Dan Steele began his business career in the early 2000s by building and selling a gaming company. After that, he spent four years as a mediocre (his word) professional poker player before working on a kids’ product called Sillybandz, which went from zero to $100 million in sales without spending a dollar outside social media.
After starting his own social media agency and working with celebrities, Dan co-founded Influential, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered influencer marketing company that pairs big brands with people with large social media followings.
Today, Dan is an entrepreneur in residence at StartUp Vegas, where he connects Las Vegas startups with customers and capital sources.
When ChatGPT was released, Dan had an idea. He asked his wife, “What if I got ChatGPT to write a book about itself?” She thought that would be funny, so he got started. It took a week for Dan to figure out how the platform’s prompts work, but he published The Book on ChatGPT in February 2023. A month later, he published The Book on ChatGPT 4.
Dan joined Carl Lewis, host of The Connected Enterprise podcast, to chat about all things ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022. Within two months, it had 100 million users. (Compare that to Facebook and Twitter, which took five years to get a hundred million users, and iPhones, which took three years.)
“It was the fastest, most incredibly impressive thing I’ve seen in technology,” Dan says.
Dan explains ChatGPT is programmed using a large language model, and it processes languages and nuances well. For example, it understands regional dialects, so you can ask it to translate something from southern English to Cuban Spanish.
ChatGPT uses all the data and interactions from the internet up to 2021. But even though it’s accessing two-year-old information, it’s a quick study. You can tell the platform you don’t like what it generated, and it digests your feedback. And the more people use it, the faster it learns.
Dan compares ChatGPT’s learning curve to his childhood experience at a hardware store. “There was a big funnel, and you’d drop a quarter in the top of it,” he explains. “The quarter would go around the top really slow, speed up in the middle, and go really fast at the bottom.”
Almost anything. You can ask ChatGPT to compose music or write a business pitch, poetry, or school essay. You can tell it your child’s name and what they like, and it will write a personalized bedtime story.
Dan says many businesses are using ChatGPT to rewrite their website copy and refine search engine optimization (SEO).
And it comes in handy in the kitchen. “My wife was cooking for two from a recipe for six,” Dan explains. “I told her to paste the recipe in ChatGPT and ask for the conversions, and it just spit it out.”
Dan talks about a project he worked on at Influential. It involved raising $10 million and 30 people working around the clock for almost a year to produce a cutting-edge technology product.
“Now, with ChatGPT, I wouldn’t say you could recreate what we did in a month,” Dan notes. “But you’d be able to recreate a lot of it, really fast, with a lot fewer resources, so that’s kind of scary.”
However, he points out people panicked when Uber launched self-driving trucks, fearing truck drivers would lose their jobs. They needn’t have worried—roads aren’t designed for self-driving trucks, and we’re decades away from even the possibility.
“The industry was barely affected, but people were freaked out about it,” Dan says. “For those worried about AI, is it really a problem, or are they just getting clickbait headlines? It’s hard to say.”
Within a few years, Dan envisions telling ChatGPT he wants to watch a new movie set in the 1930s in the style of Quentin Tarantino with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the lead role—and it will play.
In the business world, Dan thinks ChatGPT has the potential to replace some mid-level management jobs. However, it’s a huge benefit for small businesses that can’t afford things like a good SEO company.
For example, a friend of Dan’s working for a small law firm used ChatGPT for SEO. “In six months, he was able to get the firm to compete on keywords they would’ve never been able to rank for,” Dan says.
For more insights from Dan Steele, listen to Vision33’s The Connected Enterprise podcast. In each episode, host Carl Lewis interviews bright minds and industry thought leaders about enterprise technology and what’s coming next.