[00:00:09.01] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.12] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.26] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.22] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.24] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast, where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back.

[00:00:24.00] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:24.24] - Gordon
Thank you for joining us. It's been a busy week, and you had a friend of yours come visit us.

[00:00:31.28] - Taylor
I did.

[00:00:32.10] - Gordon
Very briefly.

[00:00:33.09] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:00:33.22] - Gordon
Yeah. Someone who came from far away, who was here for just a few hours and then disappeared again. And I believe he actually watches our podcast. So do you want to say hello?

[00:00:45.10] - Taylor
Yeah. So his name is Luke. He's my friend that I met from the Oxygen Discord, and we became friends and we built a couple of projects together, personal ones. And then we just became better friends over the years. And he came... He lives in Japan, so he came over to the UK. And so I got to see him and hang out with him.

[00:01:10.17] - Gordon
Yeah, very briefly. It was part of a day, wasn't it? He got in very early and then he had to leave pretty much immediately to go off again. Anyway, thank you for watching. And let's get straight into our topics. You went first last week. Shall I go first this week?

[00:01:30.07] - Taylor
Okay.

[00:01:30.24] - Gordon
Perfect. So this week we had some incredible news. GPT 4.0, no, 4.O was released. Now, we have spoken about AI before, And I think we can all agree that OpenAI was the first and the company that made the most impact with AI before everyone followed and copy-catted, and there's been an awful lot of jump in functionality and what these big language models can do. We've got Llama, which is a completely different system. We've got Claude and all of these systems that have come out. And OpenAI, with their ChatGPT 4, were starting to be forgotten and left in the dust, really. But as I suspected would happen, they've been secretly squirrelling away in the background and getting their new system ready to release, and it was announced this week. So it's quite phenomenal.

[00:02:45.06] - Taylor
Okay.

[00:02:45.26] - Gordon
It's quite phenomenal. So what it's doing is it's not only a lot better at understanding context and understanding what you're asking of it when you're typing it in, it's also now got the ability to respond to video and photos. So you can basically have a live video and show it things. And it also allows you to talk to it. And it will talk back to you.

[00:03:16.26] - Taylor
That's very cool.

[00:03:17.17] - Gordon
So, I watched a couple of demos. We'll put a link in the show notes for the announcement so you can go and watch the videos yourself. But I watched a couple of the demos that they were using. One was asking ChatGPT to describe the environment that it was in, using the camera. So the person was holding up the camera, showing around, and basically, ChatGPT was talking in a very, very realistic manner, didn't sound robotic in any way, and basically saying, "well, it looks like you're in some sort of studio setting, and it looks like from the tripods and the camera and the microphones that you have set up, along with the lighting that you've positioned, that you could be recording or doing some sort of live stream." And it's just exactly what the situation was. And then the second video I watched was about having one AI talk to another AI. And the way it was doing it is it was using ChatGPT, ChatGPT 4.O. I keep saying 4.0 because it looks like a 4 and then a 0, but it's not. It's four and then O. And they were talking to each other. So it's the same AI. But the person that was there was explaining to the first one, "you are going to be chatting with another AI which has a camera. So you can ask the other AI questions. You can direct what that AI is looking at. You can explain what you want it to do. You can ask questions and just interact with it and find out as much as you can about what's going on." And then he paused that one and he talked to the other one and said, "You are going to be the camera for another AI that you will be talking with. They are going to ask you to look at certain things and describe what you're seeing, and you need to do your best to explain to them as if it were someone who was blind or can't see, and you are the eyes for that other AI." and it just let them talk amongst themselves. It was going, "So I can see there's a camera and the lighting is very subtle, and there's a lovely plant behind you which adds a bit of greenery and organicness to the scene." And then someone came out behind the person and did bunny ears behind it and then just disappeared off again. And the person who was there was saying, "Can you tell me, did anything happen just recently?" It said, "Actually, yes, it did. Someone came out and did a very comical bunny ears above your head." And he then said, "That's really good. Could you both sing a song about what you've now learnt. And to make it interesting, you get to do one line each." And they started singing and the second one started, and he said, "I'm sorry, that really wasn't singing. Can you try that again and sing it this time?" And then started singing, and they both took it in turns to create this song about what they'd seen and what had been happening. So the way forward and the future for AI is looking so good because now it can interact with what's going on around it using our cameras and our voices. We don't have to type anymore and just wait. And what's really good, is they've brought the price down for this new model, and they're going to allow free ChatGPT users to also use this model.

[00:07:12.08] - Taylor
Exciting.

[00:07:12.15] - Gordon
Oh, pardon me. Really exciting. Have you played with it at all?

[00:07:17.08] - Taylor
No, I haven't really tested it yet, but it looks and sounds very interesting, and I think the possibilities and capabilities are definitely something that people will be testing, putting through the paces and seeing what it can come up with.

[00:07:32.09] - Gordon
I'm very interested to see what Apple do because they've not actually shown their hand yet as far as AI goes. But with the latest chips in the iPads that were announced last week, AI on device is very much a reality with the M4 chip. So it's possible at WWDC, which is the Worldwide Developers Conference for Apple, which normally happens in June. I think it's June ninth, something like that, this year. They normally go through all of their new programming APIs, and they talk about the new OS's for the computers and the phones and the mobile devices they have, and they talk about the next operating system. And it could be, everyone is talking about this, it could be that they are going to be introducing some sort of AI on device when they announce the next operating system updates, which is a very exciting prospect. And having seen what OpenAI are doing today, well, announced this week, it'll be interesting to see if Apple are close or have exceeded. There's obviously a lot of things that they could do because they've got their whole operating system. They control the camera, they control all the audio on a device. They can do things that other people can't do because they haven't got that integration with the hardware and the software. So it'll be interesting to see what happens. We'll know next month. Anything else you want to say on this?

[00:09:14.04] - Taylor
I don't think so. It's just interesting to see where it's all going.

[00:09:17.02] - Gordon
It is. It's very exciting. And it's actually, it was in the news this week, and a lot of people are getting very concerned about how good AI is getting. And it's very interesting to see how some people are embracing it and using it to do things that they wouldn't normally be able to do. People can now write really interesting prose, whereas maybe they weren't so good at English before, but now they can write blog posts, they can write books, they can do all sorts of things. With the AI graphics, you can create images that just don't exist anywhere else. And then there's lots of other people who are very concerned that it's potentially going to step on their toes as far as their job is concerned or their creativity, or that it's using their creative endeavours to actually be able to do what the new AIs are doing because it's learning from what's already available. So, yeah, it's very interesting to see where this goes and who embraces it and who doesn't. I have a feeling at some point the powers that be, governments, whatever, will step in and try and regulate this in some way. But so far that hasn't happened. We will see, it's going to be an interesting future. What would you What would you like to talk about, Taylor?

[00:10:46.06] - Taylor
So my topic this week is surrounding yourself with like-minded people.

[00:10:51.12] - Gordon
Oh, thank you.

[00:10:52.21] - Taylor
I have a couple of friends I talk to regularly, and they are all on a similar wavelength to me in terms of where they are in their business, what they do on the day to day, what their goals are, and being able to just talk to them, throw ideas out there, bounce ideas off of each other, go through the ideas and actually work out whether it's good, how we can improve it, what the best solution or pathway for that idea is. And a lot of the time I have these ideas, and I have a rough idea of how I think it should work or how I think it should be done. And then I have a chat with my friends and they bring things that I didn't even think about into the mix, really. And it always turns out 100 times better than what it would have been if I had just done it by myself. But it wouldn't be the same if it was just some random people that I gave these ideas to because they think along the same lines as I do in terms of what they're trying to achieve, and how they work, and their workflow and things like that it works really well. However, we all have our own different opinions, our own different workflows for certain things that we just keep to ourselves and we go, "That's really cool. I'm going to borrow that idea, but I'm going to put a spin on and use it the way I want to use it or how I prefer to use it." A good example is the way you load CSS in a website. There are different ways you can do that. You can put it in your child theme, for example, as there's just a style .css file. You could put it in a custom code snippet plug-in or code snippet plug-in and load it that way. And there's no right or wrong, really. Everyone has their own opinions on how they think that it should be done, how they prefer to work. Although one way may be better performance-wise, it doesn't work for their workflow and what may save a few milliseconds on load time actually slows them down by a couple of minutes by just changing the way that they are writing the CSS or where they're saving it and things like that. And so these ideas, although there's no right or wrong, we can use those to our advantage to see, "Okay, that's how you did it. I didn't even think about that idea." It's something that I've changed recently as well when I was using a code snippet plug-in, and then I moved to storing them in the child theme because of the way my friend showed me and said, "look, this is how I do it." They didn't say "you should do it this way." They just showed me their way. And I thought, "Actually, I like that idea, but I'm going to put a spin on it and do it slightly different. I'm still going to put it in the child theme, but I'm going to load them with separate files and then include them." So what that means for a non-technical people is you separate out the styles into their own files, and then you have a master file where you import all of your separate files, essentially. You then can keep everything together while still making sure that you can separate them out into their own components essentially. So when I was using the code snippet plug-in, I was able to create a new snippet for every single part that I wanted to write styles for, for example. But yeah, it's using different components and just bouncing ideas off of ideas and friends and things like that.

[00:14:50.14] - Gordon
So do you find that by putting them in separate files, it's quicker to load them? Is there a performance impact in doing it in a different way?

[00:15:00.10] - Taylor
I haven't done any tests for the performance because I think they're very negligible. Unless you're having a file that has hundreds of thousands of lines of CSS or code, you're not going to notice much impact, especially on just standard brochure websites. But for me, in terms of the workflow of actually creating the styles, maintaining them in the future, it works for me. But what works for me doesn't work for everybody else. But it's good to get these ideas, and there's been other features, ideas, functionality separate from just styles and things that I have worked on with my friends, and they've brought these new concepts and these new thoughts to it that ended up making the overall product that we came up with a lot better.

[00:15:51.01] - Gordon
I think collaborating is a really good way to go. And as you say, collaborating with people who think along the same lines as you, but not the exact same way as you, is really good because then you've got another opinion. It's a bit like going to the doctors and getting a second opinion, isn't it? Someone else who knows what they're talking about, but might have a slightly different viewpoint. And it gives you it gives you sparks for ideas, and all of a sudden you'll go, "oh, that's a great idea. Why didn't I think of that?"

[00:16:23.18] - Taylor
It's very easy to have tunnel vision and only be thinking down one line, whereas there could be several tracks that you could be going down that would actually lead to a better destination. But because you weren't looking at those, especially when you're trying to code, you're thinking about how you're going to solve the problem, the immediate problem at hand, and sometimes taking a step back and looking at the end result that you're trying to achieve, it changes the whole way that you end up going about the problem.

[00:16:58.05] - Gordon
I think being too close to a project is also an issue. Sometimes if you step back or you let someone else look at it, they'll look at it with fresh eyes. And that's really important because they will see things that maybe you know about and you think, "Yeah, I need to do something, but I don't know what," or they'll see things and make suggestions and you'll suddenly go, "Oh, that's so much better. Why didn't I think about it?" And it's only because you've been so engrossed in the project that you haven't been able to look at it by stepping back. And that's something that I try and do when I can, and not near the end as well, because sometimes you want to try and do this in the middle of a project. So it gives you time to branch into a different direction if you need to, if it's going to be a better solution in the end.

[00:17:52.12] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:17:53.20] - Gordon
So that's everything I want to say.

[00:17:55.07] - Taylor
And me as well.

[00:17:56.09] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, you can find us on Facebook and on YouTube, hopefully. We weren't on Facebook last week. We had some sort of glitch, possibly because of the new system. But we managed to upload the... Not upload. We managed to put the YouTube version into the group so you'll still be able to see the episode. It's just not direct onto Facebook. So every week we try and get onto YouTube and on Facebook. Please like, share and subscribe.

[00:18:29.11] - Taylor
You can also to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:18:34.03] - Gordon
And if you're more of a listener, then you can listen to our podcast on your favourite podcast platform. Thank you for joining us. I'm away for some of next week, which I'll talk about the next episode. So depending on how much we have to get done next week, we will try and be with you next week, but it may not happen, in which case it will be the week after. But either way, it will be Friday this week coming or the one after at 1pm that we'll be with you. Until then, my name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:19:11.24] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:19:14.16] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:19:14.25] - Taylor
Bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes