Futuristic

In this episode of Futuristic, Cameron and Steve reunite after a three-month break to reflect on how far artificial intelligence and robotics have come since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. They chart the wild rise from OpenAI’s first conversational model to today’s trillion-dollar valuations, integrated browsers, agentic coding tools, and the dawn of humanoid robots. Along the way they weigh the “bubble” narrative, the myth of a job apocalypse, and the cultural impact of AI on everything from creativity to capitalism. The conversation pivots from nostalgia for the early internet to speculation about the next three years—when everyone, they predict, will be working with personal AI agents and, perhaps, living alongside household robots. The banter swings between philosophy, tech history, humour, and a few pulled hamstrings. FULL TRANSCRIPT Futuristic recording – Oct 30, 2025 Cameron: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Futuristic Podcast, episode 46. It is the 31st of October, 2025. The first time I’ve seen your face on a screen except on TikTok, Steve Sammartino. Since August 4th was the last time you and I did an episode, I did one with my old friend, Nick Johnson, principal of Toowoomba Ankin School on August 23. But we have not done a podcast for nearly three months, Steve. Not because there’s been nothing happening, just because there’s too much happening, and you’ve been too busy. Steve: Sounds so needy. I apologize wholeheartedly, Cameron. And, uh, the fact that you didn’t delete my phone from your contacts Cameron: No Steve: is revelatory, and I like it. It’s good. You’re a good man. And Cameron: revelatory. Steve: it and I missed it. Our chats because [00:01:00] every time I chat to you I get a little bit smarter. So I’ve been in Cameron: Same, same. Steve: and I’m glad we are going to, uh, unpack. Cameron: I’ve got less hair than the last time we talked. Not because it’s falling out, but just because it’s hard to tell with, there’s glare coming through my window. But, um, I am, uh, Sean Light so bright. Steve: And I just asked, when did you go gray? ’cause you got a really good gray mop there. When did it, were you one of Cameron: Well, I’m, yeah, I, I started going gray at 23. I’m white. I’ve been white for a lot longer than I’ve been gray, but Yeah. Steve: Blonde is area part of the Aryan Nation, Cameron: Or as the Mormons like to say white and delight them. If you wanna get into heaven, you need to be white and delight them. Steve: Do you? Cameron: Hmm. Steve: me. All right. Cameron: Steve? Um. In terms of what to talk about today. There’s been a lot of news in the last [00:02:00] three months and too much to catch up on, obviously, and I thought singers were coming up to the third anniversary of chat, GPT, which hit the world in November of 2022. It might be a good time to stop and reflect where have we come from, where are we today, and where do you think we might be three years from now? What do you think about that as a model, Steve? Steve: Perfect. It is the perfect time for a review. Three years. Things work in threes. It is the perfect time to review it because it’s been a pretty radical three years and maybe in some ways we’re in the [00:03:00] trough of disillusionment now. A lot of people are starting to ask questions. The bubble word comes up, which comes up with every technology revolution. And bubbles aren’t bad anyway. If a bubble bursts, the beneficiaries are usually the people because there’s been an excessive investment in capital and that can benefit all of us because the infrastructure gets built out and they overinvested and we need that. It happened with broadband cables and early internet and, and now it’s, it’s happening again potentially. And that’s good ’cause you want overinvestment because the beneficiaries are usually the wider populace when it comes to and technology Revolutions. Cameron: Yes. Look, there’s obviously a ton of investment, Steve: Mm. Cameron: ton of hype going into all things AI and robotics we’re to, [00:04:00] NVIDIA’s just became a $5 trillion company open. AI is suggesting they might IPO at a trillion dollar valuation. I mean, it is, uh, like bonkers stuff, absolutely bonkers. But I thought I would start this by pulling up the blog post that OpenAI put out in November, 2002. It was November 30th, so we’re about a month away from the five year anniversary. It was pretty simple. It said, we’ve trained a model called Chat, GPT, which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for chat GPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. Chat GPT is a sibling model to instruct GPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response. We are excited [00:05:00] to introduce chat GPT to get users feedback and learn about its strengths and weaknesses during the research preview usage of chat. GPT is free. Try it now@chatgt.com. Then there were some samples of ways to use it. Limitations Chachi PT sometimes write plausible sounding, but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Well, I’m glad they fixed that. Uh, but. These were simpler times in November, 2022. Do you remember when you first heard about it and when you first used it? Steve: I was actually using GPT, uh, the, the model before, it might’ve been a 2.5 or a three, uh, through one of the APIs. ’cause the APIs were released earlier. wasn’t Grammarly. I’m trying to remember the name of it now. And it was, and it blew my mind the first time I saw it. Uh, when I went on to Chacha, bt I do remember it [00:06:00] being a super revolution, and we can remind listeners that they had a hundred million users in the first month, fastest adopted consumer product in history. also they’ve got 983 million monthly users now, which is pretty radical. You know, maybe one quarter of the internet. And a, Cameron: Wow. Steve: of people don’t have, call it unlimited data like we have in western markets. So you’d pretty much say if you’re in a Western market, you’re on it. Uh, it’s decimated search. I, I did say a statistic, which blew my mind on search. Now, if you’re a first page search on Google, first page search item, traffic is down. Reportedly just came out, uh, yesterday, 79%. And that’s two reasons. The first one is the AI dropped down summaries that happens in Google, which to their credit, they’ve adopted the reality of where they are. Unlike Kodak and said, look, people are going this way. We just have to adopt it and work out the business model later. [00:07:00] But also, I know that I use chat GBT 80% of the time when I once would use search. And I simply ask it for the live feeds of, tell me where you got it from, what happened today. And you know, those small prompts to make sure the data you’re getting isn’t just a hi historical construct. And it, it really has changed the way we use the internet fundamentally. And even though the last, I think the last maybe. Three or six months. A lot’s been happening, but nothing fundamental. I would say easy to forget how far we’ve come in those three years because the first version of chat, GBT when it was launched in, in November of 2022, remember that was an 18 month old database, and then it was six months old, and then now it’s live. It didn’t have code bases, didn’t have Dali, didn’t have image recognition, didn’t have video. It’s easy to forget that [00:08:00] it isn’t just chat GBT. It’s actually been really dramatic and we’ve almost been spoiled by the fact that every iteration, most of them, for 80% of that time in the past three years has been incredible and wowing. And maybe in the last few months, because we haven’t been wowed with the most recent iteration of Cha JBT, then all of a sudden, oh, bubble Bubble came out. Cameron: I’ve got an article here from the 5th of December, 2022 New York Times by Kevin Ros. He says, like most nerds who read science fiction, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how society will greet true artificial intelligence. If and when it arrives, will we panic start sucking up to our new robot overlords, ignore it, and go about our daily lives? So it’s been fascinating to watch the Twitter sphere try to make sense of chat, GPTA new cutting edge AI chat bot that was open for testing this week. Chat GPT is quite simply the best artificial intelligence chat bot ever released to the [00:09:00] general public. It was built by open ai, the San Francisco AI company that is also responsible for tools like GPT-3 and Dali two, the breakthrough image generator that came out this year. Um, goes on to say that, uh, AI chatbots are usually terrible, but chat GPT feels different, smarter, weirder, more flexible. It can write jokes, some of which are actually funny, working computer code and college level essays. It can also guess at medical diagnosis, create text-based Harry Potter games and explain scientific concepts at multiple levels of difficulty. And, uh, you know, I always like to go back and read news articles from the early days of the internet, 93, 94, 95, and see how people were talking about it. Um, he finishes this article though by saying. Personally, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that chat, GPTA chat bot that some people think could make Google obsolete and that has already been compared to the iPhone in [00:10:00] terms of its potential impact on society isn’t even open AI’s best A