Summary:
In this vibrant and forward-thinking episode of the Sidecar Sync, Mallory and Amith dive into the fun side of AI—exploring OpenAI’s new GPT-4o image generation capabilities, Hedra’s cartoon animation tech, and the jaw-dropping robotics work between Nvidia, Google DeepMind, and Disney. You’ll hear about Mallory’s creation of cartoon avatars of herself and Amith, animated with lifelike voices using Hedra and ElevenLabs, plus a lively discussion on how associations can use these tools for scalable content and member engagement. Plus, a look at how Disney’s droids and advanced physics engines are shaping the future of robotics far beyond entertainment.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
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🛠 AI Tools and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
ChatGPT-4o ➡ https://chat.openai.com
Hedra ➡ hhttps://www.hedra.com/
Nvidia Reveals Project GROOT and Disney Robots ➡ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51TYhPJ4zys
Amith’s AI Comic Strips ➡ https://shorturl.at/ItvQZ
https://www.linkedin.com/company/sidecar-global
https://twitter.com/sidecarglobal
https://www.youtube.com/@SidecarSync
⚙️ Other Resources from Sidecar:
More about Your Hosts:
Amith Nagarajan is the Chairman of Blue Cypress 🔗 https://BlueCypress.io, a family of purpose-driven companies and proud practitioners of Conscious Capitalism. The Blue Cypress companies focus on helping associations, non-profits, and other purpose-driven organizations achieve long-term success. Amith is also an active early-stage investor in B2B SaaS companies. He’s had the good fortune of nearly three decades of success as an entrepreneur and enjoys helping others in their journey.
📣 Follow Amith on LinkedIn:
https://linkedin.com/amithnagarajan
Mallory Mejias is passionate about creating opportunities for association professionals to learn, grow, and better serve their members using artificial intelligence. She enjoys blending creativity and innovation to produce fresh, meaningful content for the association space.
📣 Follow Mallory on Linkedin:
https://linkedin.com/mallorymejias
🤖 Please note this transcript was generated using (you guessed it) AI, so please excuse any errors 🤖
[00:00:00] Hey there, Sidecar Sync listeners. I'm Cartoon Mallory. While I might not have all the nuances of the real Mallory, this technology showcases how AI is transforming content creation. Welcome to Sidecar Sync, your Weekly Dose of Innovation. If you're looking for the latest news, insights, and developments in the association world, especially those driven by artificial intelligence, you're in the right place.
[00:00:26] We cut through the noise to bring you the most relevant updates with a keen focus on how AI and other emerging technologies are shaping the future. No fluff, just facts and informed discussions. I'm Amith Nagarajan, chairman of Blue Cypress. And I'm your host. Greetings everyone and welcome to the Sidecar Sync, your Home for content at the intersection of associations and ai.
[00:00:50] My name is Amith Nagarajan, and my name is Mallory Mejias. And we're your hosts. And before we get into today's topics, which are super fun, as usual, but particularly fun today we're gonna take a moment to hear a word from our sponsor. Let's face it, generic emails do not work. Emails with the same message to everyone, result in low engagement and missed opportunities.
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[00:01:29] This opens up the door to many powerful applications like event marketing, networking recommendations, and more. Sign up at rasa.io/campaigns. Once again, rasa.io/campaigns. Give it a try. Your members and your engagement rates. Well, thank you, Amith. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing well myself.
[00:01:50] I'm also very excited for this episode. I don't wanna spoil it, but we've got some fun conversations and demos lined up. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah, you showed me some previews of, of what you wanna show today, and I'm, I'm excited about it. Some, uh, really interesting implications for this, uh, next evolution in this technology.
[00:02:07] Yeah. I love that. I love that the, the impact of this technology will be transformative and just huge in general, but also that it can be so fun. And I told Amme before we recorded, I had a moment thinking, is this really my job to do this? Because I was having a blast. Amme. I'm curious if you can share with listeners how has that, uh, content automation that we've been discussing for our AI Learning Hub for members version been going.
[00:02:33] It's really, really fun. It's a great project. We've been incubating this idea for, for quite some time now. It's, you know, been percolating really in our minds for probably over a year in total, but really in development for a number of, a number of months. And for those who haven't heard us talk about it before, what we're doing essentially is trying to attack the problem of change, uh, across two dimensions essentially for our learning content.
[00:02:57] So, uh, and I think all associations can relate to this with their own learning content is that, uh, learning con. The minute you create, it starts becoming stale because the information, it becomes outta date. And of course, we're in the world of delivering AI education. So when you're teaching people about ai, this stuff is changing so crazy fast.
[00:03:15] Um, it starts to decay really, really quickly. And so we tend to rerecord our content, uh, in the traditional way with, you know. People like Mallory and myself and our other colleagues, uh, recording new versions of the same courses as well as new courses on a high frequency basis. And that's a problem because we wanna be able to update our content even more frequently than we've been doing, which is roughly every six months we do a complete refresh.
[00:03:39] Um. And we think it needs to be updated probably every month or two. Uh, and so there's that issue. The other dimension of change is that we're starting to partner with more and more associations where we take that learning content about AI and we adapt it for their industry. So we'll make it AI for x, X being whatever your profession or industry is.
[00:03:59] And we're doing this as a really exciting revenue share partnership with our, with our friends in the association community. We're super pumped about it. And uh, so of course that's another dimension of change because now you have. All of the changes happening in ai and then you have lots of variations of the content that essentially are like specific versions for different use cases and different vocabulary that are, of course very important to make.
[00:04:20] It really hit home for a given audience, and so we wanted to solve that problem. We wanted to make it possible to move really fast and do all of this at the same time. And so pre ai, this would've been effectively an impossible task, but what we have with ai. Is the ability to generate high quality audio and high quality video and then to be able to stitch that together in a way that ultimately results in us being able to fully automate our production pipeline of content from source material all the way to produced content on the LMS.
[00:04:52] Um, so I won't go into more detail on it because that's not the point of today's. But, uh, it is something I'm really fired up about. Um, we're excited to, uh, over the next 30 days, we're gonna start putting some of the content on our learning hub that's generated by this tool and, uh, starting to get some feedback.
[00:05:07] We've already gotten some informal feedback from folks that it's been super positive, so very, very excited about that, and I think hopefully it'll serve as inspiration for what associations can do as well. Yeah. Yeah. And it kind of fits with today's topic too, because we're talking about image and video, and I do have a question in there.
[00:05:23] Maybe we'll wanna start integrating some cartoons into the AI Learning Hub potentially. It sounds like fun. Alright, today we are talking about some fun topics. As Amme said, we're talking about Chat's four oh Image, generator and Hera, which is a company I was not familiar with until I demoed it for this pod.
[00:05:42] And then we'll also be talking about Disney robots. I'll explain more on that in a bit. But first and foremost, chat, BTS four oh image generation feature is open. AI's latest advancement in generative ai. For now, offering users the ability to create and edit highly detailed and realistic images directly within the chat GPT interface.
[00:06:03] So here's an overview of of some features and functionality it excels at creating photorealistic images. Editing existing ones and rendering text within images an improvement, major improvement over earlier models like Dolly. It supports multi turn conversations for refining images, allowing users to iterate and improve their creations.
[00:06:27] Users can specify details like aspect ratios, colors, using hex codes, or even request transparent backgrounds. The model can transform uploaded reference images or use them as inspiration for new creations. It's capable of generating a wide variety of content from cinematic landscapes and logos to creative art styles.
[00:06:47] It can also handle practical applications like designing infographics or mockups for businesses or even comic strips. The tool is available. Now for all users, including those on the free tier, though free users are limited at this moment to generating three images per day paid subscribers. The Plus and Pro plans gain enhanced access with fewer restrictions.
[00:07:09] I wanna take a little pause here before we talk about Hydra ame. I know you have done some experimenting with the image generator that we talked about recently. You built a comic strip. What was your experience like? I did this, the, the night that this product was announced by OpenAI and in fact, I posted this comic strip on my LinkedIn.
[00:07:28] We can link to that in the show notes, but if you follow me on LinkedIn, you can go to my profile and see it. It's, it's, uh, by the time you listen to this, it might be a few weeks old, but, um, I thought it would be an interesting test because I wanted to take some concepts, uh, from what we talk about a lot in the association world, um, and see if we could create something kind of sort of funny, but really also see if could the image generator like stitch together several.
[00:07:51] In a comic and actually keep the scene like logical where you're not like having different characters appear and disappear, uh, and put in text. As you mentioned, that's been the big hole in all of these image generators. None of them have been able to do, do really high quality, reliable text, and that's been a big hole, uh, in fact.
[00:08:10] Prior image generators, you couldn't even really reliably tell them not to emit text at all. Mm-hmm. So a lot of times they would like throw text out there, even when you said, please don't do that, because your intention was to take it into a design tool and add text yourself. Now you can, I, I can say this, like my immediate reaction was, oh my gosh, this is amazing.
[00:08:26] Because I was able to create a comic strip that the copy in it wasn't necessarily funny, but like the fact that it did all that in one shot and it maybe like took 60 seconds or something. Was really phenomenal. So it's definitely a next level capability in terms of intervention generation. And the thing I got really excited shortly after that was things like infographics or mm-hmm.
[00:08:45] You know, other kinds of typical business communication tools that, you know, normally you wouldn't build these things, but now you can start to build them for all sorts of different things to improve your communications. I think I've told you all at this point, midjourney is my preferred AI image generator, and, uh, I think there's kind of use cases still for it.
[00:09:04] I'm interested to see how Midjourney, uh, updates with this chat. GT four Oh, image generator. I think I've gotta double down on what Amis said about the text. It is fantastic. Like you, I, I kind of thought when I gave it instruction to put sidecar sync, for example, in an image, maybe it would take me a few times.
[00:09:21] No, it got it perfect the first time with very minimal direction. I also think the ability to iterate with it is so helpful. So in Midjourney you kind of have to do it in, in a one-shot prompt. Um, you can do like subtle variations or big variations within Midjourney, but you kind of have to get the prompt right the first time.
[00:09:40] But with. This one, you can go back and forth and say, oh, could you brighten up the colors a little bit? Can you do X, Y, Z? So it's much more user friendly. I find that it still has an AI look, if you know what I mean. Ami, like you can now tell which images have been generated with A-A-G-P-T four O, but overall I'm really, really impressed with this.
[00:10:00] I still think I will use Midjourney maybe for more realistic images, but in terms of creating cartoons, I'm very impressed with, uh, four O. Well, I think that's a great use case. 'cause cartoons are a fantastic way of making people remember stuff. 'cause especially if the copy in there is well written and of course we know language models can help you quite a bit with that and Right.
[00:10:21] Um, that's interesting. I do wanna point out one quick thing before we move on about the four oh image generation that is a little bit of subtlety that might not be obvious to everyone, is that up until now, the tools like. Chat PT that have had image generation as one of their features as part of like a language model interaction, have actually been calling out to a separate image generator model whenever they need to generate an image.
[00:10:44] So in the case of OpenAI and Chat PT, they would use doll E three under the hood. So you could basically use Dolly from chat GPT. And actually, if you remember a little bit earlier in time, you didn't have that ability to generate an image. You'd have to go to a separate page for Dolly. Yes. And you would.
[00:11:01] Prompted directly and with Dolly three, they embedded it in chat, GPT, and in fact, chat, GPT rewrote the prompt to Dolly, but it was actually calling a different model and the dolly model. The point is, is the dolly image model had no idea about anything about the conversation other than the enhanced prompt that.
[00:11:20] Chat, GPT sent to Dali. So that's how it worked up until the moment in time when we got to 4.0. Now when OpenAI released GPT-4 oh and the later chat, the chat GPT that used it, people are like, what is this? 4.0, people call it 4.0, which by the way is not the name, it's four. Oh and O stands for. Omni and the intention behind it is it's omni modal, right?
[00:11:40] And that means that multiple modalities in multiple modalities out. And so the original four oh could take in images and it could describe them to you and use them as part of a prompt. It would understand the images, um, but it would not emit images directly. Now, the four oh, omni model, as far as I know, it's the first model that does this.
[00:11:59] It's a single model that's able to. Both have inputs and outputs in various modalities. Why does that matter? Well, by having it in an omni modal model, that means that the model understands the full conversation. So what you described, the ability to have iterative, continuous improvement for that image to represent kind of holistically what the conversation is about.
[00:12:21] Um, that's a very, very powerful kind of layer of dimensionality that image only models are gonna have a really, really tough time dealing with. So my prediction on this is, uh, models. That are pure images, like just midjourney, unless they do some really amazing magic, are gonna have a hard time dealing with this because they just don't have the context mm-hmm.
[00:12:39] Of what an omni modal model has when interacting with a user, at least for most use cases. Yeah, that's, that's a really interesting distinction. Oh, I love midjourney so. Do better guys. I wanna ke, I wanna be able to use both. Alright. I want to introduce kind of a, a subtopic to this topic, which is Hera. So Hera is an AI company specializing in generative video creation, founded in 2023 by two Stanford PhDs with experience at Nvidia, Google, and meta.
[00:13:06] The company aims to democratize video production by making it safer, more expressive and accessible to creators of all skill levels. Character three is RA's latest omni modal model and processes, text, audio, and images simultaneously enabling seamless integration of storytelling elements in a single workflow.
[00:13:26] There's also the Hira Studio, which is a unified platform that combines various AI tools for video production. It allows users to create customizable avatars with unique appearances, voices and personalities, while offering realtime previews and intuitive controls. Key capabilities within HERA are the ability to transform static images into lifelike characters that can speak, seeing, or wrap their support from multilingual text to speech inputs.
[00:13:53] And you also get fast video generation, like 62nd videos from 300 characters of text with lifelike exper expressions and synchronized movements. So I'm wondering if you all can kind of deduce where we're going with this. So we talked about creating images with 4.0 and chat UT, and then we've talked about using Hera to animate some images.
[00:14:14] So I'm going to share my screen for those of us who are joining us on YouTube, and then I'll try to kind of talk my way. Way through this as best as I can. I'll show you the finished project at the end, but I just wanted to show you my process a little bit and how I created this. So right now I'm using chat, GPT-4 oh, and I actually took my headshot that I use on LinkedIn and also that we use in the sidecar sync cover.
[00:14:38] Uh, I dropped it in here. I gave it a really simple prompt just to see what it would do with it, and I had not run this experiment prior, so turn me into a cartoon wearing a yellow cap that says sidecar sink. I did get an error the first time, which might have been my internet connection, but I asked it to try again.
[00:14:56] And you, you all have to check this out. I'll probably post this on LinkedIn. I get like an exact replica of my headshot, even down to the leaves in the background. 'cause I took this in front of like a, a bush where I live. Uh, even down to the leaves, to my earrings, I'm pretty sure. Yes, it is very detailed.
[00:15:16] And I have this yellow cap on that says sidecar sink. Nothing misspelled, nothing looks crazy. And my exact outfit. So that was step one. I then had to do the same thing with you and me. Hopefully I didn't get your permission to do this, but I feel like since you're co-host, I'm just allowed to, uh, I said do the same thing for this image.
[00:15:35] So I didn't even like necessarily repeat the prompt, but I said, you know, please include the sidecar sink cap. And then we get Ames version. I don't feel like th, this looks a ton like you and me, but it did get the bricks in the background of your headshot. It even got the stripes on your shirt. Uh, pretty impressive all the way around.
[00:15:53] And then I went a step further and asked it to create a little infographic for the side cursing podcast with both of those. So, Amee, you were talking about context. This is pretty impressive that it then used both of those images to create a new one. And it says, sidecar Sync podcast, the intersection of AI and association so that.
[00:16:10] Was kind of step one to this. Then I went to Hera. This is inside the Hera platform. I dropped in, I had to do this separately. So first I dropped in my avatar and then I generated a script. I used Claude to help me generate a really kind of short and funny script, which you'll see really soon. I was also able to, the voice, lots of options here.
[00:16:34] I did some digging because the voice is pretty good and I had a hunch that they may have used 11 labs and they do, so you're actually getting 11 labs audio within the heater platform, which is great. I typed in my script here, I chose the voice and then I said she's an enthusiastic podcast host. I pressed generate and then it probably took about three to five minutes and I got my clip.
[00:16:57] I did the same thing with uh, Amit's clip. Right now I am going to stop sharing and we are going to play for you all the clip. Hey there, sidecars sync listeners. I'm Cartoon Mallory created using chat GT's image generator and brought to life with he's animation technology. Pretty wild, right? While I might not have all the nuances of the real Mallory, this technology showcases how AI is transforming content creation.
[00:17:28] Just think about the possibilities for your association. Personalized welcome messages, multilingual communications, or scaling your educational content without having to be on camera all the time. But hey, don't just take my word for it. Let's check in with my cartoon colleague, cartoon Amme. What do you think about this technology?
[00:17:47] Thanks Cartoon Mallory. I have to say, being a cartoon is quite liberating. I. No bad hair days and I can present from anywhere without leaving my desk. On a more serious note, what excites me most is how this technology could help associations with limited resources, create professional video content at scale.
[00:18:06] Think about educational modules or personalized outreach that would otherwise be impossible to produce. The technology will only get better from here and forward thinking organizations should start experimenting. Now, back to you real, Mallory and Amme. What did you think when you saw, uh, cartoon Mallory and Cartoon Am?
[00:18:26] It put a big smile on my face and it was, it was so funny. I knew, uh, that you were preparing for this pod and, and working with these kinds of tools. I'm like, that's, that's so awesome. 'cause it's, it's, um, it's fun and fun Things obviously are enjoyable, but they also really open up, uh, perhaps a creative avenue that you might not.
[00:18:45] Otherwise choose to exercise in some ways. And you think about like, oh, the association's in a serious business, right? But like, yes, you are, but your members also like fun stuff. And um, you also can think of this as like, okay, well what else can you do with this? And maybe it's not always cartoons, but I think cartoons can be a very powerful way of communicating something important, something serious, but um, in just a really expressive, interesting way.
[00:19:08] Um, but um, what you showed earlier I think is really interesting and it ties back to what I was describing about omni modal models. Um. Well, that you had this conversation. It was just natural conversation that you were having with the model. Um, it knew what you had said earlier. It knew what it generated in terms of the images.
[00:19:25] It outputted, it knew about your input images, it just all blended together. So, um, we've said in this spot a number of times that at some point. It won't be this kind of model, that kind of model. It'll just be like AI or AI model, right? And all these models kind of blend together, and that's kind of where things are going.
[00:19:41] So it's pretty impressive what you're able to demonstrate. And if you think about where we were even maybe six months ago, um, I don't think either of us would've predicted that we'd have it this quickly, that this level of capability would be in our hands. And it's, it's essentially free. And I'm pretty sure, was it last week or the week before am myth on the podcast?
[00:19:59] I'm just not sure if it's out yet. We were talking about the next step we'll be creating a video version of these cartoons and literally it was already available. Yeah, it goes back to the idea of breaking our brains. We've gotta just constantly challenge ourselves. Totally. What does this make you? Yeah, next, next we need like a, a hologram or something, so.
[00:20:16] Oh, uh oh. That'll be, I'm sure, I'm sure we could do it if we really wanted to. We could probably have a hologram at digital now. Um, you mentioned kind of that this is a, a fun technology. I had, frankly, a blast with it. I highly recommend if you all I think you do listening to this podcast, have some interest in this stuff that you play around with it.
[00:20:36] I think it could be also a really fun tool to like create a cartoon for your family, for your children if you have them, but. Where does your mind amme go for associations here like, like zooming out broader landscape trend lines? What does this make you think of for associations? Well, first of all, I'm just thankful that you didn't make my character sing or rap, so thank you.
[00:20:56] I okay to, I didn't know I probably would've made your character sing a rap. I didn't know I could do that, but next time. That that'll be, that'll be in a future episode, I guess. Um, so in terms of what I think happens with associations, I think about this from a more general lens, which is how do we communicate and how do we communicate with each other effectively in an interesting way?
[00:21:16] How do we communicate something that might be kind of dry in kind of a little bit more exciting way? So you take some key concepts, whether you're communicating with, with kids or adults, whether it's professional context or personal. Um. If we can communicate, if we can express ourselves in different ways, in ways that go beyond our personal creative ability, right?
[00:21:37] Like for me, I can barely do stick figures, but now I can express ideas I have in all sorts of cool kind of artistic ways, right? Um. Is it real art? Is it not real art? I'll leave that to the philosophers and the artists to decide. I know there's a lot of controversy about this, but it allows people like me who have zero artistic capability to have an outlet where I can communicate ideas in a completely different way than I've ever been able to.
[00:22:00] Uh, so that is exciting and that leads to an organizational capability to say. How can we best communicate? How can we best educate? How can we best deliver content? Those are the types of things that are so exciting for associations because associations are in the business of educating. Of course, communicating is the fundamental of everything, but educating really are the applications, and then of course, connecting people.
[00:22:22] Um, and so, you know, connecting people for professional networking or connecting people to collaborate as volunteers in a committee, or connecting people to, let's say, collaborate on a standard that. Uh, maybe competing organizations are coming together in an industry to work together to collaborate on an open standard to advance the industry, um, and on and on and on.
[00:22:43] Um, there's so many ways that connecting us is such a critical part of what associations do. So to me, it's all of those things. I think some very immediate obvious applications are, think about your learning content. Think about adding some more dynamic elements to. Pretty static learning content. I know we're gonna be doing this with the, you know, all of our AI content, the Sidecar AI Learning Hub is, we're gonna have a lot more fun stuff like this to illustrate concepts because why not?
[00:23:11] Right? It would've been prohibitive to create cartoons or to create tons of infographics everywhere to create whatever. Uh, but now we have all these additional creative expression outlets. To me, that's the real idea here. And something, I mean, not to get into the philosophy of the art side, but that, that side is interesting to me for sure.
[00:23:29] But it's not like Sidecar would have gone out there and and contracted an individual to animate all of our content. We just wouldn't have done it. We would've recorded it ourselves to be frank. So I do agree with you that this is opening doors to things that we never could have considered. Uh, you did mention the AI Learning Hub Content Automation Am Me and.
[00:23:49] I'm just curious from your perspective, would you consider incorporating like cartoons? I know we're using percent human Okay, human AI avatars right now, but would you use both either or? Oh, a hundred percent. I, I, I would love to see that happen because to me it's about how effective are you at getting the material across in a way that the person can relate to, can understand, uh, and will retain, and so.
[00:24:11] That doesn't mean like everything's a cartoon 'cause then you kind of kill the point. But like, if you introduce bits and pieces here and there, I think people look forward to that. You know, you have a lesson like, you know, data in the age of ai, which is like, you know, super important, but maybe not the most compelling, like, exciting topic in the world.
[00:24:27] Like, don't watch that video at night. But, um, you know, but what if we had a little cartoony thing in there, right? Or maybe the cartoon comes to life and each of the panels in the can cartoon individually comes to life as an animation with cool audio and there's some singing in there or whatever, you know, like.
[00:24:41] There's all these ideas, and if you can do that effectively just by thinking about the idea or even have the AI help you brainstorm the idea, that becomes really powerful. It makes, it makes us more effective at what we do, so we 100% will be experimenting with this across sidecars AI learning content.
[00:24:57] You'll probably start to see this stuff in our LinkedIn posts. You'll see it in blogs. You'll see more and more and more of this content. And think about this, this way too. If you're doing these things and your competitors to the extent you have any in your market, but you have competitors by the way, in terms of attention, uh, that people give you, right?
[00:25:13] Like their time is split amongst, however, however many different things they look at. So you are competing for attention. So if you are doing this and others are not, you have a significant advantage. And so that vantage may not last forever, but uh, it lasts for a period of time and I think that's exciting as well.
[00:25:28] Um, there I quickly mention about, um. Content modalities like this that I think is underappreciated and it's an emerging area that I, I predict is gonna become a much bigger deal, um, in learning in the next, say, 12 to 24 months. And that has to do with interactive games or interactive role play type scenarios.
[00:25:47] So think about this, um, if you were developing a learning module for your members, and you know, most of it's, let's say one way, uh, single directional content like. Prerecorded videos or you know, downloadable assets. They could read worksheets. That's all great, and there's like a bulk of content, but sometimes you say, Hey, you know, this particular concept is so important.
[00:26:07] We're gonna have some kind of interactive learning. Exercise. Right? And a lot of times these things are frankly, pretty lame. They're, they're not very interesting. Um, but what if you could have an AI just generate a game specific to that lesson, right? Where you say, oh, for this particular lesson on AI data platforms, we're trying to teach people how they can connect all their disparate data sources to the AI data platform.
[00:26:31] Let's give them a game of some sort and we don't even specify what, but we go to Claude 3.7 or we go to Gemini two five Pro. Both are outstanding at this task and we say. We have a learning module that has this kind of content. We want you to think up of five ideas for games that will reinforce these concepts.
[00:26:48] And then not only will it give you those ideas, but it'll actually build game for you. And in an interactive artifact in Claude, you'll be able to play the game and see if you like it. And if you like it, you can literally copy and paste it into your LMS. So the opportunity, and of course you could have done this in the past.
[00:27:03] But that production budget for what I just described probably would be six figures for a single such game, right? Maybe higher. And now all of a sudden it's essentially free. So it's again, the, the thematic concept here we're talking about the broader stroke is going from scarcity to abundance, and that's extremely powerful.
[00:27:21] And if you're still a skeptic of delivering rather serious information through fun mediums, I've got a shout out. Nin Geo, which is the company that we use for cybersecurity training. And all of their lessons are done with cartoons and obviously cybersecurity is quite a serious topic, but they're really good.
[00:27:38] I enjoy watching those videos. I get a lot out of them, so be open-minded. All right. Topic two for today is another fun one. I'm calling this the fun episode because we're talking about Disney Robots. So Nvidia Disney Research and Google DeepMind have announced a collaboration to develop Newton, an open source physics engine designed to simulate robotic movements and real world and environments.
[00:28:02] The announcement was made by Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong during the GTC 2025 conference or GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. This partnership aims to revolutionize Disney's Next Generation Entertainment robots, including Star Wars Inspired BDX Droids, which are set to debut at Disney Theme Parks worldwide starting in 2026.
[00:28:24] I'll add an aside here. If you haven't seen this video on YouTube of the keynote where he brings them on stage, you've gotta check it out there. Adorable. They're not scary at all. They're really cute. Um, some key features of Newton. It allows developers to program robotic interactions with various objects like food items, cloth, sand, and other deformable materials.
[00:28:45] The engine is designed to make robots more expressive and capable of handling complex tasks with greater accuracy. Newton integrates with Google DeepMind's robotic tools, which simulates multi-joint robot movements. Disney plans to use Newton to enhance its robotic character platform for lifelike and interactive robots.
[00:29:04] The BDX Droids showcase during the keynote represent just the beginning. Disney Imagineering. SVP Kyle Lachlan stated that this collaboration will enable the creation of robotic characters that are more engaging and capable of connecting with guests in uniquely Disney ways. Beyond entertainment robots, though Newton has potential applications and industrial robotics, AI driven humanoid assistance and manufacturing systems.
[00:29:29] It addresses the SIM to real gap, enabling robots to learn from simulations and adapt their movements for real world conditions. In addition to Newton, Nvidia unveiled GR in one, an AI foundation model for humanoid robots aimed at improving perception and reasoning capabilities, the company also introduced next generation AI Chips, Blackwell Ultra and Reuben, and a new line of personal AI computers.
[00:29:55] So Amit, this is another fun topic that I think still has. Quite serious implications. We've been keeping an eye on robots basically since the inception of the sidecar sink. Uh, why do you think that's important for our listeners to keep an eye on? Everything we talk about with AI is in the digital world.
[00:30:11] And so when we have robotics, we're able to connect AI with the physical world, or put in other way, it's going from bits to atoms, right? So it, it makes it real in our minds and it becomes physically real to us, right? Uh, so I think the applications are enormous. There's a lot of things in the world that are not solvable, purely with digital solutions.
[00:30:30] You know, as much as we say that we want everything to jump on, uh, digitization and therefore jump on the back of Moore's Law and the internet. And now ai, there's certain things that don't work that way. Uh, like how do you take care of an aging population? How do you take care of, uh, more and more people that need medical care who either can't afford it or we don't have enough doctors and nurses to go around?
[00:30:52] Right. So those are, that's one application that I think robotics is going to be very, very interesting for. Um. And there's other things too, too, like think about like, you know, all the different things that you have happening in your house. Um, either you know, you don't want to do your own laundry or perhaps, you know, you can't.
[00:31:08] Right? What about something to help you do that, that's, uh, affordable and, and scalable and all that. So I. There's a lot of things in life where robotics will be extremely powerful. Um, I think the consumer facing stuff, uh, is interesting because if you think about advanced robotics thus far, it's either been like demo videos that you've seen at shows or online, um, or you've seen them in industrial settings.
[00:31:31] Robotics has been a thing in, in, in. Much more of like fixed location robotics where you have like a robotic arm doing auto manufacturing or something, but nonetheless, robotics. Um, but those robotics were like kind of pre AI in the sense that they were much more like specifically programmed to do very, very specific tasks, whereas.
[00:31:49] Part of what has been announced here that's kind of under the hood, if you will, of, of, um, you know, the, the cute Disney robots is this physics engine. Um, and this new foundation model for robotics that integrates with all the other work that DeepMind's done, which is this interesting, through a collaboration between obviously a consumer brand that's pioneering in this kind of stuff with Disney, um, Google's DeepMind who have some of the best AI researchers in the world, and of course Nvidia, who's done tremendous things with, with compute and hardware.
[00:32:16] So. Um, it's worth watching and I think that, um, you know, the ability for a platform like this to be available for other people to build on top of is also what's exciting because there will be a proliferation of robotics if you can make it easier. Way less expensive for anyone who has an idea for robotics to just build on top of a generalized robotics platform, which is what Nvidia and Google are after Disney's, after, you know, cute robots in the theme park to get, you know, people to come mm-hmm.
[00:32:45] To Disney World and, and other applications as well and, and movies and so forth. But, um, you know, ultimately for Google and Nvidia, they're after a generalized platform. Mm-hmm. So would it be fair to say maybe robotics will have less of an impact? On internal associations operations, but maybe more a huge impact potentially on their members.
[00:33:06] I don't know. I mean, I, I think it depends on, like, anything where the movement of something in the physical world is necessary, could be something that robotics helps with, so, okay. You know, I don't know if there's certain associations that have, you know, inventory in their office or whatever they're doing, you know, I probably less and less of that these days.
[00:33:25] But, uh, I definitely think in the field where people are working, um, you know, in, in fields that are fundamentally like, you know. People facing or industrial settings? A hundred percent. Um, but I think this is gonna affect all of us in our daily lives a lot faster than we probably anticipate. Um, I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of this decade it's fairly commonplace, but still probably a little bit on the expensive side, but, but fairly commonplace still.
[00:33:49] To have some consumer type robots in the household doing some basic tasks, um, wouldn't surprise me at all. And if they're cute enough, like the Disney robots, people might be accepting of those. Mm. I might get one. If it does my laundry and it looks like that, uh, I might be. I might be open. We'll see. Yeah.
[00:34:06] Well, I mean, you know, I think Robotic Companions have existed for a long time. Like I know it's a big thing in Japan. Sony had a companion robot dog like two decades ago. Oh yeah, of course. Didn't do very much, but it was cute. Mm-hmm. And it sold pretty well. And there's been more and more advanced versions of that.
[00:34:20] Uh, and there's, the other thing to remember is, you know, we're talking about something that we thought would be number one. It's interesting to our audience, probably interesting to most people that this is going on. Then this is in addition to and on top of all the other advancements in humanoid robotics that have been going on.
[00:34:34] We've talked about that a little bit on this pod. Um, there's so much going on there. There's so much investment happening. There's so much research happening there along with, you know, the continual progress and industrial robotics. All this is coming together because the common denominator now is that you can turn it into software that actually drives these things.
[00:34:51] You can turn it into, um, general purpose foundation models, and the physics engine kind of compliments that. Right. Uh. So physics engine is deterministic. It's something that says, Hey, like, we know this is the way things will react and based on the laws of, of physics essentially. So it's, it's basically an engine, um, kinda like in a way, like a game engine, you know, the way certain things work in, in video games.
[00:35:13] But yeah, this is a real world, three dimensional, um, you know, real time open source physics engine. It's a lot of words to basically say. It's a piece of software that understands how the world works, whereas AI models don't really understand that. Some people are out there trying to create, uh, neural networks that have better understanding of the real world, and I think that's great, but ultimately you want the neural network to be complimented by a deterministic piece of software that has a rules engine that says, look, this is actually the way the physics would work in that situation, uh, which is gonna be a lot more consistent and reliable.
[00:35:44] And then leverage the AI to make good choices about what's the right action or, or, you know, reaction to have based on what's happening. So I think it's a great combination. It's what a lot of people have been talking about. You know, the natural progression. There's, there's nothing really novel about like what they're trying to do, but I think the combination of this skillset is really interesting because, you know, you're doing it in a way where you have innovators in three different dimensions coming together to partner.
[00:36:09] So I thought that was particularly interesting too. Um, ultimately for associations. Uh, I can't say that this has like this specific applicability to you tomorrow. It's more like over the next five years, 10 years, your profession, your industry will likely be affected by this and maybe there'll be some applications for you within your life or within your own work.
[00:36:29] Mm-hmm. So in the situation where an association's industry profession is surely going to be impacted by robotics, let's say manufacturing, for example, what. Responsibility do you think the association has at this point? I feel like there's a lot of question marks still. We're seeing a lot of advancements and investment in this space, but it's not like we're seeing right now major disruption occurring.
[00:36:52] Do you feel like association should get ahead of the curve, start producing content about that? Uh, like what do you think? I mean, the association should be the voice of their sector and should be looking at things that are gonna affect the sector and help the sector prepare, help the sector advance itself by taking advantage of these technologies.
[00:37:09] So that's generally a true statement across all the different fields associations represent. Um. What I would say with this is that it might be some of the less obvious industries. So for example, industrial automation or robotics manufacturing, auto manufacturing in particular. But a lot of other manufacturing has had a, a heavy emphasis on automation, uh, and robotics for a long, long time.
[00:37:29] So it's definitely not like a novel idea to talk to manufacturing leaders about like how to add more robotics or same thing with like industrial warehousing, like someone like Amazon and lots of other warehouses have that, where I think it's probably less anticipated, but where this advancement. Will be, uh, more likely to have an impact is some of the kind of softer, fuzzier environments.
[00:37:50] So if you're in a factory or if you're in a warehouse, there's a high degree of predictability or a higher degree of predictability in terms of your environments, your surroundings, the kind of objects you're dealing with. It's a lot more, uh, mechanistic, right? Whereas, what about housekeeping? What about painting?
[00:38:05] What about delivering food? What about all the things where you're in the real world, where there's all this like chaotic scenarios happening, much caused by us as people, but just like the weather or like, you know, new Orleans potholes or whatever, right? Like, so you have all this like chaos and so having robotics that is smart or that are smart enough to handle that and to still accomplish whatever their task is, is interesting.
[00:38:27] So if a world. Comes up in the Nazis in future where certain types of tasks like folding laundry. But if you, if you take that one and say, well extrapolate from that, well, it can probably also wash your floors. It can probably also wash your windows. It can probably also make your bed maybe, um, and do some other things.
[00:38:45] So that's interesting. But then what's the other applications of that? So in, at, at kind of like an industry level, what does that mean for like. The house cleaning industry. Mm-hmm. Um, does it mean everyone has a housekeeping robot? Does it mean that there are businesses that start up, that lease these out or rent them out?
[00:39:01] Or you have a service where like your housekeeper that comes to your house is a robot. Um, what about the industrial setting? Right? So there's, there's all these kinds of questions and that's one example, right? What about in areas where there's tremendous labor shortages? Like, um, when Hurricane Ida came through New Orleans a handful of years ago, I think you were still here when that happened, right?
[00:39:19] Yeah. Yeah. Um, it was, it was terrible for a lot of reasons. Mm-hmm. The power was out for four weeks or three weeks. Um, but also it caused a lot of roof damage and it was, it took forever to get a roofer to come to your house. It's a dangerous occupation. There's not that many people who do it normally.
[00:39:34] They don't have demand at the level they did. Right. So, of course everyone's mad. I can't believe it's gonna take me six months to get my roof repaired. Well, normally they don't repair half the roofs in the city all at the same time. Right. Yeah. So it's, it's kinda makes sense. But what if there were some general purpose robots that could learn to be roof?
[00:39:48] Installers very quickly, and there's no issue with like risk or hazard of safety or insurance requirements for these robots to be on your roof other than falling in your head or something. But like much reduced insurance concerns compared to mm-hmm. Hu humans on your, on your roof and all of a sudden everybody's roof's repaired like way less expensively and way faster.
[00:40:06] Right. So that's an interesting scenario where you have these choke points or disaster relief, right? Um, or search and rescue. There's just so many applications where robotics could, um, not just give us money, which I think. By itself is obviously gonna be the, the drumbeat of economic decision making will always be there, right?
[00:40:24] To find that, um, but to also find things that we cannot do. But for the scale of this kind of emerging technology, that's where I think it gets more exciting. I. That's a great point of me. So I feel like AI is gonna be able to do the knowledge work and the physical work. Uh, last question for today's episode, 'cause I heard you mention this briefly.
[00:40:44] I don't think it was on the podcast. Uh, but you mentioned to me that you were doing some college tours with your son. I. So he is starting to think about what he's gonna do in his future. Amit, what are you recommending to your children in terms of like career paths that they go down when we're having these kinds of conversations?
[00:41:01] You know, it's a tough one. I think part of it is the follow your passion kind of thing matters to some extent. I think it, it. I mean it matters as a person, but like in terms of career opportunity, I guess is how I'm trying to answer your question. Um, my thought process for both of my kids and they're both getting closer to that time is, uh, pick something where you get really good at communicating and you're also really good at connecting with people where your interactions with people are really a lot of the value and that, and that can be said to be true for a lot of different professions, but I think that.
[00:41:33] The AI is going to do most of the cognitive labor for most people very soon. I don't know if that's in three years or in seven years, but I mean, in some ways we're already there, right? With a lot of the things we're doing. It's also to expand the range of possibilities. This episode in a lot of, uh, respects, it's the fun episode.
[00:41:51] It's also the possibility expanding episode because yeah, the things we can do with ai, you know, it's, it's not like we're displacing tons of graphic artists to create all these cartoons. We just never would've created the cartoons. Of course, the inverse of that is also true. People who were creating cartoons will use this tool instead of hiring graphic artists.
[00:42:06] So there's, there is that issue. Um. But the demand for something that is, you know, becoming abundant is enormous. And that's gonna create more ideas and more opportunities. We tend to be pretty good. We collectively, as a species, tend to be pretty good at, like, coming up with new ideas. Um, so being in a creative pursuit of some sort or having a creative, like thread to a discipline.
[00:42:26] So I'm just trying to get my kids to, to maybe try a couple different things. Mm-hmm. Um, and to really focus on, on. Like, just getting good at building relationships and communicating, um, certainly hard skills and specific disciplines. That's like, it's a very generic answer in a way. Um, that's important.
[00:42:43] But, you know, ultimately I think that's gonna be what's super, super important for us. So lean on being human, lean on humanity, it seems like is kind of the advice. Well, everybody, thank you for tuning into this fun but serious episode. We will see you all next week. Thanks for tuning into Sidecar Sync this week.
[00:43:05] Looking to dive deeper. Download your free copy of our new book, Ascend: Unlocking the Power of AI for Associations. It's packed with insights to power your association's journey with ai. And remember, sidecar is here with more resources from webinars to bootcamps to help you stay ahead in the association world.
[00:43:26] We'll catch you in the next episode. Until then, keep learning, keep growing, and keep disrupting.