French corporation, Central Bank of France, GIAT industry, which is a military company. So it was all about curiosity, like solving a problem. And then when I moved to the United States, the curiosity for me was like, what type of problem could we solve that is a big problem and does not have the right solution? And I thought about fraud prevention. So the second company I built, Briterion, was to deal with preventing fraud. When you use credit card or a check or also product that was used also for homeland security, and now it's used also for health care. So curiosity pretty much is the engine that allowed me to seek opportunities and take risk and build businesses. You know, this very morning, I got text messages and voicemails. I don't know if it's real or not, saying that my credit card has been used as, you know, in a transaction that I wasn't aware of. I still don't know if it's true or not, because I don't recognize the last four digits of the credit card. But this is obviously an ongoing problem with fraud. And tell us a little about your company, Briterion. So you sold it already. It's been a while, but it became quite successful. So tell us some of the stories that kind of defined it, in a way. Yeah, I go back to the curiosity. You know, I wanted to know. So when I was in France, I had, there was a report about a company called Metagroup United States that did a study about technologies of AI. I remember talking, that was in the 95, 96, 97. And suddenly, we were selected as one of the best technology with our smart agent technology. So a company of the United States contacted me, visited my customer in France, and were impressed by the technology. So they invited me to go and see them in San Diego area. The company name is HNC. I was talking to them and trying to understand what type of technology you guys are using for fraud prevention. And then I find out that the problem with that type of solutions back then, I don't know what they're doing now, but back then it's like, I saw the opportunity of building a technology that treats every person differently, because your spending behaviors versus mine are different. So I saw that we needed a new solution that would be more precise, that has less false positive. You know, like when you decline, when it's not true, you should have allowed it. So I entered that field. And it took time, you know, particularly when you come with someone like me that don't speak very well English initially, arrived to the United States. It's not easy. We didn't have a lot of people that believed in us. I'm actually lucky that we did not get a lot of funding. It was really difficult, but because curiosity allowed me to find a really problem. So the way we offered the solution to customers, actually my first customer was in France, a company called Cetel M. So basically you provide us with a transaction of last year or two years ago, because you know which one was fraud and which one was not fraud. They send it to us and we send them an Excel file telling them, have you used our system? This is what will save you. And the results were amazing. So we signed. And when we started having customers in the US, it took a lot of time. I honestly, I was really impressed by the, we had a lot of challenges, a lot of the company like for scalability, we had to overcome a lot of technical challenges, but we resisted. We continued. It became phenomenal because if I can give advice to people, if they start a company, it's like my first idea was like, because I was small, I can't do everything. But I knew I need to be good in one thing, which is technical. But rather than trying to sell, I thought it's better to have partners. So like I had a partner with MasterCard for the banks. I had a partner with WordPay, which is the, both of them are the largest. WordPay was for merchants. And we had other partners. And the idea was like, I wanted to concentrate on something that I knew how to do with technology, partner with other companies. And in the end, we were doing over 200 billion transaction a year. My business was paid for every transaction. So every time you use transaction, I get paid. So we made money, a lot of money. When the buzz about artificial intelligence started in 2017, I had other offers, you know, companies coming to us to try to acquire our business. And I was lucky to sell it to the best company, which is MasterCard, because I get to know people at MasterCard. Amazing company, amazing people, really impressive management team. That's how Britarian started, and I'm glad to see that it's continued to increase its presence on the field of security. They moved it also to help the fraud. And that's the story about the company Britarian. Now we'll talk about your book as well, Inside AI, your latest book. But I want to change gears and talk about some of the challenges that AI has, as big as it is now. I think a lot of people probably are still not aware a lot of the dangerous path that AI can take us through. So the first thing I want to ask you about is something like ChatGPT. Tell us, in your opinion, how the use of ChatGPT influences people or society. This Bay Area Innovators episode is sponsored by Peter Cassara Clothiers, an Italian menswear store that brings timeless European style with a modern edge to Sunnyvale and the Bay Area for over 50 years. From top Italian suits and shoes to the exclusive Tami Bahama line, they've got your look covered. Check out their website at petercassaraclothiers.com to find out more. And now, back to our interview. I was talking to someone last week, we had a dinner, and said he thinks that his kids are slaves to their phone. You know, they are always on the phone. The contact with phone. So I think the risk of ChatGPT, there are many risks. Number one, we have a tendency to compare it to human thinking, which is absurd. You know, human thinking is not statistic. It's not just statistics. It's powerful. The machine is extremely powerful. But it's not in any way intelligence. There's no intelligence in it. I mean, if you think that statistic is intelligence, that's fine. So I see too many risks. I will start with the most important one. When people start using it at school, ChatGPT, for example, if you outsource your thinking to just look for a solution, how do we become intelligence? It's the path. It's the challenges you have to solve a problem. You know, errors, you're not sure, you do something, you come back. It's like going to the gym. You start, you know, you build muscles in your mind. But now, if every time you need to ask a question, you go to ChatGPT, the risk is you will not trust yourself anymore. You will not trust yourself. So lack of confidence. Lack of confidence, because you'll be relying on the machines. The other one is like, if everyone used ChatGPT, so where is the originality? I mean, we would be all drinking from the same source, as we say, which is absurd. Outside that, ChatGPT, we know, it elucidates, it gives you things that make absolute no sense. So if you don't understand the field, and ChatGPT provides you with information. In my book, I explain a lot of, some examples about myself, for example, it's not, you know, I was interviewed on, I had people on Wall Street Journal, USA Today, hundreds of other magazines talked about me. Yet, ChatGPT, and I have a very unique name, Akhli, I mean, how many people are called Akhli? It's like 50 people around the world or something. So my last name is unique, which is beautiful, I love it. And my first name, and then still ChatGPT get me wrong, and sometimes they make me work for companies that never existed, or did things, run IBM, run Berkeley, this and that. This hallucination, it's not a bug, it's not an error of the program. It's the fundamental of the way LLM, which is called the Large Language Module, works. So I think the risk for education is really, really crazy, because if we outsource our thinking, we don't want to create zombie thinkers. Like the example you said earlier about your text, you receive the text, you are smart enough to not click on it, because they are infusing fear in you. So if you type, or you connect, or you call, if people, like senior people, they take advantage of them. So artificial intelligence will amplify the bad people, will amplify in the future, when you see a video like this, you will never know if it's real or it's made by AI, because people will understand my accent, my look, yours, and they can do and add, remove, change everything. So there is a lot of, I think, thank you for asking that question, because honestly, it's probably one of the biggest challenges in the future, is to be careful about how we, with artificial intelligence, even the ethics, you know, today, when you go to social media, they know everything about you. Yes. It will amplify things. The insurance will have information about you, your neighbors, so we're losing the privacy. We become enslaved to things we created ourselves. So it's really important for people to understand the benefits, but also the risk of CGPT and other products. There are other products than CGPT. I think in your book, you make a good point about how if you go to the gym, you work out, you stay in shape, right? If you don't go to the gym and you don't work out, you're out of shape. How the mind and the brain is the same. If you don't use them, they're going to be out of shape, right? Absolutely. And one of the examples I can think of, I don't know if you see when astronauts come from the space station, they've been there for a month or six months, when they come back on Earth, because they've been in the space, there's no gravity, when they come back on Earth, they can barely walk. People have to hold them. Correct. It takes a few weeks for them to build enough muscle. Even though they do work out in the space station, but there's no gravity, so they're so weak. So if you think of that analogy with your brain, if you always use CHI, GPT, or some AI tool, your brain, like you said, it will really have difficulty processing things on its own, right? I think it would be even more difficult for the brain, because I think, number one, we don't understand how the brain works anyway. It drives me nuts when people think how the brain works. If you know, why don't you fix the mental health problem? You know the brain works, okay, go ahead and fix it. So I think the issue is absolutely what you just said. A few weeks ago, I stopped at a gas station that the system was broken, I went inside to pay, and the person took forever to calculate a simple number, because he said, I don't have a calculator, or really. I said, it was a young kid, he said, yeah, I'm in high school, really. When I was in high school, that simple, for me, would take not even a millisecond to give you the response. It's not his fault, because they don't do that by hand. I think if you explain that to, like, the education, the mind, the key for thinking is imagination. The beauty of our mind is so complex, like, I honestly still remember today things that happened to me. You know, in my book, I talk about the first time I heard the Imagine song by John Lennon. Just like, what? I still remember it. And I can't tell you exactly who I was with, how the area was on the table, how I stopped, I was mesmerized by the song. When I was little, if you go take olives, you remember the smell, the taste, it's crazy, it's just, like, mind-blowing. So that's what you need to work out, because a computer, you know, it's lights, it's, like, turn it on and off, it's zero and one. I hope, and I'm open for, to start, like, a foundation or something that will alert of the risk of artificial intelligence when it comes to education, because everything that was created in the world for the benefit to eradicate disease or hunger will come from the mind of people that had a different way of thinking, had to create something, had to build something, and all of that come from our minds. And if we stop using it and we outsource it, I think it will be terrible. Yes. I want to move on to the power that AI uses, and specifically, you know, there's applications and various programs that create art. And we had someone in the program who was telling us, why do we need AI to create art? Because you have an artist, the art created by AI is not going to get to the level of the artist anyway. I mean, it's going to look nice, but it's not going to have that creativity, that imagination that the real person has. At the same time, it creates this, it uses this huge amount of energy to create this specific piece of art. So why do you think we're using these applications to create art instead of having the actual people do it? Because there's a lot of hype, you know, I don't believe there is any technology that is hyped more than artificial intelligence, for many reasons. Everyone pretends to be an expert in artificial intelligence, even they have no clue what they're talking about, absolutely no clue. It's like, you know, while building businesses, I like it to teach as a side, it allowed me to talk to brilliant people, intelligent people that ask me questions. The hype about artificial intelligence, because there's a lot of money on it, it's way more hype than nanotechnology, I don't know if you remember, the only fear I remember is like when, before the year 2000, when they were saying, oh, the world will stop, airplane will explode, train will, you know, the whole, and they, all these people sold all these hours of nonsense. And the hype about artificial intelligence is like, because, remember, AI is nothing, zero, without data, nothing. It's nothing. AI is a statistic that's useless without data. I don't care if they call it transformer or deep learning with transform, it's all buzzwords, okay? I'm not saying AI is not powerful, I become successful with AI. There are things that AI can, simply cannot do without stealing the work of other people. So if I ask AI to write a poetry for me, it would take, let me take a French example, because I learned poetry in French, like Baudelaire or Rimbaud, you know, famous, she will mix them and bring you something and be like, wow, this is impressive. But it reused, whether it's synonyms or context, you know, with the, the, the way charge GPT works on other, they don't give you the obvious response. When you write a sentence, when they think about the next word, they think about the word that we don't use that much. So it looks more, more unique, more impressive. Because it's probabilities, but they don't give you the number one, they give you the one that below that you don't use, I don't use. So things are, we think it's original. It looks original, but it's just because it's like taking a dictionary or thesaurus and look for all the words that we don't use, and be like, this guy's a genius. It's like, so when you take the art, because a computer, again, it's zero and one, it copies part of the pictures, you know? The way AI works is to give you, without going to pictures, let's suppose you wanted to learn like number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine, okay? And then we expand that to the pictures. So if you take these numbers and you put them in pixels, you know, matrix, and where there's a writing, you put one, where there is nothing, you put zero, so it becomes vectors. So that's a layer, the input. Like when you put, you give the computer to learn the algorithm. And in the end, you want your machine to detect whether it's an eight or a nine or two or four. So how, let's see, for example, a nine. Nine has a loop on the top and a line on the right. An eight has a loop on the top, a loop below. Like number four has lines, you know, line, line, line. So what do you want for the AI, how the AI works? Again, if you take the loop itself, it has edges, you know, turn like this, like this. So you take what you learn, and the first layer, you will extract all the edges, because it's numbers, you know, zero, it's between zero and one. You create the edges, and the next line, the next level, you want it to show you a loop and a line, and say, this is nine, this is. So even in pictures, whether it's an image or anything, it does the same thing, you know, we take pieces, edges, and we learn from them. So when you mix them together, you may see an arc, but all of it comes from what human did. And I think it's, it's the biggest IP theft ever. It's the biggest IP theft. Interesting. Very interesting. Because these artists, they live, that's their life, you know, it's just like, we need also to be responsible about what we do. Yes, artificial intelligence is great, but we also talk about the ethics, it's, forget the fact that it did it. Why we, how many times we heard about global warming before, oh, global warming, drive an electrical car, global warming. And then artificial intelligence today, every model spends so much energy and water, we don't have water. We don't have water. You know that data centers, all the data centers, use more electricity than the half of Africa. See? So the rich can do everything well, and the poor Africans, we have no electricity. Just data centers, I'm not talking about all the data, this is not my number, it's available. You know, it's in my book, we talk about all the people that invented new things. Versus copies. You talk about invention versus copy, and that's a very important aspect. People like Tesla, for example, or just take anyone else, the people that invent really are beyond outliners, they have to think differently. And we don't want to destroy that, and make the machine just keep reusing what existed. And also, we need to be responsible, because if we just accept something that we believe is good, and kill the jobs of the people that are doing it, of course when we kill the people that do it, we can't do it anymore after that. It's like going to the moon. You know, before we knew how to go to the moon, and now suddenly we don't know how to go to the moon. Because the people that went to the moon died, and we did not have the, of course it took years after that to rebuild it. So I think it's a great question. I hope that, again, but there is so much money in it, I don't believe we will, and you know, what Europe thinks, what China thinks, China doesn't care about regulation, they don't. Even in the United States, a lot of people think that you let the market decide by itself. We don't want artificial intelligence to be in the hands of a few people that benefit from it, and the rest of the people suffer. Now we talk about the complexities of the human brain, and how it's so hard for us to understand how the human brain works, and when you compare to AI, how inferior AI is to the human brain. I think in chapter six, the first sentence you have on the top, and it's not your quote, it's someone else's, but it says, one year spent on working on AI makes you believe in God more than otherwise. Tell us about that. I like the quote, because the guy was like, you know, after working one year in AI, he believed in God, which is at least they helped him become more spiritual. Comparing artificial intelligence to human, it's just for hype. You know, when I was doing my PhD, I wanted to understand how the mind works. And I asked everyone, and I was lucky to talk to people that worked in neuroscience, and they were laughing at me, were you crazy or something? I remember I asked one professor, he was funny, he said, we don't even know the effect of aspirin. Aspirin is like, we take it, he said, we don't know if it's good, if it's bad, if it's this and you're asking me about how the brain works. What really keeps me thinking is like, how do we store all of it? What type of format, you know, can't store all of this in zero and one, it's not possible. How many things we can store? You know, in my PhD, I started with something funny. My first sentence was, Solomon was mesmerized that all the river poured to the ocean and the ocean never gets full. So I said, what about our mind? How is it possible that with all the information we have, we store it, we remember it? Even when I started the human eyes, you know, like to understand the human eyes, what we see, sometimes you see things, you don't even know how it's possible. We say le sixième sens, you know, six, well, how is it, six sense, yeah. When AI, I know how we are presented, you know, it's, basically it's vectors, you know. I want to tell people that artificial intelligence is just a set of numbers, numbers, matrix of numbers, zero and one, between zero and one, that's it. Anyone who tells you elsewhere is a crook, an idiot, has no clue what he's talking about. That's why you said in your book that chat GPT is empty inside, like on the surface. It looks impressive. It is impressive. But what drives me nuts is like when you see people telling chat GPT, oh, thank you very much, you're helping me. You're talking to numbers. You're telling numbers. If they knew that in the back of a computer, it's just a set of numbers. You know, there are people that say chat GPT, they see him as a friend. Yes. I've heard of that. Isn't it crazy? You see a set of numbers and you're a friend. So it just, because it's sold like that, it's, it's given to people like that. I don't say what they did is impressive. Chat GPT, the idea of chat GPT started in 1957. There is a guy named John Firth and John Firth said this, if you want to understand a word, you understand our neighbors. And actually myself in 2000, I filed a patent about contextual understanding words. So like, for example, when you say Apple, Apple can mean a fruit, can mean New York, it can mean, you know, a computer. How do you understand it based on the word that are around it? And in my patent also, I use vectors and matrix, et cetera. So what chat GPT does is like when you take a text for every word, we think about all the synonyms that, so every word is the, is represented as a vector, is represented, if you picture a multi-dimensional representation. So the word that looks similar are represented all together, like close to each other. And then the way they work is they talk to each other, it's called transformer, technology of the transformer, and the word talk to each other to find which one should come next. But when you use a machine, you know, chat GPT, if you as a human, you calculate, just tell you how much calculation happens. If you calculate, you make 1 billion calculation per second, a human, you, let's suppose you, you can suddenly your magic, you can do 1 billion calculation per second. You know how much time, what's the time you need to do all the calculation that the chat GPT did when they were trained? 2,700 years, you see? If you try to read all the books, or internet, if you do the calculations, it's in the hundreds of millions of years for a human. So we see it as impressive. But remember, I said in my book, you and me, when we talk, when we use the word, how many words we know? 3,500? 4,000? You don't use 10,000 words. But in grammar, there are rules, you know. There is a grammar for a rule, like when you speak. So what the machine does is they read everything on internet. And you know when you read on internet, a lot of this is fake news. Yes. False. Even, I'll get that 30% of what's written on artificial intelligence in internet by the so-called article that were written by, are false. I'm not even talking about the news, the magazine, et cetera, it makes no sense. So the hype is what's killing artificial intelligence. You remember in 2015, Facebook, it was in the news, I was driving to San Francisco and I heard on the radio that news saying that, oh my God, Facebook, artificial intelligence is creating in a freaky way, it's all language that the human don't understand. I think I heard about it. You heard about it? Yes. So I, when I arrived to the office, I said, we should call 911. These people are crazy. They're crazy. They are insane. How is it a machine create its own language that people don't understand? It's absurd. It's like recently you get a CEO that show up and says, 50% of the people, of the jobs would be lost to artificial intelligence. Really? Now, we talked about this before. It's about the bias that exists in AI or in chat GPT or whatever. We expect a tool to not be biased, but you're saying that it will automatically be biased because it follows what happens on the internet or the news or other sources that would be biased. Yeah. This is really an important question because when people say, how do we turn AI to be non-biased? It's not possible. Why? Because we are all biased. You are not forcing people. If you learn from internet, you learn from everything. And why are we biased anyway? When you grow up, when you're born, do you choose your first name or last name? No. Do you choose your parent? No. Do you choose your neighbors? No. Do you choose the church you go to? No. Guess what? You are programmed by that. All your mind is, you know, the seeds are there. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So when you grow up, everything you judge is based on that. You see? I grew up different than you. So I have a vision, you have a vision, it's not your fault, it's not mine. Okay? So we are biased. Now, all humans are biased. They do the right things. And the people don't like this because it's yellow, this guy is black, this guy is young, this guy is Christian, Muslim, Jewish, it's stupid, nonsense. Okay? So then internet, it's all biased. So computer, artificial intelligence, I repeat it, again, I have a PhD, the AI today does not understand anything, okay? It's impressive what it gives, but it has not the meaning that we have. So because we learn from internet, the internet is full of information created by people that are biased themselves. So automatically it's biased. It's just the way the world, you cannot go to change it. And I think it's bad, we should, I mean, the concern I have is about regulation because Europe, for example, had a regulation before, and now President Macron and others are saying, we cannot impose regulation to our companies because for regulation, they will not advance while China can do whatever they want. And of course, the United States also, we have this type of thing. So there's a lot of ethics. I think if people really understood that artificial intelligence would continue to manipulate them, we are being manipulated nonstop by everything. The kids are manipulated nonstop. Everyone is manipulated. And I think artificial intelligence will amplify that because it will pretty much push you to think something, do something. I'm not talking about the, you talk about the bias today and how election will be influenced. The day when we will not distinguish what is true versus not true, like the deep fake and all this, it's, we're entering, see if we, the hope I have though, that if we enter, which we are anyway, a world where everything, you will not distinguish what's fake versus not fake. I think what will happen is like people would like to be like this, you and me, because I want to be sure that it's real. So maybe we'll open more opportunities for people to get together and talk. So it's, I love this technology. I honestly spend all my life in it. I was lucky to follow my intuition at the time where people thought artificial intelligence did nothing. And I've become extremely successful with it. So I love this technology. But I want to also alert people about its negative impact. Use the positive and be, I think it's, it would be, the negative would be amplified that what do we see with social media, because we see a lot of kids are depressed. High school people live the instant, you know, I want everything now. The new generation is scared to be by itself. Can you believe it? They are afraid to be by themselves, because I don't know, they did not grow up. I had no problem being on a tree myself, just by myself, enjoy the nature, enjoy the thinking, you know, see life. And AI is with all the billions and billions and billions of dollars that are invested, they will try to make profit from them. How do they make profit from them? By finding a way to sell them. How? I get you to more games or more games, more manipulation. Absolutely. Now, you have a company now, it's a newer company. And then tell us what companies you invest in, you invest in different companies. How do you look at that? How do you look at the company? Do you invest in AI companies? Or it depends? So if you come to me and say you don't do AI, we invest. It's unique, right? It's a very unique approach. If you show up to me and say, I don't use AI. Okay, let's have a lunch. You don't use AI? Let's have a lunch. Because it's so hyper, like AI was so hyper, it's crazy. I mean, I get some people, they have no clue what they're talking about when it comes to artificial intelligence. But they put AI in everything. So we, you know, I was lucky to... In a toothbrush, right? Like, some toothbrush as AI. I mean, the companies that invested $300 million in a company that deals with dogs, with AI, like pet settings with AI, it's crazy. Just insanity. You have to be insane, or it's not your money to do that. I like to see things positive, like I invest in healthcare. We invest in AI and technologies. We invest in fintech. We invest in things that deal with mental health. And for me, the way you select someone, I like people that come from a disadvantaged background, you know, because for me, I had so many disadvantages that allowed me to be successful. See, when you grow up with nothing, you want, you have two choices, either the bad path, complain and go steal, and fight, or the hard but beautiful path, work hard and believe in yourself. I was so lucky to have my grandmother and my parents that believed in me. They never went to school. And they told me, you know, if you work hard, my mother told me, if you work hard, one day you will become a teacher. Because for her, teacher is the most beautiful job. And this is probably why I teach as a side. I mean, when she passed away, I cried for two weeks. I couldn't stop crying. She just has a big heart and loves everyone and helped everyone. So I think my goal for investing is to like CEOs that have experience. Or if they don't have experience, they understand the value of things. Because if you get someone who shows up because, you know, doesn't matter if I fail, you feel it. It's just when you meet someone, you know if it's real or fake. I would never invest in things like gaming or things that make you get addicted. You can use them over and over. I would never, ever invest in that. But anything that's positive, impactful, I'm happy not only to invest money, but to provide my experience and connections. Well, you told us a story the other day. You were at your home and you had a plumber doing some work. And then you invited him for lunch or dinner. And what was funny is that you told me you enjoyed that lunch with the plumber more than with the top CEO. Can you tell us what drives you first to invite him to have lunch with you? It's because of my parents. They never... I remember one day, we had two rooms, okay, two small rooms. And I was literally sleeping at the ortry of the door. And one day, he brought a guy and the old person and his daughter. They were lost. Because it's just the way he was. And he was always telling me that, you know, you're not doing something positive for the other person, but merely for you. Actually, the lunch was beautiful because many times I hired people in my company, some people would tell me, why are you hiring them? Because I see someone that has autism, for example, or some people that were depressed. It happened many times. Some people I knew that they were probably had some mental illness because of the way they acted. It's all to my parents. It's just, I said, what is it going to cost me anyway? If I pay a salary, the company was making more money back then. I would not have done it when I started because I did not have the resources, the risk of making the company bankrupt. But again, I think when you see, if the plumber enjoyed the lunch that my wife did and opened his mind and feel that he's as respected as he should be, that's the way I grew up. As anyone else, it just reminds me who I am, where I come from. I feel more connected to people that remind me of my background. You know, it's interesting because we talk about human values and what we get from family, which is the strongest bond that you can think of. And then we talk about AI, which in so many ways, it takes away from that strength. Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. See? You're right. You're absolutely right. You just said it in a great way. So I'm lucky to have people that believe in me. You know, you can't have many, but I do have few friends that you can call me at 3am, 4am. I don't ask questions, they don't ask questions. I have a friend of mine who is a very successful guy, he travels around the world. He was in Australia and I call him, I always feel when I call, you know, just like maybe he's traveling. I call him and he says, I was just thinking about you. Thank you for calling me. Instead of complaining, say, why are you calling me? No, no, no. And he meant it. No, no, it was not during the night. Because of that human connection. I get a call from someone in France. I said, he called me for a long time, he never called, he called. So I said, is there anything you need? He said, I just want to hear your voice. You're right. That's a human connection. AI will never give you that. Akli, thank you so much for your time. I want to see if you have any concluding thoughts, especially to the audience about using AI or tools such as ChatGP. Number one, and thank you so much for having me. I think it's really amazing what you're trying to do and to, you know, get different voices for people to learn from them. The only last thing I would tell your audience is what my grandmother told me, and again, never went to school. She said, just impress yourself. Don't try to impress other people. Impress yourself. And that's the path. That's the sentence that really was like my guiding light all my life. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay.epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.