Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Hi everybody, and welcome to another edition of the Southern Fried Podcast, a production of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. I'm Rex Nelson, Democrat Gazette senior editor, and we're going to talk about something that everybody else is talking about these days. We hadn't delved in it on this show yet though, and that's AI. And I've got a true expert with me today, Mike Stealey, partner from luminarc Global.
Mike is a Little Rock native, well known Arkansas entrepreneur, technology strategist, co founder of the Venture center here in downtown Little Rock, a national mentor and pitch coach through south by Southwest, Summerfest Tech and other startup organizations, and now the co founder of luminarc Global where he works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, workforce development and community ecosystems. Mike, welcome. Thank you for doing this because we all need to understand AI a lot better.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: Oh, thank you, Rex. And wow. I had no idea I'd done so much.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Oh, you have, you have. And I need an expert to explain some things to me. Now.
I will tell you, in my job as a newspaper columnist, I will never use AI to write.
I mean a columnist. It's your voice. That's what sets columnists apart.
Your voice. However, I do a lot of Internet research now and you know, Mike, when I do a Google search now and rather getting 30 stories and having to go through them and find the best one, having that AI summary has already from a research basis just been a world changer for me for research.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: Oh yeah, for sure. And I use the same thing, YouTube videos, another great example. Yeah, you can now just hit summarize on a YouTube video if it's 10, 45 minutes long, you don't necessarily have to listen to the whole thing to capture. And while you're listening, while you're watching it, you can literally be determining is this something that I really need to pay attention to or not? It's, you know, it's, it's, it can be amazing technology, but you got to be careful. Yeah, like everything else.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean, I have used it even to, even to the extent of when. When did Rex Nelson last write about Hope, Arkansas? You know, pull up an old column? You know, I can't remember when that column was, you know, in my head and it's just amazing. It will tell me, but why don't you give me a plain English definition? Because I'm kind of a plain guy, you know, here at the newspaper. A plain English definition of what AI really is.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: Sure. And the way I like to explain it is for me, this is the first technology I've used where the computer starts to feel a lot less like a machine that I have to operate and, and more like something that I can think with.
So keeping that in mind, I mean, what AI is or what we see as AI, you know, ChatGPT, Claude, all the variants of it, Gemini, you know, when you're doing Google searches, is basically what they call a large language model. And you can think of a large language model as this massive store of data that has been taken.
Books and websites and articles and code and now even images and had people, you know, learn what people describe as an image. You know, on Google, when certain places you need to go to a website and it asks you, you know, look at the buses and tell me which ones are buses, that's training. Right, so exactly. So it's understanding the context of everything. And once context is there now, now that software can really be good at predicting what's going to come next. So when you make repeated Google searches about the articles that you have written in the past or something that you're researching over time, it's actually learning from that, and it just gets better and better at anticipating what you want.
That does not mean it's alive. You know, it does not mean it has a soul or, you know, has wisdom or any kind of things, but it is extremely good as an assistant, you know, to help you think and discover things.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. I, you know, folks of folks of my age certainly have seen a lot of technological shifts in our lifetime. I mean, when I first started in the newspaper business as a teenager, I was typing on a manual typewriter. I moved here to the Arkansas Democrat as a sports writer, and we were on electric typewriters, and we were scanning those pages in so that editors could edit them on an actual computer. And wow, what an advancement.
And then I go to Washington in the 1980s, and I have a little Texas instrument with a screen a few inches wide that I used for four years. So the only thing I worked off of was it the TRS 40. Does that sound familiar?
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: So we go there, then the cell phone's invented, and then working in the governor's office, I get a BlackBerry for the first time. My gosh, what an invention.
Hung with that for years because I loved it. Then the iPhone comes along. So, you know, I've walked you through all of these massive technology changes that you and I have lived for. Why is this moment different from these past technology shifts that I'm talking about?
[00:06:41] Speaker B: Sure. And I do want to give a shout out to Arkansas Here, Right. As a native Arkansan, I was at hendricks, graduating in 88. I'd missed out on the punch cards. It was just technology, you know, they'd advanced past then, but, you know, we had three computers in the entire business department of Hendrix, and we were just monkeying them with them. But then, you know, we saw back in the, in the 70s really, but into the 80s, you know, Arkansas was at the forefront of all this. I mean, I was interviewed. I was set to be an investment banker, you know, working for Stevens, intern there in college. And then this, this dynamic guy named Charles Morgan interviewed me.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Oh yeah, I was just thinking of Charles Morgan when you mentioned Conway. And speaking of punch cards, was it Dynamax?
[00:07:34] Speaker B: Absolutely. You know, he convinced me that computers were going to change the face of marketing. A really cool BMW out in the parking lot too, be honest with you. But yeah, but the what, you know, what companies in Arkansas were doing with the technology at the time, you know, was amazing. Where we are now, I mean, if you think systematics, that was going to go into that.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: Systematics. I mean, Arkansas was revolutionized the banking business, back office business for banks, for sure.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: And this is really not another just tool that we're adding, you know, to the profile. I mean, the Internet gave us access to information.
Google really helped us find that information.
Social media has, for better or for worse, helped us share all that information. And smartphones, when they came about, were one of those technologies that let us make it portable.
But at this point, this is the first time that we can really work with the information.
So you can have a, a computer program that has the ability for you to conversationally work with it. And again, they're called large language models because everything was language going into them. I don't need to know how to program anymore. I don't need to set up a job like we used to do way back in the day at ccx, you know, Axiom, and, and instead where you described a search engine giving you a bunch of results, now you're getting the summary that the AI is doing for you. And so it has the ability, again, I'm going to say I'm always going to qualify this if used right, if used responsibly, it has the ability to allow someone to take tasks that otherwise take a long time and to basically just leverage the predictive nature of the tool to help you get more things done.
What's really different is that you're doing this in a linguistic manner that the computer understands and can come back and that becomes A conversation. Everything you did in Google was just asking a question. There was no conversation going on.
And so now the technology is at a point where it can help you think better. Yeah, right. That's really it. Which is completely different.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: I'm not saying we're in a world history transition along.
Along the lines of the invention of the printing press or the creation of the World Wide Web. It's at that level, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: And really, you can think of it as a new layer between people and knowledge. Right. It's here to be that layer to allow you to access knowledge conversationally. Where before you just kind of had to hunt and peck and sort and figure out from reams of paper that you can now, you know, as you said, scan and upload and just have it do the analysis for you.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:54] Speaker B: You know, and in industries like law, you know, huge advancements here to research that needs to be done, you know, from a health perspective, on drugs, there's some massive applications there, but all of it comes down to the fact that we now have this.
This predictive layer between people and, you know, the knowledge of the data.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. I don't want to digress too much, but going back to Charles Morgan and the Arkansas.
Arkansas factor, did not some of that have it start with Winthrop Rockefeller wanting to be able to do political polling better?
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: You know, when he had unlimited resources and he wanted to have better polls.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Yeah. The original company, you know. Well, I mean, one of the iterations was called Demographics.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: Demographics. Yeah, demographics. Yeah, that was it.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: That became ccx, Conway Communication Exchange and then. But yes, absolutely. It.
The idea way back in the day was, hey, we can start to track and categorize and better understand voters so that we can get more of the right people to the polls.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting. That's what I thought.
I thought that so much of things can be tracked back to Winthrop Rockefeller. This state is just really wonderful, all of the things that. That he actually instituted. And then you had smart Arkansans like Charles Morgan take it and run with it. So, you know, for those of us on the ground here in Arkansas, what do we need to know about AI right now? How's it going to affect us? How's it going to affect our businesses? How's it going to affect our nonprofits?
All aspects of our lives and, well, the next three, five, even ten years.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. And so the one thing, you know, that I would really say is that this is not something that's happening elsewhere. Right. It may be built on either coast.
But the, the effects are everywhere because it affects, as you said, nonprofits, small businesses, hospitals, from an automation standpoint, banks, financial institutions here in the state can do a lot with it.
This is not really a question from an Arkansas standpoint.
Are we going to participate in leveraging AI? Whether you love data centers or not, whether the politics of it are yours or not, the technology is being embedded in so many things that you interface with, even if you don't know that it's there. But it's really.
How are Arkansans going to participate? Are we going to be passive consumers of AI Just like, treat it kind of like Google, where you're just going to do some research? Or are we going to learn how to use this in ways that fit Arkansans in ways that, you know, in ways that help a small business here in Little Rock, you know, a school teacher, let's say, in Pine Bluff, you know, we, we have done some work from luminar perspective with, you know, with Hendricks College, because they're really interested in, from a liberal arts standpoint, how is, you know, how is AI going to impact the classroom?
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:29] Speaker B: The faculty.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: And, you know, and the. These are, you know, if you don't do anything with it, you know, what. What's going to occur is we're going to, you know, other people outside of the state will dictate how it's used here. And competitively, a small business, you know, may not be able to get as much done, drive as much revenue, have as much profit if they don't, you know, if they don't get involved it. But it all goes back to practical use. Right. What we want to do with AI in the state is we want to understand how Arkansans can, number one, how they, you know, what they understand about this and where do we get them to the places that help them.
Not, not, you know, post articles day after day after day. And there is a use for that. There's a lot of slop out there in the world. But really, really, the way I look at it is.
And actually this comes. One of my partners uses a phrase a lot. Zach Morris. He's one of my partners in Luminor. He's out of Bentonville. He was working on AI projects for Walmart.
He has a phrase called that he says all the time, called fold time and make space. Right. So if you get up in the morning and as a mom or you get a summarization of what's going on on your day, if I, as a business owner and this happens. I have an agent that looks at my calendar, sees what's happening today, also looks and sees what's happening in the next two weeks.
And the first time I used it, it went back and it went back six months and said, here's the most important things you're working on based upon what's on your calendar. Right. Well, at that point, this becomes a really good tool to help you focus, to help me focus, which is hard to do in the first place, but it is that, you know, that is where I want people to get to understand how they do this. And then we can get into the conversations of, okay, how do we make it less. Use less water?
How do we not waste AI as a resource by just making funny bunny or kitten pictures? There's all sorts of things that we can do to responsibly use it. But first we need to understand what is it that Arkansans need help with from a standpoint of improving their personal lives, improving their business.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: Gotcha. Gotcha.
I do not make it a habit, Mike, of quoting guests while they're sitting here at the table back to themselves. But you summed this up in an email to me. I've got to quote this so well.
The core idea you wrote is that Arkansas does not need to chase Silicon Valley. We need to become very good at helping regular people and local organizations use AI to solve real problems, strengthen communities, and create economic opportunity. I think that's a great summation of you mentioned, you as an individual. You mentioned your business.
Make it easier to make your business profitable, make it easier to use your time wisely.
That's what we're talking about here.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: And. Absolutely. And we can't control what are called. These big foundational companies are doing with their technology.
They're shifting it. But we can look at it and say, okay, in my community, because I'm huge into each community, understanding how this impacts them. Not just AI, but this is just one area. Pine Bluff is an example. I've been. I've been down there a few times lately. There was an AI little summit out there a couple of months ago that was pretty good. The.
You know that those are community members who barely know what broadband is.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:18:48] Speaker B: But we're at a point where if a young person.
And I'll use them as a first example in Pine Bluff has an idea, and we can connect them either locally through uapb, through some of the community leaders who want to see how this technology can really impact the community and get that young person to better be able to Leverage a technology such as AI to help them to get something started, to do the marketing for them. Right. To track their books. I've got an 80, I guess I shouldn't say her age, but she had a birthday this week. 87 year old mother. Right.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: I think that's great. Happy birthday. Yeah.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: She has a sewing business, she works out, she does classes out at the Stitching post and she's been doing this for years. She's got like 120 students right now.
I don't know how she does it, a lot of energy. But she asked me, hey, I've got more and more students who, you know, who submit this to the learns, act as one of their training thrones. And she's excellent in what she does.
And I need a way to figure out to help me because I spend several hours a week on trying to reconcile and make sure that we get the right reporting and everything done. And I'm like, mom, just give me the data.
Let me talk to my agent, let me talk to, in this case it's Claude. And say, okay, hey, here's the type of data we have. What can we do with this to make my mom's life easier? Because she says it takes her four to six hours, you know, a month to be able to reconcile all this. And I want to give her those four Thursday nights ago over there and I eat dinner and you know.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: Right. Give her that time back.
[00:20:48] Speaker B: Give her that time back. Right.
And, and so we went dinner for all the grandkids and me. And, and so but that way she, you know, she, we can build a process for her and I'm doing this right now with her that she simply uploads the information and it knows and it can repeat over and over the same time every month exactly what to do, exactly what to understand and report out. And now all of a sudden she's freed up four to six hours of her time a month.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: In that one thing alone, if people in Pine Bluff or Conway or northwest Arkansas or south Arkansas, you know, wherever they are, can, you know, can, can look at this and say, okay, I want to understand how this helps me, not just ask it for a recipe, which I do, you know, but how can this make my life simpler? I really, I really think that's where things can click in and that's where Arkansans can see a benefit.
[00:21:51] Speaker A: Gotcha, gotcha. I love that we're taking this down to the individual basis. I do, however, want to add a caveat here.
You wrote again, we do not need to chase Silicon Valley.
[00:22:04] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: You mentioned that one of your partners though had done some work for Walmart. Mike. I was recently walking, it was too hot a day, but I needed to exercise anyway and trying to get a feel for that new Walmart corporate campus, which is enormous. I was so sweaty. Luckily they have a hotel there. I could go in and cool off after a while. But just trying to get a good feel for it. And as I walked that multi billion dollar corporate campus, you know, it really struck me that, and a lot of people really haven't caught this, that Walmart now is as much a technology company as they are a retailer. I mean, Amazon is their main competitor and obviously some of the brightest technological minds in the world now are in Bentonville, Arkansas. We're working on that campus.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And I mean Walmart did it incredibly smart thing many years ago when they recognized that one of their biggest assets was the data. Right. It was, we know what's going on the store shelves of Walmart because we're tracking every little bit of it.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: And when they made that decision, Kmart's now gone.
[00:23:23] Speaker A: Target faded because they didn't keep up. I mean Walmart was ahead of everybody
[00:23:27] Speaker B: when they made that decision to open up that data for whoever wanted to, you know, whoever wanted to come and have an office in, you know, Bentonville or the surrounding areas.
That's what's really driven that growth and that, and that, that growth has led to this just, you know, gorgeous campus.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: Oh, unbelievable. I recently wrote a column that I, we put the headline on it, Three Islands of Innovation. And I wrote, and I think you'll agree with me, then we'll get back on subject. But you know, as an Arkansas, I don't think most Arkansans grasp this yet how big this is, but the three islands were the new Walmart corporate campus.
Crystal Bridges, where Alice Walton now is not only doing art, but combining art, nature and healthcare with her own medical school, her own think tank, the whole health institute, which is just amazing. And then the old corporate campus where Tom and Stuart Walton are creating a new four year private STEM focused university.
I mean you take those three. Like I said, any city in the world would be glad to have one of the three. They're all in one Arkansas town. I think it's amazing for a state this size.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: I'm really looking forward to seeing what they do with that campus. You know, the, you know, the, the, the ability for, you know, them to be able to do that is, is great for our state, you know, because it will attract a lot, you know, a lot of things in, I mean,
[00:25:04] Speaker A: a lot of top minds that'll think of the intellectual capital that'll bring to Arkansas.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a little, you know, mining town in that. I was former Arkansas friend of mine, lives up there in Lead, South Dakota, I was at last summer. And you know, they have something similar, but just in the scientific community because they're studying dark matter and they're catching it from the old mine.
[00:25:26] Speaker A: Okay, okay. That's why they're there.
[00:25:28] Speaker B: Yeah, that's why they're there. Right now all of a sudden the investment comes in and what they, you know, what they're projecting is that Lead South Carolina is going to become the next cern.
[00:25:38] Speaker A: South Dakota.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm sorry, yes. South Dakota is going to be, you know, the, all the scientific minds are moving into this little.
This is just a, you know, Walmart is a much larger, you know, example of how you can start to build in Bentonville in general, you know, that type of cluster, interestingly, Little Rock.
And I have to, you know, I'm a Little Rock guy. Right.
[00:26:04] Speaker A: Me too.
I've lived here since I moved back to Washington in 89.
[00:26:09] Speaker B: So I'm all with you back in the 80s 90s and even into the early 2000s.
And I tell this to a lot of people. If you looked at the technology and data footprint of Little Rock, Arkansas, if you consider, you know, if you consider Systematics, Stevens and the data that they had, what was, you know, originally Arkansas Systems, ArcSys and now your Net and Axiom Corporation here, all of the data processing in central Arkansas.
We technologically were actually as, you know, had a technology footprint as large as Austin's.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Wow, that's exciting.
[00:26:51] Speaker B: We didn't win.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: You had all tail and all the telecommunications stuff at the same time.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: My dad. Yeah. Was one of the guys that started the mobile company. I should say, should mention them too.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. Throw that in.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: We had so.
We had so many, you know, we had so many technological things converging at once. It's much like what's happening up there. The difference is, you know, number one, a lot of capital up that way.
[00:27:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: We ended up on the, on the wrong end of a lot of acquisitions and there was not a mechanism to reinvest in, you know, in Little Rock at this, at that time. There really wasn't a, There wasn't a startup community. Yeah, you know, there wasn't. And, and, and we're now seeing AI as an opportunity.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. You know. Well, I was going to say the good side, the. The acquisitions, not having the capital to really take that to the next level. That's. That's the downside.
The upside, though, I have to mention, is a number of those people from all those companies we mentioned love Little Rock. They stayed here, A lot of them formed their own businesses, their own consulting firms. And so this city still has a lot of great technological minds. When you say, oh, yeah, no place of 200,000 people.
[00:28:09] Speaker B: We got our, you know, the tech park across the street.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Oh, right across the street from us here.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: So.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: And we're now seeing this, you know, with the organization that luminarc and I'm involved in, AI in the Rock, where we have the largest meetup group surrounding AI in this part of the country, if not each country. We. Yeah. Matt Olson, who was Matmon Agency, wanted to learn more about AI because he knew it was going to impact his business.
So he. We threw up a meetup group.
We went to the Flying Saucer. He paid for 40 beers, and we had probably 30 people show up the very first time. And I told him, matt, this is really encouraging that we have this many people wanting to learn this. This was a year ago in the spring.
[00:28:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:56] Speaker B: So, you know, fast forward to now. We just had Stuart Sherrill of, you know, of Steven Zink, Franklin Sherrill's, you know, son.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Yep, yep.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: And. But Stuart spoke on Stevenson's focus on using local models for AI.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:29:21] Speaker B: The last count that I heard was the meetup group has had 392people register and attend one of our monthly events.
Unheard of for an area like this. And I was just in Milwaukee or Nashville and.
Name your other community.
The interest is here. The people with skills are here. Now we just need to connect them all together and get a momentum going and invite people from all around the community to join in and understand how this could help them start a business, think through an idea, learn to improve their skills with AI which is part of what our company, me personally, you're focused on.
[00:30:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Mike, I knew this would go way too fast. I'm gonna have to get you back soon. We'd run out of time. But before we close, I do not want to end the show without asking you about the risk. What are the risk? Especially as we talk about things like privacy and trust and accurate accuracy and overreliance on a. Yeah, absolutely there.
[00:30:32] Speaker B: And we really need to be honest with these things, because AI can be wrong. It's called hallucination. When it's wrong, I would categorize it as AI can get confused as you continue to ask questions and hallucinate, as they call it.
You cannot outsource your judgment as a person to AI.
[00:30:59] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: It doesn't work. You. You can treat it as a.
As a tool. You can. I have a GPT that's customized to me that's called Keaton and I refer to it as Keaton. It's not a person, but it's a strategic thinker that knows way more than I do, that can assist me in thinking through ideas and then turning those into something that can be executed.
But you. But it will tend to give you an answer that's right because it. Or sounds right because it is predictively trying to say this is what he wants to hear next. Mike wants to hear next. Right. Or this is the way the world looks at it and therefore it's that direction we.
So just keep in mind that you just don't outsource the judgment. Privacy is the other big area.
Privacy you can turn off in most models, the ingestion of your data into others if you're on one of the paid plans.
What we see a lot in businesses that a company may have Microsoft, and so people have access to Copilot, but at home they use GPT and so they start to feed information, company information into GPT without understanding that that information, if not walled off. Right. Will go to the giant cloud in the sky. And now all of a sudden, something private may be leaked. So that's why we really encourage companies to focus on governance and really say up front, you need to understand who's using what tool inside your company and what policies you need to put in place. Because it's only going to get more complex from that perspective.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: Absolutely. Boy, I have needed this and I've really got to get you back soon. Mike Steele, partner of Luminart Global, thank you so much. This has been fascinating.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: Absolutely. Thank you.
[00:33:13] Speaker A: And a lot more to talk about. Like I said, we're. We'll have you back soon.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: Anytime.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Southern Fried Podcast, a production of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
