Coming Soon - Victor AI - Victor Menasce

The Real Estate Espresso Podcast

Coming Soon – Victor AI

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Coming Soon – Victor AI

Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso Podcast, your morning shot of what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I’m your host, Victor Menasce. On today’s show, we’re talking about how to search for the Real Estate Espresso Podcast.

With over 2,800 episodes, there is a significant body of work and we’ve got loyal listeners, and I often hear about past episodes from listeners. Searching over 2,800 episodes for something you’ve heard in the past could be a daunting task. So much so that I’m sure most people wouldn’t even try.

We’ve made an investment in creating a custom AI tool specific to the Real Estate Espresso Podcast. We’re calling it Victor AI.

We have an intuitive idea how the various large language models work. When you go into a tool like ChatGPT, or ~~GemIIni~~ 📝Gemini, or Perplexity, you ask it a question. The tool then relies on what it’s learned by crawling the entire internet, or perhaps at least as much as it can legally get a hold of. That knowledge base becomes the foundation on which its answers are formed. But it is also possible to restrict the knowledge base and to create a custom knowledge base that becomes an expert in just one thing.

For example, let’s imagine you want to master the game of checkers. You could train a language model to become an expert in checkers. I know it’s a trivial example. But you could find all the resources out there in the universe on checkers with the goal of building the world’s most powerful expert at checkers. Exact same process can be used on any knowledge base.

In our case, it’s training a custom AI tool to become an expert on the Real Estate Espresso Podcast. It’s learning from all 2,850 episodes of the podcast by examining transcripts of the audio.

This is a new capability that we’ll be rolling out to the general public in the coming weeks. It’s currently undergoing internal testing. Here’s what some of our testing has turned up.

Let’s imagine you want to know: what did Victor have to say about industrial property in Dallas? So I asked Victor AI the following question: search the podcast for industrial property metrics in Dallas. Now you’ll notice that I didn’t give it the name of the podcast because it already knows we’re talking about the Real Estate Espresso Podcast.

And it says, yes, there’s a Real Estate Espresso Podcast that discusses industrial property metrics, including data relevant to Dallas with the broader Texas market analysis. The most directly relevant segment is in the episode titled “The Best Texas Market.” And then it goes on to describe what’s contained in that episode.

Now, I was not that happy with the response. While it did give me the title and a summary of the content, it didn’t tell me when it was published, nor did it give me a link to the podcast itself. So I told it to take me specifically to that episode on Dallas industrial. Again, it gave me the name of the episode and a summary of what I talked about in the episode.

So I asked a little differently. I said, provide a link to that episode both on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, as well as the date of publication. So then it gave me the links for the Real Estate Espresso Podcast episode specifically on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts. But then it had a hard time finding the exact publication date because it wasn’t able to find that from the RSS feed.

The blog post instead that is on my website at ~~victorjim.com~~ 📝victorjm.com showed the publication date as January the 9th, so it tried to infer that from the blog.

So as you can see, it’s a matter of not just asking a question; you’ve got to sometimes ask the right question. I asked it the following question. I said, what can you tell me about water rights? It’s a pretty general question. And then it went on to describe and said what water rights are and how you can use water and what you can and cannot use. It talked about the fundamentals, talked about the two main doctrines for water rights. There’s riparian water rights in the eastern US and then the doctrine of prior appropriations in the western part of the country. And then it goes on to describe the various elements of it. So it did a pretty good job of that. And I recognized that content because, of course, I wrote it and talked about it in the podcast.

But again, it didn’t tell me which specific episode, so I asked it what podcast episodes talk about water rights. And then Victor AI said after reviewing the full set of transcripts provided it doesn’t appear to be a single episode specifically dedicated to water rights. And then it offered me the option of getting more information on submetering of apartments so that you could get better control of your water consumption, which of course has nothing to do with that.

So I gave it a hint. I said, try Episode 2033 published on August 8, and then at that point, it said, yes, Episode 2033 of the podcast, published on August 8, does indeed discuss water rights and water management, and then described what’s in that particular episode.

Then I gave it another hint. I said, try Episode 183 on July 20, 2018. And then it said, yes, excellent. Episode 183 of the podcast is indeed the one that discusses water rights. And then it goes on to describe what was contained in that particular episode. But it did confuse information from the later episode in 2023. It kind of matched them both together. And then it summarized and said, yes, the Episode 183 in July 20, 2018, is your go‑to reference on water rights and sustainable water use in real estate development.

So in fact, the AI tool lied about the content that was specific to that episode. It’s searching all 2,850 episodes for content, and it’s not currently indexing the content to specific episodes. So it’s putting it all together, one big pool. So this will require the tool to relearn the content, but this time to maintain the context for each episode.

So in short, the AI tool is not quite ready for release to the public. I would put it in the category of useful but not excellent yet. And this exercise has given us real insight into how the tools learn. In my experience, the tools do a great job of learning content, but not necessarily a great job of maintaining context, and that’s what we need to train it on.

So in the coming weeks, you can expect to see Victor AI being launched. You’ll be able to search the entire history of the Real Estate Espresso Podcast for any piece of content, and hopefully it will take you to the specific episode that covers that specific topic.

As you think about that, have an awesome rest of your day. Go make some great things happen and we’ll talk to you again tomorrow.

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