Steven Forth is Ibbaka’s Co-Founder, CEO, and Partner. Ibbaka is a strategic pricing advisory firm.

In this episode, Steven discusses how AI, particularly transformer models, is revolutionizing business strategies by automating complex tasks like value modeling and scenario planning, making them more efficient. He emphasizes the importance of leveraging AI to explore frameworks and generate innovative solutions, such as using AI to better understand industry problems. Steven also highlights the ongoing development of prompt orchestration tools, which will soon become essential for managing AI workflows and optimizing the use of multiple models.

 

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Discover how AI is transforming traditional frameworks like value modeling, scenario planning, and pricing, making complex processes faster and more efficient.
• Gain insights on how AI can help you better understand problems and create innovative solutions, ultimately improving your decision-making process.
• Dive into emerging concepts like prompt orchestration and how AI is evolving, giving you the tools to enhance your AI workflows for maximum effectiveness.

 

“Create a series of prompts, create a series of context documents that you can reuse and explore the framework in ways that you never could before and find ways of applying it.”

- Steven Forth

 

Topics Covered:

02:10 - How no single AI model can meet all needs, thus,  advocating for multiple model for diverse perspectives and specialized capabilities

03:11 - Distinguishing between diffusion models and transformer models

05:46 - How does a transformer model work

07:28 - Understanding the [LQMs] Large Quantitative Models, [RAG] Retrieval Augmented Generation and challenges faced by companies like Pros in leveraging customer-owned data 

11:39 - How Wolfram/Alpha uses mathematical reasoning to validate and simplify equations and highlighting the emergence of reasoning models for complex problem-solving

15:34 - Steven reflecting on his increasing reliance on AI tools, how they are transforming his thinking, and the need to embrace these technologies as vital partners in enhancing exploration, communication, and decision-making

17:17 - How generative AI enables more dynamic and efficient approaches to scenario planning

23:29 - Emphasizing how leveraging AI with established frameworks accelerates complex tasks like building value models

25:13 - Learning 'prompt orchestration’ to optimize prompt sequences and responses

26:52 - Explaining Perplexity's limitations in generating complete outputs

 

Key Takeaways:

“It used to take Ibbaka between 40 and 60 hours of work by a highly trained person to build a value model. It now takes us less than two hours to build a better value model than we could have done before.” - Steven Forth

 

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Geoffrey Hinton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton
• Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/asia
• Attention is All You Need paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need
• Sam Altman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman
• Karen Chiang: https://impactpricing.com/podcast/467-minimize-churn-and-boost-your-net-dollar-retention-with-karen-chiang/
• Porter's 5 Forces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysis
• Clayton Christensen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen
• William Gibson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson
• Perplexity AI: https://www.perplexity.ai
• ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com
• You.com: https://you.com
• Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co

 

Connect with Steven Forth:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenforth/
• Email: [email protected]

 

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: [email protected]