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Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com slash podcast. Terms apply. Mark Beckman is here, CEO and award-winning advertising agency with DMA, best-selling author and his latest book, Some Future Day, How AI is Going to Change Everything. Mark, you could not have come out with a better book at a better time than we're coming right now out of what we saw yesterday was a huge announcement.
And this huge announcement rocked the stock market as everything to do with AI. First off, welcome. Brian, thank you so much for having me. It's really a thrill to be on your show.
It's great to see you. So you have a real perspective about what took place yesterday. And tell me what China did that rocked everybody's world. Well, basically what they did was they launched a new, a new artificial intelligence named Deep Seek, but it's not new. It's been around. People think it's new. It's a new model. It's a new version, Deep Seek. They're using it during the summer, but this version was really interesting in that it has reasoning built into it. It's a little bit more advanced, but what they did was they undercut the market and the app skyrocketed to number one on the app store. So now we have a country filled with people that have Deep Seek on their iPhones, on their devices, their laptops and beyond. And, you know, it's very American, as I said to you, we're like sheep in certain ways.
We see the shiny object. Everybody thinks it's the cool thing. They control the narrative on social media. It was the cost of Deep Seek is virtually free.
So everybody ran in. But nobody's concerned, I believe, yet most people aren't concerned with the fact that now Deep Seek has access to everyone's data. When it comes to constructing something like this, they say the Chinese company spent just $5.6 million to come up with it. Small, very small amount compared to what OpenAI needed, what Meta needs. And now some people are saying that maybe you don't need to be these mega companies in order to lead the world in AI.
Is that something you take away from this? So it's an interesting part of the analysis, Brian. If you look at Deep Seek and how it goes back in time, its founder started a private hedge fund, actually, almost 10 years ago.
I think it was 2016. And the hedge fund was financed in many ways from China, and it was set up to create artificial intelligence investments and innovation. I personally don't believe that it was just $6 million that went into this. As you're probably aware, China's been investing into the AI ecosystem, including energy, including the technology, and including the compute for a long time into the trillions of dollars.
So this isn't like an overnight thing. I do believe, however, that they were able to leverage what we've seen with OpenAI as far as their infrastructure and what they've built. They were able to use that technology to help accelerate this part of Deep Seek. So is the word open, is that somehow giving me the wrong impression? Or they said that they did reverse forensics on the creation of Open Chatbot, GBT, and that's how they were able to catch up so quick, and then in this case, temporarily, I hope, surpasses.
It is open, correct? People are speculating that they stole what OpenAI created. However, there are two parts to the DeepSeek equation that people need to understand. There's the open piece of it, which will allow programmers to have full access to innovate and to create with regards to the programming. It's all exposed in DeepSeek. That piece of it is probably solid as it relates to accessing an individual's data. It could be private.
You don't need to be worried if you're working on that piece of it. But what most people are going to do, Brian, is they're going to use DeepSeek for search purposes. It's much better than Google, admittedly, at this point in time. So the average person will download DeepSeek on their phone and use it for search, and that's where the data is exposed, the individual's data is exposed at that point in time. So Mark Beckman, our guest, the CEO of his own company, DMA United, but his book is out just for a week now and so perfect in the timing, some future day, how AI is going to change everything. I want to just talk about this a little bit, and Anthony Papalino from the investment side, the CEO of Professional Capital Management, weighed in on what's going on here and why the market was so negatively affected.
Cut 43. Well, in the actual user agreement, they definitely are taking data and they are putting it in servers in the Republic of China. And so I tell people all the time that if you really care about privacy, if you really care about the security of your data, then I'd be very careful about the software you put on your phone.
If you have concerns about TikTok, I'd have concerns about DeepSeek. And so any time that you are looking at where's my data going, if you don't know, you should probably go figure that out pretty quickly. Well, here's the other thing, is that you have a situation where if you want to go online to go do this and you want to get answers, for example, if you have sensitive questions for China. 1989 Tiananmen Square, you asked DeepSeek, what is that? They have no answers. Nothing available. If you ask President Xi, is he a great leader? Nothing available.
When you ask anything about Taiwan, nothing available. So they're picking and choosing garbage in, garbage out. So is that what you want controlling in the American mind? So it's really interesting.
I'm happy you brought that up, Brian. For a while, I've been talking about A.I. wars, China versus America. I also lay out the difference between a centralized and a decentralized artificial intelligence, essentially open and closed. In America, we happen to have a lot of closed, centralized product offerings.
Meta is one of their llama version is one of the only open versions. And I think what that allows for is a lot of opinions, a lot of perspectives. In a way, it's more democratized. You would expect from China the opposite centralized, closed and fully in control in this interest.
It's in this interest. It's kind of perplexing that they're controlling what people perceive as it relates to China and China's history. Yet it's open.
So there's like a there's a tension there. I think that's built into it innately where they're coming on saying it's an open platform. They're giving access to all of the technology, but yet they're controlling certain messages.
But aren't you getting the same thing from TikTok? When it comes to anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, nothing positive, almost nothing positive about Israel and their war with the Palestinians. There's nothing positive. You're going to tell me that Trump's not going to be angry when he realized that the Panama Canal coverage is going to be all about China having no impact on the canal when two Hong Kong companies own portions of the canal? Totally, totally agree. So it's interesting that you're raising TikTok and the Trump administration, because what we're seeing right now, as you know, is a move to bring TikTok into some sort of American ownership. And there's an artificial intelligence search vertical that you and I have spoke about actually historically called perplexity. And perplexity is running right now to purchase TikTok. And the other angle that's interesting is that Trump, I believe, said just yesterday or the day before that he wants the American government to own 50 percent of that vertical. So perplexity, TikTok and America come into play for TikTok.
Why is it interesting? Proplexity then has access to all of that data on the search piece of TikTok, similar to what Metta is doing across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. So it gives perplexity a big lead or a big advantage over other other search platforms. I just hope the president realizes China can't own it. And if they decide to collapse it instead of selling it, it shows you it's a spying device because no business person would ever walk away from two trillion dollars. Correct.
And it's interesting also the United. Are you aware that New York City, the New York City government forbids any city employee from having TikTok? Did I know that?
Yeah, this is true. The New York City chief technology officer joined me in a conversation that I had at NYU and he disclosed that information. And it's been for a couple of a couple of years now. So there must be something going on if the New York City government is so concerned about TikTok that they that employees are forbidden from having the app on their phone. There's got to be something going on. I mean, there has to be. And we also know that India is banded.
Romania is about to ban it with an election coming up. So Mark, how is A.I. going to change our everyday lives, not just the capital investor and not just Nvidia vice president? So thanks for asking that, Brian. My book really covers a lot of that. What I wanted to do with my new book is create a platform where the beginner, the curious person, the average person who is not in tech could find ways to implement artificial intelligence solutions to enhance the quality of their career, the quality of their family and the quality of their city. And within each chapter, depending on what people are interested in, it could be fashion, it could be finance, it could be medicine.
There's a really cool section in there which I hope you check out on government and the evolution of warfare. But within each chapter, I give the reader tools that she or he could use so that they could apply A.I. to their life immediately. I find out it's already in schools. I mean, people are already using it. And there's, I guess, watermarks they're looking at for teachers to be able to detect it. So teachers already got to adjust.
It's tough. The truth of the matter is that to see whether or not a student is using artificial intelligence is virtually impossible. The A.I. has evolved with regards to the way that the text is put out in a statement. So it used to be really easy to, like, figure out, you know, there was like a certain syntax to the language that the A.I.
was using. But now it's a little bit more complicated. It's a little bit more sophisticated. This is where the interaction between A.I. and crypto is going to come into play.
Crypto is going to play a major role with regards to authenticating content that might have been produced through artificial intelligence. All right. So we'll talk about that more when we come back. Mark Beckman's here. Go pick up his book, Some Future Day, how A.I. is going to change everything.
More with Mark. And a lot of this, what happened yesterday was the number one story. And it's not going away today. Don't move. For bed, for bath, square footage and so much more. So if you find a place you love, Redfin makes it easy to go see it in person.
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So you're saving a pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters, and Suno A.I. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current bill, your current cloud bill, in half if you move to OCI. For new U.S. customers with minimal financial commitment, the offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com slash cain. That's oracle.com slash cain. It's a little disconcerting that this is the number one app in the free app store right now.
Because, you see, this is not a reliable place to get any meaningful information. But, John, I do think this is an important moment. Marc Andreessen, who's one of the world's preeminent technologists, said on Twitter or on X today that this is a Sputnik moment.
As you recall, Sputnik in 1957 was when the Soviets launched a satellite into orbit before we did, and it took us by surprise. So what you're seeing in the markets today is a reaction to this Chinese company's claims that, number one, they have reached this level of capability at a fraction of the cost of what open A.I. and others here in the United States have done, and with a fraction of the computing capacity that they did it with. Now, that's important. This A.I.
race is going to be the defining technology race of the time, so we've got to get the national will to win this. And that is Cliff Simms, former DNI deputy director under John Radcliffe, who's now with the CIA. And he's back in the Trump orbit to a degree, even though he wrote, I thought, a hit book on him to a degree. But he was just weighing in on effectively what went down yesterday that caused the market, the tech stops to crash the way they did, and to see if it bounces back. Marc Beckman does this stuff for a living.
He's got a book out some future day, how A.I. is going to change everything on a practical level. He's also a CEO of DMA United. So, Marc, just when you hear Cliff Simms talk, you see how prevalent this thing rippled through the entire country. Yeah, I think it's good that Trump is in office right now. We're on the precipice, as he says, of a golden age. But that applies to innovation, too. So it's time for American ingenuity to step up and innovate. We need to compete. This is a warning for American businesses, for the American tech sector, that China, we had a lead on them. We were about two years ahead of them with Open A.I. Now they're right on our tail, their neck and neck.
So we need to accelerate. Because what they did is they do reverse forensics on what made Open A.I. And they said, let me improve it, let's do it cheaper.
Labor's cheaper, number one. Number two is they were forced to make their own chips, essentially, because we kind of locked them out. Correct. And because of their belligerent behavior.
And they've never even owned up to COVID-19. So that's part of it. So they might be a little bit more self-sufficient. Brian, think about the intellectual property, too. So our LLMs were using, they were scraping different corpus of information from the Internet, books, history, etc. But we were entering into licensing deals. I think, like, for example, The New York Times, The Washington Post, they were cutting deals with Open A.I., with Google, with Meta, etc. So that they had the right to use that content with regards to training the LLM.
In this instance, all of that content is now built into DeepSeek. But do you think they paid for any of it? How do you think they accessed it?
So it's, again, kind of like there's a lot of like old Chinese playbook here, right? Like, they're going and they're just taking our IP, I assume they're just taking the IP. They're undercutting the market. And I really think their goal here is to not just beat us with AI, but to also access our devices, to access our data. Data, at the end of the day, data is a major part of this game. A lot of people listening right now go, OK, take my data. You know, I'm making $65,000 a year, I got a family, I got a mortgage, I got two cars.
What do you have on me? What's the negative side of giving up your data? Well, let's talk about it a little bit differently. Let's say, for example, China wants to come into New York City and start to institute a cyber attack or Iran or any of these countries. What's really interesting is we have billions of cyber attacks in New York City every single week.
Billions, literally. In fact, New York City is working in conjunction with the federal government to safeguard us. We're at a weaker point than China where it's centralized because all of our infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector.
So I think in terms of hospitals, banking systems, et cetera. So when we're attacked, when our AI, when AI is used by China, by Iran, by North Korea, we're attacked in a way that is totally disjointed and disorganized when we have to be on the defense. The government literally needs to align with the private sector to make sure that we're locked down and all of your data and everything is safe and secure. Meanwhile, keep in mind now, China has access to your phone, to the way that you're moving, to what you're purchasing, your consumer habits, anything that's any information that's on your phone, where you live. Perhaps they could access your banking information. It's all locked into your phone and it puts us, I think, in a more vulnerable, vulnerable perspective. When we attack the foreign markets like China or Iran or North Korea, because they're a centralized entity, it's a lot easier for them to protect their infrastructure, to protect their water sources, their hospitals, their banking system. So when you talk about practical uses of AI, which you talk about in your book, Black George Washington pops up early with Google's AI search. I'm thinking to myself, OK, so clearly we can't count on this either.
And we see China with this leading app that turns out that they have all disinformation on when it goes against the Chinese best interest. Should we all be wary of that? I think we're still at a point with regards to the development of AI where people should double check.
I certainly do. I never rely on using artificial intelligence if it's generative AI, which is what you're referencing on its own. I'll use it as a starting point. It can make, it could facilitate tasks and open up some free time for more important objectives in my day. But I would encourage all of your listeners, if they're going to use generative AI, to double check, make sure their sources and the information is accurate. Which is weird because you just want to be able to like do what you saw about the encyclopedia and say, OK, what happened in the war of 1812?
You put it in the chat by GBT and go, well, what country came up with this? Is England going to put out something that makes it look better than the US? That kind of, I feel, is a step backwards. Well, we're getting there. It's almost there. Open AI, for example, is allowing for sources of information. It's really easy now. So you could click the link and go back and read it and make sure that it's perfect.
All right. So Mark Beckman's got a book out. Go pick it up if you want to see how AI can help you in your life. It's called Some Future Day, how AI is going to change everything. And you can follow Mark at Mark Beckman. Thanks, Mark. Thank you so much.
