What should you understand about artificial intelligence before you start using it?
Many people hear the term AI almost every day now, but still feel confused about what it is, how it works, and whether they are already behind. But what if the better place to start is not with fear or hype, but with a practical understanding of how AI fits into everyday life, business, and decision-making?
In this episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons is joined by Janise Brooks, President of PAX Financial Group, for a grounded conversation about artificial intelligence and why it matters right now. Together, they break down what AI is in simple terms, why tools like ChatGPT changed the way everyday people interact with technology, and how context plays a major role in getting useful results.
You’ll learn:
• What artificial intelligence is in simple, practical terms.
• Why AI feels like it is moving fast and why many people feel behind.
• How ChatGPT and similar tools differ from a traditional search engine.
• Why context matters when using AI well.
• What privacy and security concerns people should keep in mind.
• Why business owners may face risk if they ignore AI altogether.
Whether you are just starting to explore AI, trying to understand how it may affect your business, or simply looking for a more practical way to think about this fast-changing technology, this episode offers a helpful introduction to the conversation.
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Transcript:
Darryl: Hey, this is Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group. And you’re listening to Retire in Texas. This information is general in nature only. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Visit PAXFinancialGroup.com for more information. So today I have a guest, the President of PAX Financial Group, Janise Brooks. Thanks for joining me today.
Janise: Glad to be here.
Darryl: I really wanted to bring her on because she’s been digesting artificial intelligence. And a lot of people don’t even say that anymore. They just say AI. It’s like if you say website or something, it’s like, you don’t say that anymore. You just say the website.
Like, Amazon.com. Nobody says www, nobody says like, artificial intelligence anymore. They just say AI. So, but the problem is that it’s confusing and it’s moving so stinking fast that I thought, you know, let’s just pause for a second. And I’ve been talking about it like just about, you know, investment opportunities and the, you know, what Elon Musk is doing.
And I mentioned that a lot in previous podcasts, but let’s just pause and let’s just kind of unpack what AI is just for a second. And that’s what I want to do today because it’s a game changer. And you probably heard me say game changer. But I think it’s important that we reflect a little bit on the fundamentals of artificial intelligence.
And Janise Brooks, like I mentioned, she’s the president here. Many of you’ve met her, but she’s spent a lot of time just kind of digesting. In fact, you were at Charles Schwab conference talking about this.
Janise: Yeah, I was.
Darryl: This is pretty cool. So, she was invited to the largest, one of the largest asset managers in the entire world to be on a panel discussing artificial intelligence. So she’s been up to speed here. So, we’re going to unpack it. So let’s just jump in. So how would you describe artificial intelligence? Like, what is it?
Janise: Artificial intelligence in its simplest form is basically a giant prediction calculator. So, processes lots of information, finds patterns and then produces outputs.
Darryl: Yeah.
Janise: I think what changed dramatically probably in 2022 and ChatGPT came out was the fact that where traditional software, used like code, right. It used step-by-step instructions. It got to a point where it learns actually from examples. And so, you just saw this acceleration and so artificial intelligence at the end of the day are just prediction engines.
Darryl: Like, when I’m typing on a Microsoft word and now it starts to tell me what to type is that?
Janise: Yeah, That’s AI. AI has been around a long time.
Darryl: Right. There’s like elements of that or what about Waze or Google Maps? It’s telling me that there’s traffic. Is that?
Janise: All of that is AI.
Darryl: It’s like we’ve had AI.
Janise: We’ve been interacting with it for years, whether it’s your Spotify list.
Darryl: Pandora is a good one. Pandora, like, Pandora was an early adopter. I remember my brother telling me, a lot of people use Spotify, but did you ever use Pandora?
Janise: I never did, yeah.
Darryl: My brother told me about it, and it was. He’s like, if you just put in Counting Crows, then it starts to artificial intelligence.
Janise: But yeah, it’s predicting what you would like based on that choice.
Darryl: And I get to hear new artists. And I was like, oh, this is great. And then they start doing ads. And that changed. But anyways, so I guess I say all that because artificial intelligence has been around based on what you mentioned, but like, why is it now a big deal?
Janise: Well, like I said in 2022, I think we as consumers really understood what was happening. I think it was a convergence of technology chips, you know, being able to process more. We had algorithms, different things. And when ChatGPT came out and created an interface where the consumer individuals like myself and natural language could access this, these large language models, also referred to as LMs, like this, these engines, it became a game changer. And so I don’t know exactly how that all converged together, but we experienced it starting in 2022.
Darryl: That’s good because a lot of people are like, how far behind am I? And it’s still relatively new, right?
Janise: Yeah. But it’s moving fast. It’s moving so fast. So, I’m old enough to remember the good old days of AOL discs that you put in. And there was a starting point. Right. And kind of your experience, kind of like evolved with technology. And now it’s so fast. People are asking like, how do I even like, am I too far behind? Like, when do I just jump in?
Darryl: Yeah.
Janise: Like that’s there is no starting point to it. It’s a weird thing and it’s going so fast that you always feel behind. No matter if you watch this thing every day, it’s going so fast. It’s just natural to be.
Darryl: I think that’s a good point, because there might be some trepidation of like, okay, I’ve heard about it and it’s so confusing. I don’t want to jump in. And I kind of want to try to break that barrier a little bit and encourage those that are listening to like, try to figure it out. Let’s talk about ChatGPT because you mentioned that. What is that?
Janise: Yeah. So, OpenAI is a company that created.
Darryl: Can I ask about OpenAI really quick? And I’m going to guess it’s a company, a government like a government subsidized, like a real business.
Janise: You know, that’s a really good question. I know there’s a court case coming, I believe. Is it still nonprofit? I don’t even know.
Darryl: Well, it’s a real business.
Janise: it’s a real business, For sure, yeah.
Darryl: It’s not. Yeah. It’s a real business. So, people with ideas. Sam Altman, you know, all these people, real ideas, came up with this company and made a product called ChatGPT. And so tell us what it does. Like, you know,
Janise: So, ChatGPT is the interface that attaches to an engine, and it’s whatever the version is. What is it? GPT 5.3 now?
Darryl: Yeah.
Janise: So, it created the large language model and then created ChatGPT, which is an interface like an app that allows you to access this engine.
Darryl: Yeah. Okay. So that’s like the website I can go to. When you say interface, that’s the website that you go to or the or interface is a good term, because that means that either the website that somebody goes to or they can go and get an app.
Janise: Yes, I think about it like think about it as going to like, you have your bank.
Darryl: Yeah, right.
Janise: But you use your app to access. Yeah. Like same thing
Darryl: same thing.
Janise: Yeah. So ChatGPT is how you access it. This, this engine, this large language model created by OpenAI.
Darryl: And people talk about ChatGPT, but there’s a lot of competitors to ChatGPT.
Janise: I don’t know if there’s a lot of competitors. I think the main ones right now that you might hear of is Claude.
Darryl: Yeah.
Janise: Which, the company behind Claude is anthropic.
Darryl: Yeah.
Janise: There’s Gemini, which is created by Google.
Darryl: Yeah.
Janise: And there’s grok. I never interact with grok and Perplexity, and I haven’t used perplexity
Darryl: in an effort to, encourage people to stay to the end of the show, I’m going to ask I’m going to ask you to into to tell us your favorite.
Janise: Okay.
Darryl: Yeah,
Janise: I definitely have a favorite right now.
Darryl: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right Now, I see that. another word you use that I just want to unpack to make sure that we don’t misstep here is large language model.
Janise: Yeah.
Darryl: What is that?
Janise: That’s the engine of artificial intelligence. Right. So it is, the engine that takes all that data process it learns is trained. Right? It’s my understanding. It’s basically, it has access and process everything that has been written in history. Continues to, increase its knowledge base. It’s a large language model.
Darryl: it’s an engine. Can we run with that analogy for just say, like an engine, like a car engine? Where is this car engine live at? Like or where is it?
Janise: Data centers.
Darryl: Data centers. Yeah. Okay. Well, that was a question mark and period and exclamation point at the same time. But that’s a really good point because I talked in previous podcast about these data centers popping up everywhere. So that’s why those data centers are important, because they have the engines to be able to process all of it.
Janise: It takes enormous amount of energy. It’s a process that, as you can imagine.
Darryl: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s crazy how fast ChatGPT processes information.
Janise: So fast.
Darryl: Look, I guess if you’re listening right now and you haven’t been on ChatGPT, what would you say to somebody who just has never even they just they don’t even know where to start?
Janise: I would definitely go to ChatGPT and try the free version. But not very long. I’m really big on making sure you have the paid version, so you could turn the training mechanisms off to give you some kind of privacy because the free version, whatever information you’re being put in that you’re putting into it, it’s going to be used to train the model. So, you don’t want to be putting sensitive information in. But I could go in and start engaging with it, right. Like,
Darryl: yeah.
Janise: Something that I just use the other day is I’m planning a trip to New York. I tell it my budget. I tell them what days I’m going, where I’m staying, and I say, and I ask it on the itinerary. It gives me everything, references. Tells me how many days in advance I need to purchase a ticket to catch the Broadway show, things like that. Just start asking you questions and you’ll be surprised at what it can help you with.
Darryl: Well, what about that medical stuff? Like, let’s say I wanted to ask, hey, I, my doctor said, I’m going to make this up. My doctor said that my blood pressure’s high. Here’s my readings. What do you think? Is that a good way to use it?
Janise: Yes. I always caution things that medical, financial. You’re giving it private information. So, you want to make sure that you have the right version. And depending on how private you are, probably will determine how much you want to share with it. But, yes, I mean, you know, I, I use a service and they have an AI and the service has all the protections and privacy and they have its AI bot on it and I engage with it and ask for supplements for certain indicators or whatever. And so absolutely. But the privacy obviously, we’re in the financial industry. So that’s something that’s always top of my mind is, the privacy component of it.
Darryl: So, juxtapose that with somebody that might just want to ask like, hey, I live in South Texas region. Here’s and there’s different regions for topography and climate. And you want to ask, hey, I want to plant cucumbers. Is now a good time?
Janise: That’s fantastic.
Darryl: That’s like an easy one, right?
Janise: That’s the easy one. There are so many applications to this. Yeah, it’s really amazing.
Darryl: But we had talked before and you mentioned something about context being an important thing to consider. Can you tell me, like, what do you mean by that?
Janise: Yes. Context is everything in AI.
Darryl: And when you say that that’s a big deal. So, tell me more.
Janise: It’s a big deal. Imagine that you’re hiring a team of brilliant new employees that never forget anything that are so incredibly smart. You hire on the first day, they come into your business and you start giving them tasks. They don’t know really who you are. They don’t know your vision. They don’t know what you’ve done, what you really want them to do.
And you’re sending them on to do tasks, right. They don’t have context. You have to give information in order to get good output, outputs. Right. So, garbage in, garbage out. And so, context is really important because without context you’re just going to get generalizations. And you’re also going to get hallucinations, which is basically it’s going to make up stuff.
Darryl: Oh okay. Yeah. It’s going to change the gaps so to speak. Try to fill in the gaps of what it might not know.
Janise: Exactly. And so, you want it to be really, really specific. And so if I’m even asking about travel, I’m basically giving them a role. I’m saying you are a travel agency that specializes in trips to New York, right? So, I give it a role, and I tell it what I want, what I need, and give it constraints. So that’s a big deal. I don’t want it, you know, introducing an itinerary that’s beyond my budget, for example. So, I’ll give it a budget and then I will get better output that way than if I just said, plan me a trip to New York.
Darryl: It’s a really good point. And I think I want to make sure that people that maybe haven’t used ChatGPT or just starting to get into it to not be overly concerned about context, initially, but know that what I mean by that is, I don’t want you to be paralyzed and say, well, what? I don’t know what, I’m afraid to use it because I don’t know exactly what to tell it. It is relatively intuitive. In other words, like, if we go to the cucumbers example, if it says, oh, it’s a great time to plant cucumbers and you like, well, wait a minute. You need to know that I live in South Texas and.
Janise: Oh, yeah, you need to be very specific on exactly where you live, because elevation can change those.
Darryl: And that’s what context is.
Janise: Yes.
Darryl: And so, what I mean by that is context for many people should be an intuitive thing. Like you should see it. So, pay attention. Because a lot of times you’re going to get information and like I’ll tell you what I was doing on a trip to Europe. And it started telling me all these things to do that were really, really irrelevant. And I said, oh, wait a minute. I didn’t give you context. I enjoy World War Two history. So that’s what I mean is, like, sometimes you can still work with it and then you realize that you can learn, oh, I need that. I sometimes forget to give it context. And I throughout the conversation I’m giving it context.
Janise: Yeah. It’s very important that you don’t treat it like a Google search. I think it is something to think about. You don’t want to give it snippets of information. You want to engage with it like you’re having a conversation with another person.
Darryl: Yeah.
Janise: It’s nuances with details. It’s really important that you engage with it as if you’re talking to a person. You hear me say this all the time around here? I, I encourage people to use their voice and.
Darryl: Yeah.
Janise: Because why I’m giving it more context. Right. Typing is a lot slower. I’m having to think about it. I want to be able to engage with it, get everything out of my mind into the into ChatGPT or an LLM and, have it have as much context as possible so it can interact with me in a more detailed fashion.
Darryl: Can we get real practical there? So, when you say give it to your voice, what do you do functionality there. Do you press a microphone button somewhere?
Janise: Yeah. And I don’t know at what level like, this is part of, I don’t know if it’s pro, but there’s different level versions, like a different version. So, the version I have has the ability to have a little microphone, and you could talk into it.
Some of the more advanced features, you’re actually having a conversation with it where there’s like this little squiggly line and you talk to it and it talks back to you and asked you questions, and you actually engage more like a human to human interface.
Darryl: I heard somebody tell me the other day they’re developing an AI platform where they were going to have a little, I guess, imagine a little Siri pod for seniors who are lonely.
Janise: Oh, that’s great actually, I think that’s a great thing.
Darryl: Right. And, so, you know, obviously you would have to if you’re creating this, you might want to be able to give it boundaries or maybe even like if you’d imagine. So, imagine if your mother is in, you know, Alaska and making stuff up. And you don’t get to see her and you want to put the boundaries on this and say, hey, if she ever says something about I’m lonely or I’m, you know, depressed, I’m going to program this to notify me. You know, there’s a lot of things you could do that. Yeah, that would really help seniors who are lonely and just have conversations. What do you think about that idea?
Janise: Well, just like any technology, it has a good side and a dark side.
Darryl: Oh, good point.
Janise: And so, I’m optimistic. I’m also cautious. And, you know, there’s new stories in the news and we’ve all heard some of the dark paths that you could take in engaging with AI. And so, I always take a cautious approach. I like the idea of being able to, kind of have conversations and get things out of their head, and, you know, kind of deal with the loneliness. At the same time. I’m also very concerned about that as well, because I do not believe that it is a replacement for human relationships.
Darryl: You said two things that I just really have to unpack for a second. First of all, you said technology, it can be good and bad. I do think sometimes and maybe even Christians, we see technology and we put evil on it right away. Here’s the problem. By doing that, if we don’t, as especially Christians. And I know not everyone’s listening as a Christian, so but you also know that’s the kind of the worldview I look at things through. If we always hesitate, I always think of there was a Chinese emperor during the Industrial Revolution, a revolution. I don’t remember his name. And he had said, never forget this.
He said, we are not wasting our time on these frivolous innovations that are out there. And this was the Industrial Revolution and his leadership as a result of that, set China behind. And I think sometimes Christians also, we look at technology say, oh, it’s evil, I’m going to stay away from it. And I have conviction that we lean into it. It is neither good or bad to your point, but it can be good or bad.
Janise: Yeah. It’s control. It’s a tool. And how you use it is very important. And on that note, I think it’s very important that we are engaging with it and that we represent our viewpoints in the conversation. When I say conversations like, you know, the information we’re putting in is part of the training of AI, and that leads to a whole other conversation. But I do think it’s really important that we are part of that conversation.
Darryl: Right? Like not just being afraid of it. And we really have to be curious and dive in and business owners. Right?
Janise: Yes.
Darryl: Business owners, you have to, can you give me some a little bit of your thoughts on business owners and how they might use AI?
Janise: There’s a lot of ways that they will use that they could use AI.
Darryl: Or should they use AI? I know the answer, but I want to hear it.
Janise: I think about the risks of business owners that they need to be aware of. So, the first one is that, the risks that if you’re not using it, your competitors are.
Darryl: Yeah.
Janise: And so that’s a risk. The second is, a liability risk where, if you haven’t fully engaged, if you don’t have kind of a philosophy around your AI, you don’t have an AI designated tool. What happens is that your employees are probably using shadow AI somewhere and you’re not controlled.
Darryl: Oh, It’s a good point.
Janise: The security, how they’re using it, the output. So, I think it’s really important to create some kind of framework and how AI is going to be applied into your business. And then last is the risk of doing nothing, which I don’t think anyone should.
Darryl: Yeah, but there are people out there. It’s a good point because people are like, oh, it’s evil. I don’t understand it. I’m too far behind. But you’re saying we’ve already addressed all of those. You can’t do nothing right now. You cannot do nothing.
Janise: And there’s easy steps that you could take. And I’ve talked to business owners, and one easy one is if you know, first of all, I do believe that you’re going to need to pick a preferred AI provider.
Darryl: Yeah.
Janise: And what’s really easy for businesses is really using Copilot. If you’re using Microsoft 365, which most people are.
Darryl: That’s a great point. Yeah, we didn’t even talk about that. Gosh, we have to land the plane. But I have a couple more questions. We’ve talked about Iron Man. Tell me what you mean by that.
Janise: Oh, I just love that. I love that imagery. Iron Man, you know. The AI is the suit, right? But the suit is there to amplify the human, right?
Darryl: Yeah.
Janise: I think about being Iron Man as, hey, let’s put the suit on. But we have to have the heart of the human, the empathy of the human. And it’s really just there to amplify the best parts.
Darryl: That’s a great point. That’s a really good point. What do you, where do you think this goes in like 3 to 5 years? Like, what do you think it looks like?
Janise: Who knows?
Darryl: What is your crystal ball?
Janise: Who knows? I will just say conceptually, it’s going to be a part of our everyday lives. Just kind of like the internet. We don’t really log onto the internet. We go and we check our emails and, you know, we watch our shows and, you know, engage with it. And the internet is kind of invisible. AI can be the same as it is already a big part of our lives. You may be booking your plumber and you’re talking to an AI agent, not even a human being, and you may not even know it yet.
So, it is just part of our lives. And I just see it being more a part of our lives now, where, I mean, there’s a lot to unpack there. There’s going to be, you know, some disruption. But I just think it just becomes just more pervasive and just part of our everyday lives.
Darryl: Disruption, like, job disruption.
Janise: Yeah. I think certain sectors, you know, but there’ll be more jobs created. I could think of some jobs on the top of my head where I go, okay, this is something that we never even consider before, just like a prompt engineer. I remember hearing about that a year ago. I’m like, I don’t even know what that is.
And now I’m like, yeah, I mean, the prompt engineer is really he’s giving the AI context in which it can perform. That’s going to be a job, an agent management. Right. So, an agent is basically something that is doing something.
Darryl: Yeah. Agents we talked about.
Janise: Yeah. So, you’re going to have to have managers for these agents because you can’t just set these agents.
Darryl: Let them just run and run.
Janise: They have to be managed because the inputs are going to be changing, right? As the LLMs get trained and more data comes in, it affects the output. So, there’s definitely more jobs and that will come out of this. And I’ve even looked at really dire projections and they still are very positive that the net jobs that are going to come out of that is going to be positive versus negative.
Darryl: That’s historically been how innovation has worked.
Janise: And I know as I say that I’m thinking maybe Elon Musk actually says the opposite. So, he’s a lot smarter than me, but I just, you know, we’re humans and we operate.
Darryl: But you’re wiser than him.
Janise: I don’t know, I don’t know.
Darryl: I would suggest you are.
Janise: Thank you.
Darryl: So, a couple more questions, maybe 1 or 2, but any other thoughts that maybe we missed?
Janise: I think we covered the basics. I just want to encourage people to not be afraid of it. Don’t get overwhelmed by the noise because there’s so much.
Darryl: It’s a lot of noise.
Janise: A lot of noise. I could sit at a table with people who really are deep in AI, and it feels like a different language to me, and it could get very overwhelming, but you could just kind of step back. And the first step is to engage with it. Sign up for a version of ChatGPT or Claude or even when you’re on your Google search bar, they have Gemini, and it’s just engaging with it more in conversation style than in Google keyword searches.
Darryl: What’s your favorite?
Janise: Claude
Darryl: Tell me why?
Janise: it feels more, it feels more advanced. It gives greater detail in my experience. And I really don’t like to say this because I don’t like to equate AI to humans, but it is to me more human like. Yeah, and it’s interactions. And the questions that will be in response to some of the context that I give it that really dials into the strongest outputs.
Darryl: Yeah, that makes sense. This has been fun.
Janise: Yeah. Thank you
Darryl: Went by fast.
Janise: Super-fast.
Darryl: I appreciate your insight. You’ve digested this a lot. And thank you for providing leadership to this organization. So, we can be I don’t want to say cutting edge, but at the very least, staying abreast of the AI curve as it’s, moving fast.
Darryl: And so, when I say cutting edge, it’s so hard to even think about being cutting edge. And I mean, I can’t imagine that, but I think your leadership, we’re keeping up. Well, thank you for that.
Janise: You’re welcome. Thank you.
Darryl: Anything else?
Janise: Nope.
Darryl: Yeah. Well, thank you for listening to the end. And we’ll continue to have conversations about AI. Going forward, whether it means, you know, what the job market looks like, what’s happening in Texas, and even from an investment portfolio perspective and things that we’re doing at PAX. So, consider this a probably a resource to come back to. But we’ll continue to build on this as we continue to see AI transform all of our lives.
And remember, you think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
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