In the early days of the Internet, the promise was that the cumulative knowledge of the world would be at your fingertips. Turns out that the quest for knowledge became the worldwide shopping mall, fueled by e-commerce and ads. 

The world of AI is on a similar, but different trajectory. OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, reports that more than 800 million people use it each week, but not as you’d expect. According to the Washington Post and its analysis of 47,000 ChatGPT conversations, users are overwhelmingly looking for advice and companionship, not work-related productivity tasks. E-commerce has not hit ChatGPT and other AI-bots with its sledgehammer quite yet, but you better believe it’s coming. 

Meanwhile, it seems that all those workers with ChatGPT company accounts are using it for anything but work. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

For years, we’ve helped CES curate some of their conference tracks at the annual show. Other than enduring an abbreviated holiday season, it’s one of our favorite times of the year, putting us at the epicenter of innovation. We won’t give away the whole show now, but here’s a preview of some of the issues we’ll tackle at the show.

Wearables
They’ve been around for a while, with most of us now wearing some form of smartwatch. AI is going to give these devices a supercharge. At our Wearables Track, we’ll follow the race to give AI its wearable form. With Walter Greenleaf (Stanford), Swapnil Vats (Luna), Resh Sidhu (Snap), and Kia Nazarpour (Neuranics).

High Tech Retail
The burning question is what e-commerce will look like in a post-search world. AI is going to eliminate a lot of that clicking from site to site, but what does that mean for the e-commerce engine that served as the backbone of the modern website? With Justin Honaman (Amazon), Stacy Malone (Pinterest), Mattia Miglio (Alibaba Group), Egan Brinkman (Google), John Andrews (Cimulate), and Lynne Kjolso (Microsoft).

Entrepreneurship
One of the hottest spots at CES is not the big exhibitors, but the over 1,000 startups who’ve often rubbed their last two nickels together (no pennies anymore) to set up shop at Eureka Park, on the lower level of the Venetian Expo. They need advice too, so we’ve gathered some of our favorite VCs to offer some Sage Advice. With Hank Thomas (Strategic Cyber Ventures), Sonny Vu (Alabaster), Jennie Blumenthal (Corporate+Rehab), and Deborah Jackson (Plum Alley)

If you haven’t made your CES plans, get on it. It provides the best macroscopic view of the ever-changing world of tech. And mark your calendars for Dec. 18th for our annual CES Pre-Game Warm-Up featuring journalists and speakers.

Thanks to mobile phones with great cameras, making a video has become the easy part. It’s post-production that separates you from the fray. I read a nice post from Chantal Cox, which inspired me to add to her post-production list:

1. Always look at the audience. Most editing software can now redirect your gaze so that it’s always on the camera.
2. Lose the filler words like “Um,” “like,” and “you know”.
3. Change the font on the captions to be sure that they’re easy to read and placed correctly. 
4. Get rid of background noise. Again, most AI production software can get rid of everything from dog barks to ambulances.
5. Fix typos, especially people’s names, which are often mispelled. (Do this by looking at the transcript of the video).

The following programs all contain most of these features: Adobe Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, OpusClip, Descript, Veed, and Kapwing. Some are more expensive (Premiere) and some are for more casual users (Caput). Here’s a chart that ChatGPT generated, so check for hallucinations.