I'm going to say something slightly controversial but please wait for me to finish. I think Indians and India have a stated preference versus a revealed preference problem I'll tell you what that stated preference means if you go to a wedding and you ask one of the uncles there, what you think about this (X)  they will tell you one thing, But if you look at their behavior, what do they spend money on where do they spend their time where their attention goes, etc.

A lot of it is not exactly what they told you, this is not just an India problem this is a problem with human beings in general, and one of the topics in this particular case is the topic of the West…..

The topic of America if you ask the average Indian whether you are inspired by America or whether you think India is inspired by America most people say no my inspiration comes from India our past.

our culture our history which is great, but if you look at their behavior, if you look at the flow of money, if you look at the flow of venture dollars it looks like a parting of the West now 

My stance on this is my own goal in life is, I want to be a student I am not too attached to anything and  I love my country obviously but I'm also willing to learn from anywhere. if something is popular in America right now chances are it will be popular in India a year later ,this happened with everything even things I never imagined for example veganism the the way we dress the way we talk a lot of inspiration comes from America and today any good VC in India who's making a bet behind a company is always going to ask the founders if is there proof of this working somewhere else, because it turns out that if there is no proof of it working anywhere else in the world not just in America but at least in China or even Zimbabwe somewhere if there's no proof then that VC is taking a massive risk, he's taking a very local cultural bet on India and most of the time without proof It's A Hard Sell even internally, so  the point is on this article we are here to learn if there's a report that comes from China, that's interesting and there's something to learn I'm happy to nbreak it down for you and today I have a very exciting report from America by a VC called Coefficient Capital in partnership with the new consumer it's about consumer Trends in America and I know some of you will click off because you'll say ,it's America I don't care! but the truth is there are business lessons there whether you like America or not a year later some of those things that are popular today for consumers are going to make it here(india) this could guide a lot of things for you on how do you make investments, where you work, what job opportunities to take on where are the business opportunities for you to start something. All of these things are probably hidden in this report if you pay close attention so without much further Ado let's break this down.

the report has three headlines it's 

1. AI Ozempic and the economy 

There are a lot of hidden insights and Nuggets here, so let's Dive Right In, let me talk about the new consumer, first, it was launched in 2019 by a former business journalist called Dan Frommer the new consumer explored where and how to do people spend their money it's mostly analysis research Trends and advisory so do go check out the links below this article, The Artical shows that this report is in partnership with Coefficient Capital and invests in consumer Brands they launched in 2018 by Franklin and Andrew Goleta invested mostly in digitally powered consumer Brands and they focus on transformational consumers shifts.

One thing we've noticed:-

I'm sure in India and all over the world every few years a big shift happens and lots

of behavior changes, But underlying desires are the same, as human beings

that hasn't changed in 200,000 years but a lot of the ways we express those

desires have changed, So this report is about profound changes in the consumer

landscape and this is mostly centered around the West. I can guarantee you

a lot of what I read in the report is going to be in India in a while some of them

can take advantage of this so most of how they do this is through consumer

Trend surveys They survey about 3,000 US customers and they give us insights, but they're one catch in surveys 

The problem with that poll is it's very biased

Example - finding diverse sample is hard as the surveys go biased with no relevant information 

Anyway -

So the first thing is that AI is everywhere in 2023. online news articles about AI went through the

roof a lot of this was on the back of chat GPT and the miracle that was GPT 3.5. let me be honest when I tried it my mind was blown I'm sure a lot of you had the same

experience and obviously AI is the number one trend we're going to talk about today in the US, more importantly, it's not just consumers talking about AI you look at a similar wave two years ago which was the blockchain wave most of the conversation around blockchain was

from end consumers companies,  they were very iffy talking about it but with AI companies it Just Can't Get Enough of artificial intelligence on quarterly earning SC transcripts and analyzed by Bloomberg looked like this

just look at that jump from the first quarter of 2017 to the last quarter of

last year there was barely any mention or talk of AI even though GPT in its

prior forms existed in quarter 1 of 2023 which completely changed look at that

Spike and these are in earning calls

Executives at companies are very careful about what they tell their investors and

if they're talking about AI that means they're actually excited about putting

that into action in the next quarter. One example of how powerful it has involved is when OpenAI bots beat world-class DOTA players DOTA is a game that I've been playing for a very long time and it's not by any means a simple game it requires five players to coordinate it requires you to anticipate what your opponents are going to do it's not a very easy problem to solve so when I saw open AI Bots kicking the ass of real humans in this game which is pretty complicated and has a four to 5-year learning curve till you get good at the game I was like….

This is something worth paying attention 

But you might say well AI’s been around for a while why now the report says, for many reasons firstly it's another decade of technological advancements in algorithms, computing, power, and Data Networks. I mean we've had several small shifts

across different industries that cumulatively laid the path for AI even

though I don't think the intent was AI, like, for example, a lot of graphic cards

didn't get better because of AI they got better because Gamers demanded it and

Blockchain mining enthusiasts demanded it and AI just happened to take

advantage of it, so not all of this was thought through some of this was

Incidental

secondly, useful and novel products are coming to the market such

as chatGPT and mid-Journey, I'll tell you one thing there has not been a single day or the last 8 months that I haven't used chat GPT and there hasn't been a single week or the last 8 months

that I haven't used mid-Journey or any other image generation tool, This is one big difference from the past is that consumers are now trained to adopt new tech. we no longer shy away and say hey somebody else teach me this because the tech is also easy to use it's just a

chat interface in most cases and the learning curve is short it's very very easy for people to learn this technology and therefore a consumer feels in power.

A lot of companies  are also hiding behind it, they've had a bad quarter markets have

been poor, there was zero interest in the phenomenon that was happening for the

last few years the markets have corrected everything's on free fall and a lot of companies need a new growth story

to sell their investors this can potentially be that growth story and to be very honest it does change the entire game in fact half of Gen Z and Millennial customers already claim they

are very familiar with AI take a look at this graph 52% of Gen Z believes they're

extremely or very familiar with AI 

55% of Millennials believe they're very familiar with AI 

with Gen X the rate is about 30% and boomers are 10% comfortable with AI now in India there is a lack of time if you go out on the streets and ask people about chat GPT believe it

or not if you go to a Tier One Urban Street maybe you'll have a lot of people that are aware but if you go to a street In Tier 2 or Tier 3 India the knowledge level around AI or chat GPT or mid

journey is actually pretty low in terms of awareness Chat GPT leads among.

The next AI tools so take a look at this graph Chad GPT is number one

followed by Bard now I definitely thought that mid-Journey would be more popular than Bard but it turns out Bard is number two in fact, Bing Firefly Del copilot Jasper's stable diffusion is all

above mid-journey I really expected mid-journey to be above stable diffusion but

it turns out the average consumer has other priorities

now let's talk about work and jobs

28% of us workers say they are worried AI will replace them at work within 5 years percentage of extremely

or very worried responses from household income is one of the cool things about this

the survey is they also stratified these people this question by household income it's a very interesting graph take a look at it

if people were

making $ $225,000 a year which is not that great in the US,29% were worried that AI would replace them in the next 5 years

As they went into the $50k to $75,000 range most of these people were not that

worried but as they got to skills and jobs that required more cognitive effort

more of those people were worried.

34% of people make more than 150k per annum which is about 1.2 crores in Indian rupees in

They were worried that AI would take their jobs in the next 5 years and take a look at that nearly 50% of people who are extremely familiar with AI were worried that it would take their jobs

people who are not familiar or the least familiar with AI were more likely to say

no, this is not going to take my job this is a reflection of two things right.I

think the more you're aware of AI the more you're a cognitive worker and AI

does come after cognitive jobs, it is going to go after some cognitive jobs in

the next 5 years it's inevitable and the less you're exposed to AI you're more

likely doing a physical job so I don't think AI is coming for physical jobs in

the next few years although, I could be wrong because the rate of progress has been

phenomenal. 

But it's interesting to note that the more people are familiar with ,AI the more they are worried about their jobs being taken most high-earning workers in the US say they've already

used AI tools for work people who make less money are claiming they don't 

It's weird the more money that these people are making the more they're looking for

tools that speed up their workflows this is common among almost every intelligent

person that I met once somebody has proven that they have signs of

intelligence they always look for ways to speed up what they're doing and now

there's a very powerful $20 a tool month that can be your go-to assistant I don't

Do think anyone's going to say no to a smart assistant at their desk

people making more than $200,000 in the US, were 63% familiar with using AI tools

most 100K plus household workers which are people making more than 80 lakhs a

year think AI will help them be more productive 60% in fact of people making

more than 150k a year said hey this is going to make me more productive and

where exactly are we now git Hub opened a powered co-pilot in Feb 2023 and said that

an average of 46% of code is built using GitHub co-pilot and 61% among

developers using Java and this is up from 27% of code in June 2022 they claim

that it helps developers code up to 55% faster that's already a big productivity

gain for companies. if that number of 55% is to be believed, then the  AI-generated business and marketing ideas are already close! I do know a few Indian marketing

agencies that have already executed AI-generated content for customers to believe it or not. 

In blind tests by data from dig insights human survey takers equally preferred ideas generated by real humans as they did with its AI tool

this is weird, right?

A lot of people believe AI might not take our jobs but if you give random

humans blinded outputs of AI-generated content and real content they are not

able to really tell which was made by humans and which was made by AI now

there are several fields like video where this is not true you can easily tell when a video is generated by AI today but in places like text and images it's getting really hard to tell

and to a business an employee costs 100K a year this tool costs $200 a year it's such a

big difference that a lot of businesses are thinking it through but not all hope

is lost there are Fields where customers believe this is not true they ask  a

question suppose you need to consult or hire an X which would you trust more AI

or human and in the fields of a doctor, lawyer assistant, and financial adviser

almost everyone chose human it feels like medicine or law where a small error

rate could either kill you or put you behind bars, you don't want to take the

risk so even the small chance of a ChatGPT hallucination is not worth it .but in

fields like graphic design where it's okay to generate a thousand outputs and

pick the one that you like the most people are more forgiving like I said

the tools are there they're getting better but at the end of the day, it's

consumer desires and their trust towards either a human or a robot that

determines what they will end up spending on self-proclaimed AI experts

are more likely to say that they trust an AI doctor for some reason in a lot of

my comments people ask why you're an AI expert, I don't think at least in the

world of generative AI there are experts it has been around for Too Short a period

of time we just had the Good Fortune of experimenting with it a little early and

if you don't spend every day of your time on it in 2 weeks you're out of date I actually

spend one or two hours every single day going through the tools and figuring out

is this viable is this not viable is this not and then I create content around it so I'm

familiar with the tool but I would still trust a human doctor over an AI doctor and reason for this is that I understand a little bit about medicine because, I've had my trust with

the medical system for a very long time and even though human doctors are not

perfect they also make mistakes all the time, it is that they are responsive to mistakes in the sense that they give you the wrong drug and you end up in the hospital because of an allergic reaction to that drug ,they will still take care of you they will admit their mistake and fix it and AI right now doesn't have the agency to fix its mistakes and more importantly a lot of

if you've actually been through PubMed which is where a lot of abstract and sometimes full medical papers are out you'll notice that there are lots of studies where there is contradictory evidence for example take t resveratrol which is usually found in red wine, there are lots of conflicting

studies around the substance some Reports say that t resveratrol increases

the activity of T- cells which are a part of your immune system and some

studies say it reduces the activity of T- cells and it doesn't seem to be

dependent on the dose, it seems to be dependent on the specific micro

an environment that t resveratrol gets to act in and here is where my experience

fine-tuning models helps I know that if you fine-tune Claude or Lamada 2 or GPT on

PubMed you're bound to find not-so-accurate or  slightly hallucinatory

answers to questions like this, where examples exist of both the positive as

well as the negative the way to solve this is a method called reinforcement

learning by human feedback where doctors actually, sit there and rate every answer

either a thumbs up a thumbs down or a rating scale the problem is medicine is

so vast and different expert doctors in the same field have different opinions

however, there's one place where I do agree that ,AI will help and that is in

Diagnostics so a very interesting thing happens in India where if you get an

X-ray done, not only do you get the films but you also get a radiological report there is somebody looking at your films and saying this is what I think about it , I think that part can actually be replaced by AI because it's fairly easy to train a classifier we can kind of

predict what their outputs are going to be like and it's not a black box like an

LLM  but you can't predict exactly what it's going to do.

let's move on to AI and culture 

have you seen this picture there's actually a famously viral picture of the Pope wearing cool clothes it went viral on Twitter I remember seeing it on my feed and 33% said yes

is actually pretty significant means people are now in the know I through information on Reddit which then gets passed on to Twitter which then gets passed on to Instagram via reels and whatnot I think the cycle

between something cool happening and a Gen Z or a millennial learning about it

is pretty short it's a few days and not just that out of the 33% 62% said yes I

know this was generated by AI and this is a little bit of bad news for artists

photographers and when 

Gen Z and Millennial consumers were asked do you think AI art is real art nearly half of them said yes I think AI art is real art

weirdly Boomers who were really old people said no. I don't think AI art is

real art. I think this decision is AI art real art is a matter of perception not of any reality because most people aren't able to tell if you, Remember Mid Journey from 2 years ago

and MId Journey from today I think if you give it another year or 2 years it

will be very unlikely that even I will be able to tell and I'm just going to

assume by default that every image is AI-generated so if that's not art then how do you prove that?  something is real art you have to draw it is on paint and canvas because robotic

arms can do that as well and it's pretty cheap in fact an Indian student created a

low-budget handwriting tool and it's the same mechanism you would use to create

art… when asked if will AI become the dominant form of entertainment 41% of

Gen Z and millennial consumers at least somewhat agree that 20 years from now by

the way 20 years is a long time in this space considering we're on an exponential curve most music movies art and books will be created with AI, I kind of agree with this my timelines are

shorter 39% of Genian Millennials which is 2% less than the previous stat said that 20 years from now the best not most but the best movies will be created with AI . most Gen Z and Millennials have already said that they use AI tools for fun from the lens of House of the world to

the rvcs I think it's a lot of fun playing with AI and I think everyone should play with AI because it's just so much fun and you get to see this technology evolve in real-time at least with the open-source repositories using something today 6 months later there's something that makes the previous thing look really bad and 12 months later there's something that's even better

right so it's amazing watching this technology evolve in real time

next

let's move to AI and Society 

The question is what will AI do  for society

so 53% of people said there's

going to be a total lack of trust in Visual and or audio content I think this

is true and there are already examples of plausible deniability where a politician

has actually said something bad on a call and then said no this is AI

generated so people can also hide behind it. 

52% of people think that there's going to be an acceleration in scientific advancement obviously…

47% of people think that mass transformation and evolution of jobs are going to happen I am hoping that the idea of jobs in the concept of jobs disappear in the modern concept of a job where you go to college and then get a job and do that till you die is actually very very new

it's like 300 years old of the 200,000-year history that humans have been around we've always had roles divisions and IUS but never in the current form there's obviously going to be an

acceleration of creativity in arts and entertainment

41% of people think there's going to be mass unemployment,40% think there's going to be increased income inequality. 

38% of people think there's going to be increased social inequality which is gender race etc. 34% of people think that AI will turn on us and robots will take over 

and 31% of people believe there's going to be implementation of Ubi which is universal basic income and

27% of people think that there's going to be zero change to society's social displacement.

privacy and job displacement is the biggest issue or concern that people have with AI and

I fairly agree although I think with social manipulation we'll develop an

immune system very quickly to fake content or at least we'll be alert that

maybe this can be fake content so I don't think it's going to have as much

of an impact.

The next one is an interesting question who

do you think regulating AI 

 

A. should be a government

B. Should it be companies 

C .should it state the Government

D .it should be external-governmental organizations and then so on and

 so forth

only 13% of people think that AI should not be regulated

that is wild and that's very interesting 27% of people said there's going to be

no impact on Society at all but only 12% of people said AI should not be

regulated so the missing 14% confuses me….

The next thing is does AI have political opinions?

30% said yes

 47% said no 

23% said not sure. 

The next question was if yes

 do they align with a US political party? 60% of people said yes it aligns

with one party now this part is interesting for those who identify as

Republicans in the US the right believes that 52% align with them

and 42% align with the other side which is fine for those that identify as

Democrats or the left believe that AI is unanimously aligned with them this

is a very interesting stat because I can guarantee you this is going to be

mirrored in some way in India.

And finally, while younger generations are more excited by AI the older Generations are worried 

now this report doesn't end here there's a lot more that we will

cover in part two of the breakdown

 thank you for joining me, I know this was an abrupt

ending but I wanted to leave you with all this information to digest we'll

be covering part two in the next Month …….      bye