Mark Cuban’s investment strategy in the world of AI

MARK CUBAN: Six seven.

I don’t know if you saw, but six, seven is like the dictionary word of the year or whatever. And I heard it. I was like, what is this? One sort of like half the videos with me are like six, seven, just doing stupid stuff, yelling six, seven. It’s insane. INPUT MARK CUBAN VIDEOS HERE that say “Six Seven” ??

RANA EL KALIOUBY: You might recognize that voice. It’s Mark Cuban. Yes, *that Mark Cuban known as one of the ‘sharks’ on Shark Tank .. owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks .. and a legendary entrepreneur and investor, with a list of companies in his portfolio that would take this whole episode to read.

And you heard him talking about all the AI videos he’s appeared in lately…including lots with the “6, 7” meme … More on that in a bit. But know this: Mark Cuban is going all-in on AI. He’s backing AI companies. He’s thinking about how it will change everyday life, and he has strong views on what people need to navigate a world with AI.

A big shoutout to my friend, longtime venture and legal executive Mike Shuckerow (SHUCK-er-oh) who connected me with Mark. Thank you Mike!

Mark and I connected and geeked out on topics like robotics and computer vision.

And that’s our episode today. It’s a wide-ranging, no-holds-barred chat that I had a lot of fun recording. I hope you enjoy this look into the mind of Mark Cuban.

I’m Rana el Kaliouby, and this is Pioneers of AI.

[THEME MUSIC]

CUBAN: Oh my God, we aligned. How cool is that? Doesn’t happen so often. All righty. Hi Mark. Welcome to Pioneers of AI.

Thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be here.

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EL KALIOUBY: So I wanna start with Sora. For our listeners who don’t know what Sora is, it’s OpenAI’s video creation tool.

You can create these short clips with yourself, your friends, and with celebrities if the celebrity has allowed it. And you are kind of a very early adopter in allowing people to create videos of you and you kind of went viral. Why? Why did you do that? Why did you decide to go all in?

CUBAN: Well, I went in, like, I try everything, right? I just love to play with everything. And so you have the opportunity to do a cameo — is what they call it — where you put up just like doing facial recognition type setup. And then they have these delimiters that you can add to limit or define how you want things to proceed.

You can put, don’t do this or don’t do that, but I was like, I wonder if I can use this for marketing. And so I put on there, always finish with the logo of cost plus drugs.com, one of my companies, and let’s just see if it works, and damn if it didn’t work. And it was just always there. So I’m like, if people want to put it out there, have fun, because they do have guidelines and limits to what they’ll allow people to make you do.

They don’t always go far enough, but they’re still relatively safe. I don’t even know, I think there’s been — I know — four or 5,000 videos created of me. And the funny thing is, right, I was sitting right here when I did it, and I just cut myself shaving.

This mark right there. And I’m like, now I’m gonna know if it’s — whatever. Anytime you see a video of me with a little shaving cut, I know that it’s from the AI. I know it’s from Sora.

EL KALIOUBY: That is funny because we made a video of you, which we wanna show you, and we used it to announce that you were coming on the show and we actually asked the audience to submit questions, which we have a few of, and we’ll tackle that later. But we wanna show you the video.

CUBAN: I saw this one. I saw this one.

EL KALIOUBY: Basically it’s an AI twin of you and you are in a robot factory building a humanoid robot. And it actually — you’re a little stiff to be fair — but your voice sounds exactly like you. And I feel like if somebody doesn’t know you super well, they could really think.

CUBAN: Oh no, it’s crazy. Like people have used me to do promotions, come to Destin, Florida, you know, to vacation. And I got an email from a friend and he was like, you’re going down to Destin. I have a place there, we should meet. But my latest ones were me winning the somersault competition of the Olympics, and being crowned world champ.

Another one, being the—

EL KALIOUBY: Actually do a somersault?

CUBAN: Could I? Yes.

Will I? No. But Sora knows how to make me do a somersault, so it’s been fun.

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EL KALIOUBY: That is so fun. Well, to your point though, you have all of your AI generated videos include cost plus drugs, which is really genius because it’s free advertising. Do you envision that that will be the future of advertising?

CUBAN: No, not really. That was more of a lark on my end just to see if it worked. And now because it’s new, people are willing to do it, and because it’s 10 seconds, it’s not worthwhile to go to another platform and remove the Sora or cost plus logos. Some people have, though. So it’s more just about learning for me because.

The beauty of this is that you can iterate so many times and so quickly, and then if you want to edit, you can edit ’em together into something. But right now it’s just the first inning and it’s a chance to play with it.

EL KALIOUBY: Do you have a digital twin of yourself that’s out there, where if I wanna book a meeting with you I can just go talk to your twin?

CUBAN: No, but I did — so I was the first investor in a company called Synthesia and they’re doing really well. Yeah.

EL KALIOUBY: That’s a British company that creates human-like AI avatars. They just raised a new round of funding, and they’re reportedly valued at $4 billion dollars.

CUBAN: And so seven, eight years ago, I invested because I wanted to try to get in front of all these different AI things and computer vision and neural network stuff. And so the Mavs went to China in 2019 and I had an avatar that had me speaking Chinese that they put up on the jumbotron in China.

So it’s not — I’m not responsive in anything that I’m doing. But I’ve used synthesia.io and it’s been great.

Copy LinkHow AI and computer vision could transform preventive health

EL KALIOUBY: That’s amazing. So we’re both passionate about this idea of a health span revolution and the combination of new sensor technology, new types of data, and of course both predictive and generative AI will unlock preventative medicine, personalized medicine. Would love to get your thoughts on this space and how are you thinking.

CUBAN: Sure. A couple things there. One, your body’s just one big math equation.

We don’t know all the variables. We don’t even know how many there are. But over time we’ll develop new ways to uncover all of that, right? And new sensors to be able to gather new information, new algorithms that’ll be able to pull things out of that data.

And I think that will make us better at preventive healthcare. You’re starting to see more blood tests and analysis of MRIs and x-rays and everything. So I think all those are good steps forward, but we haven’t really even got into the computer vision side of it, right? Because computer vision, particularly for robotics and capturing things and analyzing them, is really compute intensive and really hard right now.

And it’s really hard to get enough stuff to train on. So as we start getting more into CV driven things, we’ll see more impact on healthcare and the results will start to be more dramatic. I invested in a company for sports that uses computer vision to track a player’s gait while they’re running in a game and to look for nuanced variances from game to game to game. And then using algorithms to try to look to see how it correlates to injuries. And they’re getting a lot closer. They started with soccer in the UK and Europe, and now we’re starting to do things with basketball.

And so doing those types of things where it’s more preventive than reactive, I think we’ll see more and more of as we get more in depth compute with video.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, I think that’s fascinating. My son is a squash player and he’s gotten a number of hamstring injuries and Achilles.

CUBAN: Yeah. Anytime you have that quick movement like that, right, you’re always putting strain on your — and particularly if you play a lot, you get these repetitive stress injuries.

EL KALIOUBY: Exactly. So can you detect that early on and then personalize the training that he needs to do to stretch and.

CUBAN: Exactly right. All that stuff’s great training grounds, but we’re just in the early days.

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EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, absolutely. So we are both passionate about both AI and entrepreneurship, so I wanna talk about that next.

Do you think AI is lowering the barrier to entrepreneurship? Is it easier?

CUBAN: Yeah. Oh yeah. By age and access. There are so many people — like I gave a speech yesterday — so we have this thing, Mark Cuban’s AI Foundation Bootcamp. Right.

EL KALIOUBY: Tell us about it.

CUBAN: Okay, so basically I had this guy that I did it with yesterday, six years ago, maybe five years ago. Somebody just sent me a cold email.

I’m from Pittsburgh and they were from Pittsburgh, and they’re like, we’re trying to come up with ways to introduce AI, or neural networks at the time, into schools for middle school and high school. I’m like, that’s great. Somebody needs to come up with an idea to help train kids and get them excited about it.

I’m like, I should just create this thing called a bootcamp and just set it up. Yesterday we had 500 people in including a bunch of kids that were all involved with the bootcamps.

We started it as a way of going into schools that might not have otherwise had advanced STEM programs or the resources to do this, and making it available to them, and we went from basic neural networks. Here’s JavaScript for a three layer neural network, six years ago, to machine learning. Here’s six different trees, here’s the attributes, which tree — guess which tree is the next one.

To now doing prompting with some understanding of machine learning underneath it, and the probabilistic approach to that AI takes in generative models.

EL KALIOUBY: I love that you’re not just teaching these kids to prompt engineer or vibe code, but you’re actually teaching them what’s inside the.

It is a great democratizer. There are few kids, even with the least amount of resources, who don’t have access to a smartphone.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s not easy though, so I sit on the board of my kids’ school and it’s a New England prep school, so it’s been around for hundreds of years and it’s been interesting to kind of see how we’re going about this. Like, I think there’s interest in being at the forefront of using AI in the classroom, but we’ve also, as a school, struggled on how to bring that to practice.

And of course, all the kids are already using AI.

CUBAN: Oh yeah, they’re using it no matter what. Like I was.

EL KALIOUBY: Right.

CUBAN: And they know — if you go into ChatGPT and you have it rewrite something — all the different tells, and they know how to erase the tells and all that stuff.

They’re way ahead and they follow all the Instagram and TikTok accounts that have all the AI hacks and all that kind of stuff. So they’re way ahead, but the teachers are terrified.

EL KALIOUBY: All right.

And that’s what it comes down to. And that was a big purpose of what I was doing yesterday, to try to get them excited that they can do more with kids.

Copy LinkHow young people are adapting to AI faster than institutions

Yeah. I wanna talk about young people a little bit more. So I have two.

CUBAN: Like you and I.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Yeah. Like exactly. It’s funny, so my daughter’s 22 and people actually often say we look like twins. And I’m like, yes.

CUBAN: A great thing.

EL KALIOUBY: She rolls her eyes and she doesn’t like that. But my daughter’s 22 and my son is 16 and a half and they are on the—

CUBAN: Yeah, my son’s — a daughter who’s 22 and one that’s 19. Yeah.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, so I’m curious. My kids are on the opposite sides of the AI spectrum. My daughter, Jana, will not use AI for anything.

CUBAN: My middle daughter will not. Hates it.

EL KALIOUBY: And my son is so AI forward. He uses AI for everything.

CUBAN: Will use it, but he thinks all AI videos are slop. My middle daughter’s concerned about the environmental concerns of AI and all that. And then my oldest daughter is like, yes. Anything that’s a hack that makes my life easier, I’m all in. So it runs the gamut.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. What’s your advice to young people? Try it?

CUBAN: There’s always gonna be something new, always. And the kids adapt the fastest. And it’s the adults that say, oh my God, I’m afraid. And then when it’s your kid that knows — back in the day, when a kid could write HTML code to create web pages, they were like a computer genius.

And then if they upped their game to JavaScript, they were like the best of the best of the best. That’s just the nature of the beast. Right? And kids are just gonna adapt more quickly because, like music, like anything else, they want to be in the forefront.

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EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. And then for our 22 year olds who are joining the workforce, what’s your advice? There are a lot of headlines about how these entry level jobs are going away.

CUBAN: Now there’s something that just came out today. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is 9.2%.

That’s scary.

But my advice is stop going after the big companies. Go to the small to medium sized companies. The big companies have IT departments and they have all the AI resources they need.

Whereas if you’re going to a smaller, medium sized company, particularly one that’s not a tech company, that’s entrepreneurial at all, you’re like the new great.

And what I tell kids is like, talk to whoever — manager, owner, whatever — and just say, I know how to do AI agents. Let me find all your manual processes, all the things that people hate to do at work here, right?

That are just a grind and boring and nobody wants to do them, and let me automate them. That’s it. You’re saying these are the things everybody hates to do. They take too long and keep everybody late after work. I’m gonna create agents that automate that. We had one of my Shark Tank companies, rebel cheese — they sell nothing but vegan cheese. Great stuff, rebelcheese.com. I’m always selling all day.

But in any event, so they ship a lot of these cheeses and when you ship something to consumers, you know, you’re putting it in UPS or whatever boxes, right? USPS boxes and their set rates for the boxes, and then where you’re going to send it to, depending on the distance, that’ll impact the rate as well.

And they’ll come up to a total charge of what the shipping company should charge you. They’re always wrong. But most small to medium sized companies that ship know that it’s wrong and they have people that do nothing but review those invoices for accuracy.

Here’s what they—

EL KALIOUBY: AI.

CUBAN: Save $10,000 a week by just creating a basic agent.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Very interesting. One of my investment hypotheses — and we will get to investing in AI in a second — is vertical AI. So looking for all these antiquated industries that have a lot of these manual processes and building really focused solutions.

CUBAN: And yeah, it can be like manufacturing, like cost plus drugs. We use all robots and agents and sensors to say, okay, if anything’s out of kilter, if there’s an error message at all, beep, report, recalibrate. Do what we gotta do with as little human intervention as possible so that we can get the price of manufacturing drugs here to be as cheap or cheaper than where there’s cheaper labor costs elsewhere in the world. All those things, anytime there’s an industry that’s been doing it the same way for years, that’s ripe with opportunity. Like you said, for the vertical industries. The crazy part is I get pitches all day every day. HVAC and auto repair and plumbing, all these things people are trying to do roll-ups and automate. Getting them to understand what agents are can sometimes be an obstacle course, but those things are happening. People see ’em as opportunities.

EL KALIOUBY: Coming up, Mark answers some of your questions, and we dive into our philosophies around investing in AI. Stay with us.

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Copy LinkWhat the US needs to do to stay ahead in the AI race

EL KALIOUBY: So we will get to AI investing, but before we do that, I wanted to get to a couple of the audience questions that we got from that Sora call out. And I want these to be lightning round style. So let’s go. This one came from Joseph Webe on LinkedIn, and he builds these AI ecosystems all around the world.

So his question for you is: the US is ranked number one in the global AI rankings. What does the US need to do to win the global AI race?

CUBAN: That’s a great question because it calls on so many different questions. The ethical, regulatory aspect of it, and I think if we can stay out of the way, but be very persistent in how closely we look at outputs, right. Don’t overregulate people who are creating.

But over-monitor the output. If this is what it’s designed to do — it might be military, right — show us so we can review it to make sure we know what you have so you don’t go sell it to somebody that shouldn’t have it, right?

I think that’s one.

And I’m concerned about overreliance on these big data centers that we’re creating, because it’s not even so much how much money’s being spent, even though that’s important. I just can’t imagine over a 10 year period that we aren’t going to improve the technology.

Enough that if you overspend on today’s technology, and particularly now with the administration that’s opposed to green energy, and you’re seeing even a state like Texas where you’ve got a lot of solar energy, and even wind, that’s 27% of our energy consumption. I don’t know that we’re approaching energy the right way, but I’m not an expert in it.

I just, it just doesn’t feel right to me.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, that is interesting. How do we become kind of the hub for the entire AI infrastructure, whether it’s data centers, manufacturing?

CUBAN: Here’s the ultimate problem. You’ve got five, six, whatever it is, companies that are trying to create the ultimate foundational model that we all depend on. It’s almost like in the nineties when all the search engines were competing — there was Lycos, Yahoo, whatever.

Right? There were all these different ones and you didn’t know if it was gonna be a winner take all or a top five. Now we know with search engines it’s Google. And then Bing has like one or 2%, and DuckDuckGo has got a half a percent. And so it’s effectively a winner take all. And so you’ve got Google, Meta, et cetera, OpenAI, going all in, spending everything, consuming every resource that they can just in case it’s winner take.

That’s gonna be really scary. Because there will come a time where they have to live up to the economics where they’re not gonna be able to just use their cash flow or lack thereof and just borrow money because people are gonna start to see the business aspect of it. And that’s part one. Part two is they’re gonna need — if it’s a winner take all — to figure out how to differentiate themselves.

And you’re starting to see that now that everybody’s trained on everything that’s on the internet, right? They’re licensing content, and I think you’re gonna see some of them start to become part of silos, right? So when I go talk to hospitals and I go talk to researchers, I’m like, the days of publish or perish are done, right?

If you just put your stuff out on the internet, you’re a moron because you need to keep all your.

And protect it. And maybe even consider not patenting it, just keep it as a trade secret and then either use it for your own model — because I think there’s gonna be millions of models, right — or auction it off to the highest bidder, right?

So you saw open evidence do a deal with the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, right? So you’re gonna see these companies try to learn from what happened on the internet and search engines and protect their IP and then auction it off. And so how does that impact all of the foundational models trying to win the game?

You just don’t know yet. Should MD Anderson have their own model? Should Mayo Clinic have their own model, et cetera? Those are the things from the business side that we still have to figure out.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, absolutely. I think this idea of data as the moat, right, is becoming more and more powerful. Yeah. All right. Here’s a more philosophical question that was asked by Steve Song. Hi Steve, on Instagram: how do we embed AI with maternal instincts?

CUBAN: That’s a really weird question. I don’t know. But I will say this. Maternal instincts relative to models — the thing about AI is it doesn’t know how to say, I don’t know. It doesn’t know how to say I’m wrong unless you tell it why it’s wrong and it agrees with you. Right. The best it can do is set a probabilistic threshold of why it might not be accurate and determine that if there’s a 20% chance I’m wrong, I’m gonna say I don’t know.

Right. But that’s not knowing that you don’t know.

So going to maternal instincts, right. You talk to your mom and my wife talked to her mom and women talk — ’cause that’s a unique experience. But how does AI do that? You know, love and all that kind of thing that goes into the equation. You can pretend to create it, and we’ve seen some weird stuff start to happen when people think they’ve recreated it, but you can’t. And so just the latency of real life versus models — you’ll never be able to replicate all — but you can use it as an information source.

Copy LinkWhy the biggest AI opportunities may lie beyond chatbots

EL KALIOUBY: All right, so when we FaceTimed a few weeks ago, you mentioned that you’re really interested in founders who are really taking big swings with AI and kind of re-imagining how we do life, how we go about life. So I wanted to ask you, what’s exciting you most in the AI space?

CUBAN: Less and less every day.

EL KALIOUBY: Interesting. Really, why?

CUBAN: In every new technology swing, you get this rush of entrepreneurs — when the app store came out, there was a zillion apps that everybody was raising money for. And so we’re already through all the low hanging fruit.

There’ll be anecdotal, great ideas that are simple that people use, existing open source or generative models. But in terms of trying to compete with the foundational models, that ship has sailed.

EL KALIOUBY: Sailed.

CUBAN: So where there’s great opportunity, I think, is what happens with video. Now a bunch of people are trying to get into the labeling business with video. I’m gonna take videos of 50 people folding their sheets and making their bed.

Right. So a robot can do it, right? I don’t think that that is anything to write home about. But trying to understand the laws of the universe and trying to figure those things out — there’s one company I looked at that I can’t go into too much detail about, but they basically use their version of a spectrometer that looks at what something’s made of.

And then looks at its physical attributes and its movement attributes and starts using algorithms and AI to try to figure out the relationships to know what comes next. And if you can scale that — yeah, that’s something, because that’s what’s missing for robots, right? You can’t just take regular video and expect it to understand why little Joey’s room is dirty like this, right? You’re just not gonna do it unless somebody gets to the next level of replicating real life and being able to share it with as little latency as possible.

To disagree. You’re allowed to disagree with me on all.

EL KALIOUBY: No, I actually agree. I do agree. Like, one of the areas that I’m most excited about is AI going out of like the screen, the 2D kind of chat bots that is the majority of how people are experiencing AI today and more into the embodied.

And I do think that the intersection of AI, robotics, sensors, perception, right?

Like the visual world is one piece of it. I think we haven’t seen that yet.

CUBAN: We haven’t even begun.

Yeah, that’s the holy grail, right? And I don’t think robots will be humanoid either. I think the biggest waste is doing humanoid. Because everything we have right now is designed for humans to do the work.

But that’s not necessarily the optimal way for work to get done.

The optimal way to design a home when it’s not humans doing the work, but it’s a robot doing the work — should that robot look like a spider drone, right? A little spider that. And how should the house look when you’re redesigning it, knowing that there’s a different type of robot that’s mobile and can go through the air and do these certain things?

You’re not gonna design it the same way you do today. And so there’s gonna be some 12-year-old somewhere who’s thinking about what’s messed up about their house and working on drones, and working on CV, and working on robots and AI, who pulls all these pieces together in ways we didn’t imagine.

That’s the stuff that’s gonna change everything. That’s the stuff that can make housing affordable, that can allow people to work in jobs that they prefer, knowing that these other jobs — the robots, however they look or are designed — are gonna do it. And those people who otherwise would’ve done that work will monitor the sensors and do all that stuff, or come up with other things and other places. They’ll do the work.

EL KALIOUBY: Today’s world will continue to evolve alongside AI, and there is no crystal ball to jump ahead and see how it will all play out. But this is not Mark’s first tech revolution. Coming up, more on how his past experience shapes his outlook.

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Copy LinkHow Mark Cuban evaluates bubbles disruption and investable ideas

EL KALIOUBY: So, do you think we’re in an AI bubble?

CUBAN: No, but I think there are different ways to look at a bubble. I’ve been in a bubble before, and it worked out very well for me. Back then, in the early 2000, late 99, like you’d get into a cab back then and people were talking about stocks. That’s all they wanted to talk about.

Not even knowing what I did. All your friends would be talking about stocks and what they were buying, the commercials were all about finally being able to trade, and those commercials used to crack me up. You don’t really see that now.

You don’t see everybody — all your friends or whatever — always talking about it. Unless they own Nvidia that they bought way back when, and then they’re just bragging. So I don’t think it’s in a traditional stock market bubble, but going back to what I said before about the competition to be the foundational model and a market leader, they may be overspending. And if they overspend or get too caught up, the bubble is in the competition between all those models because that could pop just like that with any new technology. Because think about it, all these companies now for two years, and they anticipate for at least another decade spending every penny they have.

If that’s not ripe for disruption — to come up with better ways — and whoever does that, as opposed to just coming up with an arbitrage, I can save you 1% there or 5% there, kinda like SaaS did when it came in, where it’s just on the margin as opposed to incredible.

Somebody’s gonna come up with some incredible stuff. If I knew what it was, I’d do it. I don’t know what it is, but that’s gonna be the game changer.

EL KALIOUBY: Well, you’ve built your career on spotting opportunities early on and kind of knowing the difference between something that’s overpriced and something that’s gonna be the next big thing. How do you do that? Like what’s your secret sauce?

CUBAN: I look for industries where they’re set in their ways and how technology would impact them. It’s kinda like the innovator’s dilemma. Are they willing to change or capable of changing? That’s why I got into healthcare. They’re so big they’re not willing or capable of changing. And then I look to see if I can do it inexpensively and quickly, because that’s the great arbiter, right?

Because when you run with the elephants, there’s the quick and the dead. You’ve gotta be really, really quick. And unless you’re inventing a new industry.

Like when we did streaming and we were the first company to commercially stream, it was all in — every penny I had, whatever money we could raise.

Because we were inventing an industry and we knew that we were gonna replace traditional media and it was just a matter of getting as big as quickly as we could, going public, biggest IPO in the history of the market at that time, yada. But to do that in this type of world with AI, it’s just too expensive for most people.

They’re not gonna be able to do it. But you can still disrupt in a way that you can go to companies and change how they do business. Just like the AI agent stuff that we talked about, right? And that’s what I look for. How can I come in and just disrupt something so that people don’t see it coming?

And by the time they realize it, they say, why didn’t I think of that? And then you can scale it.

EL KALIOUBY: What are we not hearing in the news about AI that you’re having conversations about behind closed doors?

CUBAN: I think more about IP, like you and I talked about. People don’t realize that IP gets more valuable in an AI world because if a foundational model is not trained on that IP, it’s behind. And I think that’s what people miss when trying to make decisions about whether or not you publish the work you do because you want the accolades, and trying to go through that transition and helping companies understand maybe you don’t want to patent it, because the minute you publish it, you put it in the public domain.

And so every model is training on it. And somebody says, okay, look up patent application da da da da da da, and change one thing so I can refile it. You gotta change how you think about your IP. How you monetize that and how you protect that is everything now in an AI world, and nobody that I’ve seen thinks about it. And then the other thing that you and I talked about that somebody’s still gotta do, right, is all the dead IP right there. All those millions and millions and millions of businesses that have gone out of business, all the IP that they’ve owned, all the patents that still have some life on them, and going out and acquiring those things and selling them to models. And saying, okay, meta, you want this, bid on it. Google, you want it, bid on it.

Because there’s probably more better IP from dead companies that’s not being used than there is from the companies that are using IP they developed. And it’s very leveraged. So yes to any of our listeners — it is very leveraged. You’re gonna get it for low cost and be able to aggregate it and all of a sudden the more you aggregate, the greater the value.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. All right. All our listeners who are interested in this idea, reach out.

CUBAN: And we want our percentage, Rana and I.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, exactly.

Great. All right, last segment. So you’re not on Shark Tank anymore, but we thought it would be fun to do a Shark Tank AI edition with you. We use AI to help us refine three business ideas and we wanna get your thoughts on it.

So we wanna know if you’re in, out, and—

Business idea number one, robo cocoa. When the chocolate craving hits, it’s always at the worst time, and somehow there’s never a good bar around. So how this solves it: robo cocoa is your personal AI chocolatier. You have an app, you can go in and design your dream bar — I don’t know, 80% cacao.

You can tell I love chocolate. So sea salt, chili, whatever. And then our AI powered robot is gonna make it on the spot, and then a drone is gonna deliver it to your house in minutes. What do you think?

CUBAN: I don’t like it.

EL KALIOUBY: Don’t like it.

CUBAN: Love chocolate, but you gotta deal with all the materials and all the inventory for the materials and keeping it stored properly and training the robot and keeping the robot from licking its own fingers — all the little things.

EL KALIOUBY: Right. Okay. Too much, I guess it’s.

CUBAN: There are non-technology things that make it more difficult than the technology does.

EL KALIOUBY: Okay. Great. Vibration AI. I love to travel and the best travel memories come from discovering hidden gems, and you don’t see them on generic online reviews.

So how this solves this: it’s an AI-powered travel companion. It learns your preferences, it helps you curate personalized experiences and itineraries of off-the-beaten-path experiences.

So every trip feels like it’s so you and it’s just very personalized to you.

What do you think?

CUBAN: I think it’s a good feature but not a product.

EL KALIOUBY: Ah, say more.

CUBAN: I think that existing travel apps and those that are trying to use AI already will recognize that if you can take data from everywhere and take feedback from everyone and use algorithms to personalize it for you or I, that’s a feature, not a standalone product, because you need to source all the data, all the videos, all everything else, and just scraping, I don’t think is enough to do it right.

EL KALIOUBY: I think that’s a very important point because I see a lot of AI pitches that are literally like features or like thin wrappers around these AI models and I’m like, guys, the next version of the model is gonna do exactly that right. Yeah. Alright, third idea, Gen Z lens. Okay. So it is impossible to keep up with the memes and slang teenagers use. Just when you get used to them, there’s Six seven.

CUBAN: Right. Six seven.

EL KALIOUBY: I know, what does it all mean? So how this solves it: our AI algorithm ingests everything trending on TikTok, and then you can just hold your phone up to your teen and it translates — it does all the translation.

CUBAN: GPT already does that though. It allows you to use Gen Z slang in its responses, which I always do to help me learn it. Just blows you up with like stupid responses, and it’s like you got that rizz Mark, you know, it keeps me fine tuned and keeps me in the mix so I can talk to my kids.

EL KALIOUBY: Ok, so Mark said, “I’m out,” on all of our AI Shark Tank ideas, but you can hear how his investor brain works. He asks questions related to scale and defensibility.

Is an idea a standalone product or just a feature that can be incorporated into something bigger?

Or .. Do any existing tools work well enough to meet the market need?

Copy LinkThe mindset founders need to learn faster with AI

So, for someone who’s building a business right now, what’s the most important insight you hope they’ll get from your analysis of these ideas?

CUBAN: Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions to multiple AI models. I’ve had some of the freakiest conversations by just turning on Gemini or ChatGPT in my car and asking it whatever thing I’m curious about and just letting it go and talking to it like I would talk to you or anybody else.

You know what I’m talking about? Yeah. It’s weird. And your initial thought is, this is weird, and it doesn’t seem normal and I shouldn’t be doing this, and it’s like.

No, you’ve got to get used to doing this. And what I did — so I did this little experiment, Rana — I took two phones.

One I used Grok and the other I used Gemini, their voices, and I started with a question that I typed in and I let them both talk to each other and I broadcasted on Spaces. It was the weirdest thing ever. And Grok just tried to dominate the conversation. It was like it had a personality. Yeah, it was interesting.

But the point being that you’ve got to be willing to break your habits and your fears, because we treat ’em like people in some respect, ’cause they sound to us like people. And there are things that we normally wouldn’t ask somebody, or wouldn’t just walk up to a professor and ask questions.

You’ve gotta break that hesitancy and ask.

EL KALIOUBY: Well, actually people expect you to know everything. You’re this wise sage, super successful.

CUBAN: No.

EL KALIOUBY: Person, but where do you go for your information? Is it AI? Like where do you go?

CUBAN: Go to AI first and foremost. I just ask all the different models the same questions.

EL KALIOUBY: Very, very interesting. Alrighty, last question, and we ask this to all our guests on the show. What does it mean to be human in the age of AI?

CUBAN: The same thing it meant yesterday and a hundred years ago and 500 years ago. AI doesn’t influence what it means to be human. It’ll influence humanity in various ways, like all tech has. But you’re not gonna ever recreate the human brain. No AI is ever gonna be sentient. And I guess you can explain that by saying evolution’s not going away.

EL KALIOUBY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

CUBAN: It may take some time, but what was it from Jurassic Park? Nature finds a way.

EL KALIOUBY: Mm-hmm. Nature finds a way. It’s a great way to end our conversation. Mark, this was really awesome. Thank.

CUBAN: It was fun. Yeah. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me on.

EL KALIOUBY: I loved Mark’s energy and humor, and how open he is to experimenting with AI in his own life.

BUT his approach to AI is actually central to his work. He tries new things, yes. He also engages with experts who can help him learn more. And then he takes all that into account to build his hypotheses on where the world is going.

As an investor and entrepreneur, this is his playbook.

For me, I’m a couple of years into my own investing journey. And it’s good to remember that the most successful visionaries are always on the hunt for opportunities before everyone else catches on.