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Midwest Momentum
Stories from the Midwest Start-Up community.
Midwest Momentum
Business News Highlights from the Midwest, flying cars, gadgets to go into space and AI, Oh MY.
Ever wondered how Ohio is becoming a powerhouse in both space research and culinary arts? Join us, Michelle Gatchell and Dan Rockwell, as we delve into the heart of the Midwest's industries located in Ohio. Our journey starts with the state's significant strides in supporting life beyond Earth, minus the rocket launches. We also celebrate the leaps made by local initiatives: from soaring ambitions with flying car to a Columbus gem making waves in clean energy. Plus, we raise a toast to Ohio's gastronomic prowess, showcased by a local chef's triumph on "Chopped."
It's a brave new world where space innovation meets artificial intelligence, and we're here to navigate it. In this episode, we unravel the exciting synergy at NASA's Imagine Aviation event and how it's setting the stage for space tech's incredible potential. Your imagination will be captured by the advancements in AI, from OpenAI's mind-bending text to video processing to the creative genius of AI-designed planters by IC3D. We'll also get a glimpse into the future with the latest AI-driven physics engines that are redefining our understanding of possibility.
We question the changing face of information access and the human desire to personify our digital counterparts. Prepare to have your perspective shifted as we explore the quest for authenticity in a world teeming with intelligent engines.
Time to hustle America, roll up our sleeves and make dreams happen. Midwest momentum brings you stories of CEOs, startups, product development and founders doing whatever it takes to make their big idea happen. Midwest momentum is supported by big kitty labs and produced by G and our media. Here's me with momentum hopes Dan Rockwell and Michelle Gatchel.
Speaker 2:All right, welcome to Midwest momentum. My partner, dan Rockwell, is back in play. Good to be back. So missed, so missed.
Speaker 4:What are we doing today? We're talking about everything. Wow, Ohio.
Speaker 2:Columbus is a buzz man, ohio is a buzz.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 1:Special Ohio is a buzz episode.
Speaker 2:And you know, Space is Something that Ohio. I heard this explained in an interview At the space forum in April and I really liked the explanation. They were talking about how the people that make the rockets right Mm-hmm are in Houston, no Florida. Yeah they take off from Florida or California.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Houston is control right. Yeah but all of the experiments and things that help, that will help in the future. People live in space. Yeah, ohio, really R&D is Ohio man.
Speaker 4:That's kind of awesome. Yeah flames a lot. There's a lot of stuff going on here, for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Events coming up that are some amazing things, and then lots of local news going on Like groups, like a Joby, is this Flying car group? What, yeah?
Speaker 2:I could get some of the flying car.
Speaker 4:Yes, it's flying car and prove for certain routes. Don't know all the details, but you know they have the, the drones and sort of a drone flying. You know evil. That was it the vertical takeoff Airport there. And yeah, joby put down a plant. It's got four and forty employees already.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I think it's Cincinnati, I think it might be either is in the Dayton, you know, sort of bridge between Dayton and sort of in Cincinnati in that region. But yeah, that whole region is just kind of exploding with a bunch of investment. The other piece I came across just a few minutes ago Was clean energy start-up Just landed 246 million here in Columbus, ohio, and that's called a comalah. That's k o L o m a and. Hydrogen startup, yeah, so that's kind of a hydrogen fuel cells?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'll be. Research doesn't say exactly all all the stuff with it, but it's a. It's a geologic Hydrogen startup which is and it's not high estate tech as well. So okay that's a really nice story coming in here and that could be really cool. If that's Wow, that's a, that's a, that's a startup out of Ohio State's energy advancement group, which is really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Lots of cool stuff there, wow.
Speaker 2:Very, very cool, I'm telling you. I have state is starting a whole bunch of things.
Speaker 4:Yeah you know, and the TV SF. This is another group here, state of Ohio. This is their third frontier awards. They awarded 800,000 to Probably four or five different startups it looks like four companies here in the Ohio. These are all companies out of the high region and they're all connected to different universities that have, you know, licensed technology. So that's really nice to see you know 800,000 going into Split across four companies to help them with their first initial round of Investment. That's a that's a high-o initiative program that's available to people that licensed technology from the universities and or make a case for it and the sort of on its own to the Ohio Third third frontier board. So that's pretty cool oh.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Yeah, I want to give a shout out to chef Alexia Osborne from Littleton's market in upper Arlington. She won shot the show, chopped. Hello, you know I'm a food junkie in the food network and hello, we got a local chef that Made it big and chopped.
Speaker 4:That's pretty cool because you know Columbus and really a lot of our I was such a foodie area, yeah, like she's got business ready to roll. I'm you know what I mean Really into that. But I also feel like that's also something that's happening across the Midwest. It's kind of like I don't know, just seeing lots of more people Starting, you know, food like businesses, you know yeah, let's talk space.
Speaker 4:Space. Yes, we have a couple of events coming up. One of them is this imagination aviation event. This is an online event that people can check out. We're going to have to figure out how to get the link out, because the link is a little tricky to remember.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I was like how do I say that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, look up NASA, imagine aviation, yeah, and imagine, does not have an E, it's IMAGINA VIATOTION. So imagine aviation.
Speaker 4:And this is a really cool sort of free event. It looks like.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it kind of stumbled across this the other day and it has a lot of just all these thought leadership talks about how they're approaching space, how they're approaching innovation groups, you know, connected to NASA. Really great talks here from some companies Right now I get a lot of great attention like Lockheed Martin, other companies, because they're finally kind of advancing to show you know technologies that we that finally feel like we're in the future. Of course we are in a world where everyone talks about UFOs every five minutes.
Speaker 3:I don't know, maybe maybe it's coming together.
Speaker 4:but at the same time, seeing this approach actually in talking about thought leadership and space and how we're dreaming and how we're sort of approaching things, it's a refreshing like it almost it's a welcome piece. You know, it's like oh wow, that's great. I'm actually it's cool to see them actually taking this time and sharing something with the public for them to actually explore, and you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting how NASA, you know, is really collaborating with a lot of private entities to make things happen and I really I appreciate and I appreciate and like that, because it accelerates things right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, like we're seeing the investment, we're seeing the R&D really sort of explode and we're starting, we're seeing the investment dollars go into not just the hard sciences but also the you know the actual sustainability of the space. Like they're going to build the. You know the evil airports. You know they're going to build the drone centers. They're going to build the infrastructure. They're going to build the specialty schools that will probably be coming out with the specialty programs and degrees that will be connected to this space as it kind of rises. And it seems like it's a great time to, you know, find ways to get involved. And at the same time, it's great it is a new time for kind of like the Renaissance we saw that last year with this notion of AI and kind of sparking a lot of an art Renaissance. At the same time, it was a brand new world for startups.
Speaker 4:Ai has really shifted the game and continues to shift the game Today, with Sam Altman and OpenAI, they just announced another big leap in basically prompt text to video processing. It looks like this is a new technology that is a mix of potentially generative AI techniques and then at the same time, it's like a. It's an actual physics engine. So now we're starting to see some. You're starting to see the AI being Really not just in the tools to make things happen, but the AI has gone as far as to actually advance things. So Potentially, other tools that were not as advanced to do something before have been upgraded with AI. Yes, like they've been fine tuned with AI. You know what I mean, and so you're not. That's. That's the cool thing I think. That a lot of people potentially have not really Grasp with AI is it is not just a tool that helped you generate something, but it could actually perfect something that you already thought was perfect. Right, it's like. No, I mean, it's actually ripped it apart and made it leave a little bit more efficient. You know?
Speaker 2:you know, I gotta tell you, I just visited a company today called IC3D and they actually Do printing of planters, for instance, but the Co-founder used AI To. He put prompts in to say you know, make me a really cool earthy, organic design of a planter. And he took that and made it into a 3d Planter and they are so cool.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's amazing. I love that kind of used AI to sort of simulate, you know, model what, what could be you know a dozen different ways, before sort of committing you know to it in a printed Fashion yeah, that's a, that's a, you know, skill that we have not had. And what's funny is, you know, we've had it now for what? About a year, year and a half, and I wonder if we're just already like, yeah, you know, like you know, right.
Speaker 2:The sad thing is I honestly think there's a lot of Companies that don't see the usefulness like this company is really, you know, using it for what it's worth, right, yeah, and I think there could be more uses like that of companies and they don't even realize it, yeah. Yeah it's a shame.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and it's, I think it's. It's also something that we have to realize. It'll take time, yeah, like it's, it's hard to Like.
Speaker 4:You still meet people that Haven't really even used chat, gtp or have been used other tools. You know and it's, and it's not, as it's not super shocking because a lot of ways that people don't understand the force Application of it. It's like another thing for them to manage, right, right. Many people are like I'm like, totally, I can't wait to leave that scene, like I don't need to know that slang word, I don't.
Speaker 3:Like they're all backing out, like oh, okay. You know, so have you tried so far? Yet I know it just opened today.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's not available for people really to try.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, it also is.
Speaker 4:It's one of these things where, like it's, you can tell it looks like a game engine, like it definitely could has a vibe where it could look Kind of simulated. I think this it'll be interesting, but it's also right now. It's. It's so funny when you know now when people like see a new technology, they're like that's it game over.
Speaker 3:That was it. It is the game over, you know. And then it's like next week now, now is the game. It just gets really old after a while. It's just like guys like dude, we just go with the flow. I know, go with the flow there's, you don't have to claim a winner.
Speaker 4:But you know, we don't know we have a claim. Winner takes all notion in every conversation. So it's just funny to see that now and there's just a. It's also a rabid time online with you know Bitcoin, you know crossing over to 50,000. So now it's. You know it's pushing up there and a lot of my friends in crypto are. You know. It's kind of funny when it's down that you can tell. You know they're like it's the end of the world and when it's up, they're like.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, you know it's like in your face every day.
Speaker 4:It's, it's, it's just comical and a lot of ways technology is comical how fast it moves and how. Like you know, how do we keep up sometimes?
Speaker 2:I want to kind of also throw out there, for anybody who's got that entrepreneurial spirit, a free source that I've used off and on through the years. But it is old school, it's called Score and it is senior executives that are retired and they basically are offering their knowledge for free to mentor others, that's really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's a lot of online videos that they've created with information about taxes is what I was looking up and I was like they have this great tax video. You know it's coming up. People, I hope you're getting ready for it. Get your taxes done.
Speaker 4:There's a group out in California that's trying to build a so almost like an AI search engine that's based on elderly people that they interview, but it's basically like it's called Wisdom Nice the name of the startup, but that's a cool idea, you know. It's sort of like we're trying to get you know. It's kind of like let's try to remember some facts before they get sort of rewritten in a lot of ways or at least interpreted differently.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and when you think about this because I was thinking about this, you know, from cave men till now, it seemed that the old communities, if you will, did a lot better job at passing on stories for the next generation, whether it be cave arts, writing, whatever. Now we're getting into this digital age where everything's coming at us so fast. I feel like we're not doing a good job recording where we've been.
Speaker 4:Well, I think that's kind of what's kind of brought a rise to a lot of micro trends there. So one big micro trend is the rise of tartaria Right. So you go on YouTube and you see all the old world videos right, where we see a lot of people bringing sort of like more people are starting to think about how things were before technology arrived and changed things. And also I think it's it's a romance of that time or a romance of the 1800s or the 1700s and how things sort of come together. But that's an interesting trend. That's like, right alongside there's a people talk about a really heightened sense in cosmology and astrology. Oh yeah, like the really huge trend.
Speaker 4:And then you talk about the UFO trend that's really strong next to it, and then you have, well, the politics which is itself it's its own massive category and conspiracy right, which was also sort of part of the Q and on and other things, and a lot of these things haven't left us. They've sort of they've kind of melted down into other layers where I feel like they, they. There's a certain amount of nostalgia too, that we're just sort of kind of reclaiming you know like in Japan they talked about the cassette trend, where cassettes were coming back, and then, of course, vinyl is back and even bigger than some ways it's ever been before.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And people talked. I remember talking with some friends about 23andMe and sort of talking about genealogy and how that that's been kind of ignited in a couple of different ways.
Speaker 1:Interesting, I think.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then something else that people don't really talk about that much, but I had interesting conversation the other day with a friend of mine where we talked about how what's the big question that people are asking more about these days? Do we believe in God so much, or is it the matrix? You? Know what I mean you know what I mean when people are always asking me like we live in a matrix.
Speaker 3:I'm like is that the question now? I thought it was like do you believe in God?
Speaker 2:When can I time travel Come? On now yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so it's and this is. I think this is all kind of in different layers of how we're interpreting not just technology but the notion of context, right, the notion of truth. In a lot of ways, because we're in such a digital world and we have a lot of deep fakes, everything can be synthesized almost with scary accuracy, in such a way that I think we I don't know, I agree in the nostalgia trend. I think that's, I think that's very popular and I think it's also but are we doing a good job recording all of this change?
Speaker 4:That's what you're, yeah. So back to that like are we? There is a quest for that knowledge, meaning we should actually be meeting with everybody at X age and going and trying to capture that, and AI has spurred that right. Ai spurred a lot of that movement to sort of capture it. It's also because AI has basically exposed that any piece of information now is infinitely more valuable than it was before, because now we have this AI lens to look at things. So you know, if you're a legacy company, like you've been in business for 60 years and you're in the Midwest, you're sitting on a goldmine of how things have been done and you need to really now do the next step, which is like, okay, I need to think about the data that I see every day in my shop that I don't need to know. That could actually be the foundation of how my business stays alive, right? So those are the cool things that I think are really great opportunities. They're not really understood, right?
Speaker 4:Because they're kind of like, wait a minute, what are you talking about? But that's the time that we're kind of in. We're in a time where you should be thinking, I think, much larger. Just because there's, you can bet there's somebody is right. Yeah right, because you can, mm-hmm, you can, you can, you know?
Speaker 2:And in the fact that now I mean, we had access to knowledge through Google search for a long time, right, right. But now I feel like and you know I haven't done this yet, but I'm going to do it this weekend- Yep. I did like a chat. Gpt-4 search.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 2:But I also said to it give me your references of where you found this information. Yeah, and it did, and I went to those places to check. Right, I fact-checked it if you will. Yeah, but so because I think a big thing is I've gotten it. I feel like sometimes chat GPT at the end of the day is exhausted, Mm-hmm, and it just gives me like stuff it answered from the guy before me that was on there and I'm like what?
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, see that's. The other thing is we kind of went into chat GTP with the expectations we got from Google, right, right, so we took our learnings from one product and applied it to that and then you know, what's funny is is you're right. It really is random when it's bad. Yeah, sometimes I know, like Google barge slash Gemini that it's now called can be really lame at times, like it's just lame.
Speaker 3:And then other times it's accurate and it's like almost.
Speaker 4:I don't know it's sometimes I have to split my expectation a little bit because you start to think about the AI. It gets more and more human on you, yeah, and it's like people have been using like human hacks, like someone started doing a hack where they would tell chat GTP, you know, give me that data and I'll give you an extra $200 if you do a better job. And so the AI would go back and it would try to do a better job for that, right.
Speaker 3:Which never gets to the AI. So it was like you know okay, great.
Speaker 4:So we not only do we create this simulated life, we we immediately start screwing around with it.
Speaker 2:And it's like don't piss off the machine, because when the machine can really think for itself, we're screwed.
Speaker 4:Well, that's what's so funny, is it's? It's like all roads to be. All roads lead back to man. Like you know is this technology is doing this. I'm like no, no, no, no all roads.
Speaker 3:Oh, there we go. There's the people Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, human nature.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's just a human nature part.
Speaker 2:So what amazed me? My mind opened up this weekend of you really can Ask it a complex question slash situation.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it really fast comes up with an answer.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Faster than anyone.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and that's. You know it sucks about the answers that you get from the AIs. I mean I like the drill down ability of search. I like to tell search, give me the last seven days. I want JPEGs only, and you know, you know, and, and then I don't know I can put other, like you know. I mean I like that fine tuning aspect.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's also, too, one of the things that's really tough I think about it is that now we have intelligence engines on top of the internet, so you're not even on the iceberg. Now you're actually on a on a, on a really tall bridge above the iceberg that that is on the water right. So you're far. You're further and further away from the depth of the truth of the internet sometimes, and so that's going to bring, and we're already seeing that now in search engines and social networks. You know X is. It's changing its Twitter chemistry a lot. You're seeing blue skies now available to the public. So it's there's no longer a beta to get into that. Instagram threads is trying to regroup. Tiktok is changing this model. There's, there's more and more space, there's new social networks now for art. Art station is a new network that focuses on AI artists. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:What was the one where you could set up a gallery of free thing? Oh no, that was for NFTs.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that was for the on the NFTs side object maybe, or a couple of these other places, but it's yeah, yeah, so, and then, like, of course, the, the NFTs is like its own sort of separate, almost kind of a group of things. And then, of course, we have the rise of now we have Apple vision glasses versus the meta quest three, so you have competing sort of layered worlds, right, so it's, it's, there's a lot of stuff that's coming and we're already going to look at somewhat of the of the average user sort of being like oh man, wait, what is it?
Speaker 2:Right, yes, and now we're going to have AI that manages our intake of stuff that we can intake, you know, yeah, yeah, I'm just going to be really nice to my AI because you know, I want her to know that they were saying well wait, if my AI watches the TV, is it his ads?
Speaker 4:that are affecting things now, or is it mine? Yeah Right, it's so true I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 2:But Well, Dan, this has been really fascinating talk, yes. And also I mean, I think, people need to think broadly about how they use their AI. I think people need to think broadly about how they use this stuff.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's not regulations right now with AI, but you need to regulate yourself so you don't get in trouble.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and definitely yeah. I would educate your kids on it. But you got to remember these tools are are built to be. They're not really built for I don't know. Going hog wild with the. You know, what I mean. It's just like a search engine for the most part.
Speaker 2:So you got to be careful, all right. Well, we'll be back with another episode next week, so have a great one and catch a lot of momentum, yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thanks for listening everyone.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to Midwest Momentum on your favorite podcast site and great radio stations across Ohio like 92.9 in Franklin, lickin and Delaware counties and WDLR Herden, delaware, union and Marion counties.
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