Unofficial Partner Podcast
Unofficial Partner Podcast
480 Chat-UP: The Product-Algo Fit and how AI will attack the sports business
We are jumping into the maze that is artificial intelligence for the first in a series of conversations with decision makers from across the sports business.
Our guest today is Sam Sadi, chief executive of Live Score, the scores and betting app.
There are more questions than answers, but it's exciting and it's scary and it's what everyone is talking about. So it's perfect Unofficial Partner material.
This episode of the Unofficial Partner podcast is brought to you by Sid Lee Sport.
Sid Lee Sport is a new breed of agency that combines world class creativity with deep sponsorship expertise, flawless operational delivery, and a culture of marketing effectiveness.
We’ve really enjoyed getting to know their team over the last couple of months. They’re an impressive bunch, who believe that sports marketing can and should be done better.
They have a creative philosophy of producing famous campaigns and activations that build buzz and conversation in a category that too often looks and sounds the same.
And they're pioneering a new standard of effectiveness in sports marketing, using econometrics and attribution models to go beyond traditional media ROI.
So if you're looking for an agency to take your brand to the top, get in touch with the team at Sid Lee Sport, where brands become champions.
Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
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Hello, it's Richard Gillis here and welcome to another episode of the Sports Business Podcast, unofficial partner. We are jumping into the maze that is artificial intelligence and. Our guest today is Sam Sadie, who is the Chief executive of Live Score, the uh, scores and betting app and. What I wanna do is have a series of conversations with people who are running things in positions of power to influence organizations. And I wanna talk to them about what AI means for them, both personally, but also for their organizations, but also the marketplace that they're in, the, uh, bit of the sports business jungle that they, uh, occupy. if that's you, if you fancy a conversation about ai, get in touch. it's fair to say that we are approaching it. There are more questions than answers, but it's exciting and it's scary and it's what everyone is talking about. So it's perfect for artificial partner material. First of all though, we've got a couple of messages for you. Oh, it is Matt and Maggie from Expected Goals, your favorite podcast on the business of women's football. And we are here to tell you about an exciting event we're hosting in London on the evening of June 19th. We are bringing together a select group of industry leaders, commercial partners, investors. Club officials and entrepreneurs for a unique three part event. It will start with a candid conversation with top investors and commercial leads about where the smart money is going in women's football, what makes an asset truly investible, and the advice they'd give to founders, clubs, and creators looking to grow. And then we'll be hearing real world lightning pitches from clubs. Entrepreneurs and business owners who are looking for investment, sponsorship or guidance afterwards, we're gonna be hosting a relaxed mixer with those speakers, experts, and guests, and you can connect, share advice, and leads and spark future collaborations, and we would love to see you that. So make sure you get a ticket before it sells out. Google Eventbrite expected goals live before they all go. This episode of Unofficial Partner is brought to you by Sid Lee Sport. Sid Lee Sport is a new breed of agency that combines world class creativity with deep sponsorship expertise, flawless operational delivery. And a culture of marketing effectiveness. We've got to know the team over the last few months. They're an impressive bunch who believe that sports marketing can and should be done better. They've got a creative philosophy of producing famous campaigns and activations that build buzz and conversation in a category that too often looks and sounds the same. And they're pioneering a new standard of effectiveness in sports marketing using econometrics and attribution models to go beyond traditional media, ROI. So if you're looking for an agency to take your brand to the top, get in touch with the team at Sid Lee Sport where brands become champions.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Well, there was one interesting one. The, Product algo fit. That surprised me. It looks like right at the end we
Richard Gillis, UP:that from the Google thing. I got that
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:oh, was it in that document? And that's a very interesting, point where I'm very opinionated for. So like, I don't know how you're gonna link it with like other,
Richard Gillis, UP:the general vibe of this thing is, so we're gonna talk about AI and I know already that the word, the term AI is sort of, you've gotta be careful with it in terms of what it means, but. I am really interested in it, and we are in a week where Google have just announced a whole load of new things almost on a weekly basis. There's a sort of massive announcement from someone, whether it's open ai, whether it's, philanthropic or it's, someone in a more marginal place suddenly coming in with new product. And I want to go around and talk to as many sort of people who are running things. As I can just to have a chat about it and trying to just sort of establish a position. I'm coming from a position of quite deep ignorance, but personally I am into it. I really am interested in, like already I'm using products in a certain different way. I'm using perplexity, I'm using Notebook lm, so I'm sort of interested in scratching and I'm using chat every now and then. What are you, where are you? Just put on a personal base before we talk about any business stuff where, what's your, just give us a sort of sense of your general attitude towards the subject, but also what you are doing and using and any tools that you like and dislike.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Sure. Do we need to declare that this podcast is not being generated by
Richard Gillis, UP:ai
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:and we're genuinely ourselves.
Richard Gillis, UP:They can't, they'll come event. Well, they will. They are coming now, but yeah. Fair point.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:fair point. So I think in my position, and I think I could advise this to many people, is to determine. Your attitude towards ai. And if you get that wrong, uh, that has dangerous consequences. What I've chosen for myself and for my company is that AI is severely under hyped right now. And, the world and human evolution is going to go through a transformation that's never been seen before. And I sometimes describe it as potentially the language or the operating of the system of the world currently being changed. Uh, so everything that we're used to, everything that we've understood so far on how things work over time. And when I say over time, I'm talking about years, not decades is changing and is about to change. So if you. Want to quote, from, Andy Grove's book, only Paranoid, survive, and without advocating that, we need to live in fear. But I think we need to make that our modus opera operandi, whether we're business professionals or companies because of the pure, like speed of change, uh, that's happening. If this were 20 years ago. You could say, okay, what could happen to my business that, makes it extinct over time or makes it uncompetitive right now? You mentioned the Google product launches. If you were a startup, investing in producing video, synced with audio, and that was your business model and you raise a hundred million from VCs, and hired, a hundred people to do it and bought Nvidia chips yesterday, you became extinct. Because that became just part of the, core service that language model, uh, offers. So you just have to be, not living in fear, but be humble of your convictions, uh, and, embed that uncertainty. Say, knowing that I can never be sure where this technology is going to be headed. So the job I have is to be curious and to acknowledge. How fast this change is happening and the need to be on top of it. So personally, I invest a lot of time to increase my fluency on the subject and to increase the baseline knowledge level of my teammates here so that we can, interpret the changes that are happening and hopefully react to them, uh, as quickly as possible.
Richard Gillis, UP:I mean, you are someone, I mean, we did a live event, a live podcast recording here in this building about technology, and you are a technology business. You are a technologist. You know, You're an engineer. You are, I'm expecting you to be interested. How has it changed your, the way, your day to day?
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Oh, I mean dramatically. Uh, and I'll give you a very clear example. Uh, a year ago, uh, I had a meeting with, uh, someone from a executive recruitment agency and we were discussing, okay, so what are your needs? And I was saying, um, I could probably use, uh, an advisory board that, I could debate ideas with on strategic matters. I sometimes find myself. Driving too much of that by myself. And I also don't want to, take the time of my executive team for these topics. And he was saying, well, that's a common problem. And you could hire, a team of three part-time consultants who could be, former execs from your industry, could, meet with you every quarter. And inspire ideas around, strategic topics. We met yesterday, with the same person. And he asked me like, so how are you getting along, uh, on that problem statements? Oh, it's like, oh here's how I sold it. I hired a hundred of them. I. And they're the best in the world, and they work 24 7 for me, uh, to advise me to spar with me, to produce reports for me. And it's incredible. They're the best experts in any context I throw at them. And this is how, like, my way of like using AI has impacted my daily work. Uh, if I need to understand a particular domain, if I need to do, research on, on, um, a particular, uh, sport or the audience of that sport. I go straight to Chachi BT oh three. Uh, I have, pre uh, determined memories there. Okay? You are my chief strategic advisor. Here's the context. Uh, all ready to upload every time. Uh, I have all the context loaded. And I asked for help, said, go research, the demographics of this audience and do a competitor analysis, uh, in that space. Uh, and help me, price, our position in this partnership going forward. And, I could spend two, three hours and come up with a conclusion, which would've taken me probably weeks by myself or hours of meetings with others who would then go and, prepare for weeks. And come back with the reports and recommendations. So in that particular context, I've, I have become a superhuman, and I'm not saying superhuman in a way that is like the superlative part of it. I'm just saying I am able to do things much faster, much better, that were not possible, uh, before. And I do strongly believe this happens in every domain, uh, right now. And if you're not exploring, uh, these opportunities. It's not the AI that's going to, really replace you, but this common, term that is being now used a lot, it's people who are fluent in AI who are going to replace you. Yeah. So if you're an amazing product person today, uh, and you are not fluent in ai, you are no longer an amazing product person, there's an amazing product person fluent in AI tools, that is the amazing one.
Richard Gillis, UP:So the, expertise will get deeper and. It's interesting, I, listen to you say about the recruitment question and the sort of consultant question, because I can imagine people listening, the first part of that was like, okay, yeah, you get, they pick up their phone. Yeah.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Yeah. There's
Richard Gillis, UP:There's gonna be a,
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:a, there's a good gig
Richard Gillis, UP:there's an NED gig there, and then suddenly they put the phone back down. and I wonder what the implications of that are. Livecore is a technology business. It's a product content business. It's a betting business. When you look at that, where do you see the obvious places that this is going to ha make a quick difference or is now already making a difference?
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:to refer to what I was saying earlier, uh, we can't try to predict too much in the future. So what we're doing right now is constantly analyzing the capabilities of the technology today. Uh, so there are really obvious use cases where, AI is already powering, um, lineup insights, uh, on our app where the moment, lineups are, uh, published. Our AI models go in, uh, analyze the lineup compared to the previous lineups and start delivering
Richard Gillis, UP:insights. You mean team
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Lineups. Team lineups. Okay. Yeah. Uh, and
Richard Gillis, UP:euro Cup final
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Exactly. Or
Richard Gillis, UP:Liverpool lineups come up.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Exactly. Liverpool has made three changes. Uh, someone is in, someone is out, and you'll be familiar with the conversation. That starts the moment. The lineups are, published, uh, you'll say Sporters are making eight changes from previous because it was a cup game and now it's a league game. And, but then you can take the insights it level deeper and you can say. Every time, sun plays upfront, Tottenham's, XG improves by 0.5. Uh, and that's very relevant to all fans, but much more re relevant to betting fans. Yeah. Um, so that's one really obvious case where we started using uh, ai. Uh, but you know, there are a lot of cases where we're trying to do everything, faster and leaner, so there's productivity gains. Uh, the entire software development process is being redesigned now because one single person can take a concept and an idea and develop a prototype about what they're thinking, uh, within minutes, maybe hours maximum, and deliver it straight to the engineers in the way they imagined it in the past. You take this idea. You'd potentially try to come up with some wire frames and designs, and these would take like lots of meetings and work hand it to the engineers. They'd deliver you something and you'd be like, well, that wasn't what I was thinking, but that was what you were thinking, but you just didn't even know what you're thinking would result as a product. Whereas now you prototype it, you sometimes look at that prototype, it's like, oh no, that's not gonna work. When you see it, uh, and it's fully functional, and it would've been unimaginable to, to go through those stages within hours. So now you have to think, well, I can go from ideation to developments much quicker. Eliminating a lot of the waste and potential, potential for errors. So product design and product development, software development is definitely being disrupted. And even on the software coding, it's, we're very well documented that there are coding tools assistance today that accelerate just the pure, uh, coding process. So,
Richard Gillis, UP:So, does that mean just on a, just a, on that then. The human bit or the interaction is the imagination. So because obviously I think of product and I think of engineering as a, if this, then that process driven exercise, what you are describing is more of an imaginative act. There is a sort of trying to think what the thing could be. Whatever it is you are creating, allowing. The AI to do it
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:And be able to, make it close to reality with minimum effort. Uh, so if I can, if I come up with an idea in the morning and I explain that idea to a product owner or product designer, it'll take several hours of meetings, they come back, it's like, is this what you're thinking? They do some consumer research, like, is this really needed? You can now do all of that for multiple ideas. Within our, um, we were having a debate around how our products. Integrate X APIs and how we use their content and how we could be doing more on social sharing, throwing around ideas and, we took all those ideas and then started putting it on, tools like Rep Lit and Chacha pt, and then started creating prototypes, pitch decks, uh, that we can share with other people that explain the whole idea. But, with a URL saying, Hey go play with the idea. Uh, and see if, you think this has, and then even take that idea and put it in front of customers and allow them to tell us immediately. And you can even say, Hey, connect it to my survey API and do a focus group and formulate the questions for that focus group so we don't have to do it. Because you can be as the best, consumer research experts. So we didn't even think of calling our consumer research expert into it because there you're gonna be using that tool anyway. Yeah. So it's all these areas where we can augment our capabilities. And as a company we need, what is capitalism in general? It's a competition, uh, to deliver best products, in most cases quicker and cheaper, uh, to consumers who will then make the decision to purchase. So if our flywheels start turning. Exponentially faster. If we can start delivering products in a much cheaper way than our much larger competitors in our case, then that's how we, we've leveraged ai, uh, to, its, to the, to its best capability.
Richard Gillis, UP:So in terms of the way in which, it's interesting'cause you get to the question about what is. And we're using live score as an example, but you, what is it? It's asking those sorts of questions in terms of, well, what, where are we strong? Where are we going to sort of pursue and get there quicker? And where are things that are vulnerable to just be becoming commoditized? And that, in that, so every business is a sort of bundle of those questions, aren't they, in terms of how those things get accumulated over time. So really you're looking at a very fundamental question about what. A sports media entity is in this
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:environment. Yeah. That's the paranoia. Yeah. Like, are we going to be needed in a couple years time? Uh, you think about like, are people gonna search anything on Google or, they're gonna start getting answers directly from ai. Google just changed their search interface. So all these companies that relied on SEO traffic, what's gonna happen to them, we can even think, is the mobile phone the interface of the future? So, we need to lower all those convictions about the future. And just focus on like, what is our culture? Our culture has to be learn fast, adapt quicker and I keep repeating the same. Be curious, which is a core value for us. Always explore like is there something we can do differently? Uh, what if this environment changes? What will life score be? Uh, should we be investing more in our brand as a moat and be a bit agnostic about interfaces and channels? Uh, so that people still think, Livecore ai, whatever that is in two years, is the most trusted source for scores and news. However we're delivering it, whether it's a smart glass or a voice, uh, interface. Uh, so it's the unpredictability that we need to embrace and not over commit to a direction that can, change anytime.
Richard Gillis, UP:So within. The organization, are you at the bleeding edge of this? Are you being pulled by other people who are saying, we need to get going on this? Or are you, there's always a sort of cast of characters within any organization, but, and how you make that or, these embed these questions into the day to day.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:We're certainly not leading, uh, I have to humbly say, um, probably in the next, in the last like two weeks. Uh, we have been able to elevate, uh, the awareness around how, this technology is gonna affect our business. Uh, so I, I've seen a step change and, everyone in the company has embraced it. My statement to the company a couple weeks ago was I'm gonna stop hyping the tech now, and I'm gonna start, uh, stop trying to rally you around it. We're gonna put together actions now. Uh, so we have an AI enablement office. Uh, we have a team that leads, old subjects, ai, and we've tasked all functions to come up with how they will implement AI in their area. And the dates have been like, okay, should we do this by September? It's like, no, next Friday. Uh, so like, I want to hear what you're gonna do by Friday. And then, we're gonna rate it. And then it could be that we choose one function that we think we can get, incredible amount of gains. That's our resources are diverted primarily to that and say, well, this is how we're gonna win this. Or it could be all across, uh, like, I don't think we're going to win. Uh, in terms of gaining an advantage using AI with productivity gains in hr, uh, or legal, there's a lot to be gained there, but that's not gonna be sufficient for us to outcompete arrivals. But if we can gain in product developments, uh, in content production or, invent features that, are built on top of the AI technology, then that's, uh, how we're gonna differentiate
Richard Gillis, UP:ourselves. It's interesting you mentioned that brand as a moat so it's the opportunity threat question I guess I'm getting at. You are seeing huge opportunities here for new things and the market is moving. And then the other lens is huge cost reduction, removal of. whole careers and, sort of areas within a business that would normally be the sort of heart of it. So it's trying to balance those two. Things out. It's trying to imagine how this is gonna impact your core business. It's quite a sort of. Complex. It's
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:isn't it? Sure, yeah. Uh, especially when our business model is a little bit different. We're a different media company. If you look at it from that lens, and we're a different petting company, uh, when you look at it, it's an integrated, uh, ecosystem. So you're looking at it from both angles. Um, and you could probably come up with like a hundred use cases where AI can be leveraged on the betting sides, to do things more efficiently as a company, but also to produce content, to deliver insights, deliver different, betting prompts and betting, propositions and markets. And it is being used already. I mean, we've been using the former term machine learning, uh, across the industry to generate prices, to generate content and now that's. Been, uh, labeled as AI now, but, it's, again, it's fascinating because if you don't see it as an opportunity and if you get all defensive about it and fearful about it, uh, you've lost already. So the best you can do is put up a fight and say, we can't be stagnant. We have to understand that things are going to change. What we used to do with a hundred engineers or a hundred, uh, operators in the A ML and player protection and compliance teams, there may be an external company or a different operator coming up with ways to do it with three. So then they're gonna free up capital to do things that we're not able to do, and they're gonna spend it on marketing. Or maybe their marketing has become 10 times more efficient than ours. And there are companies already like months ahead, which is a lot in, in, in this space. Being able to publish, a hundred different creatives at any given time on, on meta and measure and iterate even like the content of that creative in terms of what kind of bonus they put into it or what kind of, uh, graphics they and the agent changes those automatically measures and then comes up with its own conclusions about what's the best creative tool. Keep on Facebook and meta. Yeah. And then create a report and deliver it to the head of marketing. Uh, whilst we are still, publishing one creative per week. Yeah, I'm exaggerating, of course. But that could be the difference. And who's gonna win over time? They may be very small today, but if that flywheel starts turning so much faster, uh, and then they need to scale. They go to a vc, they say, look, I need a hundred million to catch up to live score. They will get it. If I ask, I need a hundred million, to catch up to, oh, we don't have anybody to catch up to anymore. Then they'll be, no, you have your, you've had your a hundred million, now I'm gonna put it into the startup that's going to beat you over the next two years. Yeah. So scary but exciting at the same time.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah. Yeah. So that at the, there's a question about what, the live score, consumer, the user, the better will notice, and whether they're noticing it already, what that lens is like, so. There's a whole load of stuff going on in here in this organization, and you can bet across the market. How is that being fed into the user end?
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:yeah, two, two ways. First, They're gonna start seeing us deliver features a lot faster. So we have a million ideas, but we have to prioritize, uh, and similar to other technology companies. So the features are gonna start being rolled out a lot faster. So they're gonna start seeing that benefit. Their Livecore app or livecore red apps are gonna start getting things a lot quicker. Every couple weeks they're gonna see something amazing being released and this would've never been possible. And then the second part is they're gonna start seeing features that would not have been possible. Without the use of ai. Uh, so, they're gonna be seeing, uh, like we've mentioned AI summaries of in, uh, player lineups. But they're gonna see proprietary metrics that were not possible. We're gonna be analyzing they've got a hundred parameters in a match and give you live probabilities of xg, uh, in play. Uh, you're gonna be able to pick up your phone a minute 20 and ask. What's the team that's most likely to score, uh, among the hundred games that are being played in UK football today? And we'll be able to rank, from one to a hundred with a probability to score next in the next 20 minutes. And we'll be able to back that with, the logic. That's behind that model. We say we analyzed a hundred different parameters, time of position inside the other half, not just a shots on gold, the usual, simplistic. So analytics will go, to a much deeper level and we at least we don't feel like we need to wait for the optos of this world or sports radars of this world who are also innovating a lot in this space to deliver this to us. Like we can take a lot of data. And start building our own proprietary models. So what I see in a matter of months is Livecore delivering its proprietary metrics, uh, during football matches. Uh, so that's, this will belong to us. They will have to launch Livecore and say, I want to find out, what is the probability of a team scoring in the second half? And they'll either be able to prompt Livecore, uh, if we choose to go in that interface, or we'll be able to display that dynamically over time. So that would've never been possible if we didn't leverage, uh, ai, gen AI technologies.
Richard Gillis, UP:what can you, what do you think that's gonna do? I mean, there's a sort of interesting just to get your head out of Livecore and look broader into the marketplace. You mentioned radar, you mentioned, um, Opta obviously got genius that, though there's the sort of plumbing between the rights holder and the fan, that, world, how do you think that's gonna get attacked? I'm just wondering about their questions.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Yeah. I mean, ultimately there is ownership of IP and data that you assume will have some kind of protection. Uh, so it could be that the technology we're developing may still need to rely on opta data. So there'll be a partnership there, and then opta with Premier League, there'll also be a partnership there. Um, so the ecosystem itself is going to adapt to, where the ownerships are, where the IP is, and where the innovation is happening. And I think it will happen at, various different parts and it's not gonna be like live sport drives it and makes, opta or sports radar. Irrelevant. Uh, I think they have a lot of resources. They acknowledge like the potential of this technology. So it's a race, it's a it's a competition to see what part of that ecosystem, can you start owning and so that you become indispensable to the old, to the fan. Uh, if you can then embed that into your brand and say, okay, well that's where I can find things at Livecore, uh, you start building that moat. And people start relying on you, and that is how you protect. And you don't have to rely on like where people are consuming that. You can also post that on whatever platform becomes the main platform to deliver content.
Richard Gillis, UP:Can you see in the way that, the Premier League and opt that, or any, we could talk about any rights holder, but. What is stopping the Premier League and you know, moving into that. So in terms of, okay, we can do that work now. We don't
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:attitude. a license. Yeah. I mean, I can't see, I can see a world where an advanced camera can now collect all the types of data plus probably like 10 levels deeper of any football match without the need for a data collection and distribution company. And in fact, you could probably set up something that collects the data. Um, structures it in a way that, your clients want to consume it, deliver it, and even all the way to like publish it on your own platform at very low cost. If you wanted to address that, if you're not complacent and not comfortable saying, well, I'll just take my check and be comfortable, um. You could definitely do that and absorb that part of the ecosystem and have full control of it. A smart IP rights holder would have to be thinking this way.
Richard Gillis, UP:What would be the implications of them doing that? I'm just trying to think that through. It is just on the back of a comment. We had a conversation with Gareth, uh, bch at two circles. They've just released their IP league essentially that comes to the monetizing of sports ip. One of the questions is what isn't being captured, and one of the questions is the betting money. but I'm wondering what the implications are of the Premier League going, right. Okay. We are going to move into this area. In the same way as they're taking in their own media house and they've, um, taken that back from IMG over the last six months or so, what they might be looking at in this marketplace, if over the period of time, the licenses come to an end, you then start to say, well actually we've got some big decisions to make. Or they're making those now in,
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Yeah, it will enable them to do things that maybe. In the previous cycle were not feasible or economically viable. So they'd have to ask that question. So there's new technologies being available to us now. In the past we've considered taking over this part of the ecosystem, but we didn't. Now, has this made it possible all the way to, do we need broadcasters anymore? Can everybody connect to us and can we, set up a broadcasting system, collect all the data? And do it with 10 people per match and keep all the revenue associated with it. And sure, can it go all the way to the betting part? Um, there are a lot of regulatory, uh, costs and obstacles, uh, towards that. Uh, there are ideological and philosophical, hurdles to be cleared. Um,
Richard Gillis, UP:it's back to that question, what are we question,
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:isn't it? Exactly. Uh, but to your point. A lot more questions can be, asked these days with these new technologies that in the past were easily dismissed or were too scary to even like consider
Richard Gillis, UP:So that marketplace, I'm wondering if what their response is gonna be, what their protection. That plumbing in the middle and it's probably only gonna be a few, well, I dunno, my assumption is it's, we talk about the Premier League a lot, we talk about the NFL, we talk about the IPL, these sort of mega sports rights holders. But then you've got the mass of them are still not whether they gonna be able to make that leap. And then culturally you run through the sort of the view that. You know, Sports rights holders trying to be all these other things, retailers gonna be Amazon, they're gonna be Sky, they're gonna be Netflix. All of these questions that they could be, and it comes down to decision making in terms of actually,
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:well, everyone in the ecosystem, uh, must be approaching it with that paranoia I described. Yeah. So, fanatics would be thinking, how do I defend my turf in, in e-commerce? And betting in other areas that they're involved in, uh, broadcasters will be like, well, I need to still keep my place and, own the end consumer, uh, of the content. The sports radars of this world will have to make themselves indispensable, so they need to develop technologies that are gonna be either too expensive. Build their own models, uh, or, copyright them, trademark them, so you know, they know the change that's coming. So you need to make sure that you're on the attack, uh, and build modes. Uh, and that can't be just brand.
Richard Gillis, UP:Do you think in terms of the general sort of, we talked about attitude, your personal attitude and the organizationally to it, to this question, whether or not. The web, there's a legacy of Web3 hanging around and whether or not people are sort of reticent to, to jump in because they think, oh, well no, we were talking about blockchain two years ago, three years ago, and that was gonna transform everything. And now we're talking about ai. That feels like that, that in some rooms some people say, yeah, come on, let's just hold back. There's a sense of let's just see what's working and then jump, we'll, let. The people at the sharp end make the mistakes. It's even to the level of apple. Apple are being criticized for their slowness around ai. And it might just be Apple being apple. They'll come in with something fantastic when lessons have been learned. I dunno, there's a, there's that
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:there, there's certainly that and you failed to mention one that forced, one trend that forced a big company to change their name, uh, meta. And they thought everything was gonna be about metaverse. And we haven't talked about
Richard Gillis, UP:I read a book about
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Did
Richard Gillis, UP:the yeah. It
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Yeah. You're
Richard Gillis, UP:But it's all, it's a
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:of time now. Uh, sure. I mean, that, that's one way of approaching it, saying, well, it's overhyped, we mentioned where my position is. I'm saying it's severely under hyped. And there's some people who may say, yeah, we've seen this before, and, it's not going to disrupt our lives or and change humanity the way, some people think it is, but you know. I can, firmly see that would be the wrong, uh, attitude right now. Uh, because we've already seen real world applications, OO, of the technology and sectors that are already being disrupted, products that are already being delivered. I mean, open ai, uh, is the fastest growing consumer product that you know, we've ever seen. Uh, like zero to, I don't know, 200 million users in less than two years, uh, to be correct, to be validated.
Richard Gillis, UP:it's fascinated. The Johnny
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:my Yeah. Yeah. So like the speeds of adoption, uh, of these, consumer products is remarkable. If we compare it to, the development speed of the early days of internet and how. Websites proliferated, from the days where you could go to Netscape and there could be just a toolbar that shows you like 10 sites. And I'd be like, okay, those are the 10. And like maybe the week after it would be 15, some new site came on and say, oh yeah, do you know about this new site? Like actually you could refer to a new site being published on the web. Yeah. And then what has that become and how long that took? And now like, it's happening at probably a hundred x uh, the speed in a, in a. In a speed that our human brains are not capable of keeping up and comprehending. So we can't, we have to stop trying to Yeah. And just embrace that like this is happening. And if you notice, we've stopped talking about safety, uh, around ai. And that's very interesting because two years ago, people like Elon Musk were saying, we need to pause all LLM development Yeah. And understand the consequences when it comes to like safety. And we've given up on that, uh, pretty
Richard Gillis, UP:much. Well, whether we've, I think whether we've given it up, it's just that, it's a sort of, there's a, it's not dissimilar actually to the betting sort of legislation conversation because if you focus on that, it gets in the way of the other broad, you can have an opinion on it, you can have a view on it, and that's the sort of, it's important, but actually by focusing too much on it, you don't actually have an interesting conversation about the core. Subject. a
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:way Of looking at that. Um, at least I personally have started looking at this. We've given up on the, uh, potential safety, uh, dangers with this technology because we understand the irrationality of humanity and we know that we're always going to compete, that we're always gonna be greedy. And we're always gonna be. Defending some identity that's been labeled on us. Uh, so winning is more important than, putting the world at risk. So, we can, build bombs that could bring extinction to the world just because we wanna defend, our values or our culture. So I think we've, resigned to the fact that, the only thing we can do is just compete on this and trying to. On as much of it as possible because someone is gonna want to do more and, be better than us. There's always this race, and so therefore we cannot worry about the lack of safety measures that we are built in place, even though I think the smartest people around these technologies know very well that, it brings severe, like very significant dangers to humanity.
Richard Gillis, UP:Do you think that, again, back to brand, whether trust is gonna be a significant feature? In terms of, would you go in and say, right, okay, we are leading, or you again, you talk about Apple. Apple have gone, they went very big on privacy around data, which I thought was a very smart strategic marketing move. It became, around which in that environment, and I'm wondering if when everything is just the wild west and everything, new product, new stuff's coming at me and it is exciting, scary, whether or not there is a position there, which can balance those, balance that excitement, but also with, okay. Don't worry, we're not gonna destroy the world.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:I think most people are still gonna be focused on their short term, gains. Yeah. So they're gonna look at potentially an Apple product that delivers them privacy, but that does not give them like the whole feature set that AI could deliver them. So go to another, product where they can upload all their lives. With no privacy controls because then they get the best output of their ai. I think there are already tools out there that I think Facebook made a meta, made an announcement that their LAMA model can, absorb all your information on social and create and save your personal profile. So on one hand I'm thinking, oh, that would be amazing. So I don't have to tell, the LLM every time who I am and like what I do and all the context. And in fact, it'll keep refreshing itself with all the new content I put on socials. It'll know my friends, my history whereas, and then give me the best outputs, uh, whereas the other one will be like, no, we don't save your history. So which one are we going to pick? Uh, if you pick the privacy one, you may be left behind. Yeah. And it is gonna take you maybe 10 times longer to do a task on that LLM than you do without those privacy controls. Usually humans will pick the short term gains and say, well, we'll worry about safety in the future. Yeah. And you gotta, real time Black Mirror episodes developing. But
Richard Gillis, UP:Well, it is, it's interesting, isn't it?'cause it's sort of safety as a sort of, uh, hand break, your, that's, it's very difficult to not to present both of those things, if not impossible. Potentially. There's a great, and I shared with you this, and I just wanna get your, there's a, we were sharing, there's a Google doc that came out, um. Around their announcements this week. There's a phrase in here that I just wanted to get your opinion and it's, uh, what does the term product algo fit mean to you? And
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:should we define that first for the sake of the audience? Um, it comes from product market fit, really. Like whether there's demand for your product and at what level. And that's what a startup needs to go through test. And if there's product market fit and you start scaling, uh, nowadays product ALG fit is whether your product, it could be content, it could be a service, it could be an e-commerce store. Is fit for the algos that run the major platforms. So will Instagram pick up your content and show it to you? Know your followers more often than somebody else's will Google search. Pick up your sites, ahead of your competitors. Um, so you, you're constantly in a race, uh, to optimize whatever you're putting out there for the product. ALG go fit rather than the product market fit. And I personally hate this. So one of the people I used to follow when I was younger was Seth Godin, like one of the gurus of marketing. Yeah. And I used to strongly believe, uh, in his theories that he's, uh, published on Purple Cow. Which is, you need to build remarkable products and do remarkable marketing campaigns to be noticed. Um, and now unfortunately, like you can be as purple as you want among black and white cows, but if those, standard cows have found a way to trick the product ALG fit. And even if they're not as good a product as yours they're, ahead of you. And so you're constantly, trying to trick these systems. And if you are not, others are so outside, SEO has been like this, forever. Uh, and you search something and you get these, all these fake sites or what they call parasites, SEO sites, where instead of like the product that you're searching. You get these intermediaries that probably bring no value, uh, to any end user, ranking the best headphone sites as opposed to like the best headphone sites being ranked on that Google search. now, we have the issue like how is Product A Fit gonna be with AI search and these lms like how do I, uh, make my product, visible when somebody's searching for the best scores app or for the best betting and. And again, it's not about having the best product, unfortunately. Yeah, which should be the case. It's about the best way you build that product so that the platforms, whatever algorithm they have, pick it up and they can tweak this to also for their commercial gains. So that for them, it's not about surfacing the best product, it's about surfacing the best product that makes them the most money. And you could even like. And talk about like how it's more profitable for them to, surface extremist content. Yes. Which gets more clicks. Yeah. And that's not really the best, content to surface
Richard Gillis, UP:Well, the sort of Twitter X algorithm is one of the most marked changes, isn't it, in terms of what it rewards now compared to what it rewarded previously and how that sort of is it in and how that impacts so. The phrase AI slop gets sort of thrown around the place. But you can start to see a future where you've got this weird world where you've got algorithms and bots fighting to fighting just
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:for the,
Richard Gillis, UP:and actually that's what the internet becomes.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Yeah. There you go. There could be a use case of ai like optimize my products for product a fit in real time. So, constantly iterate and then all of a sudden you're gonna have millions of products, websites, content producers, having AI agents, trying to game the platforms. If those are the still the entry points to, to content consumption, uh, if they haven't been made obsolete yet. But if they are, so we have SEO engineers and experts. Now will AI take over and, change our websites, every second to make sure that, Google's algo picks it up? Uh, so yeah it's no longer, trying to deliver the best products to the customer in the quickest time. It's about how are you gonna have to be visible in this new era of ai? It's got a
Richard Gillis, UP:a gloomy prospect.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Yes. It's a bit dystopian. Uh, definitely. If we go back to watching, episodes season one of Black Mirror. It's remarkable how much of that is going to be, real, people's memories being uploaded, people having, memory issues, having to possibly rely, uh, and there could be like very big positives. I mean, imagine people with Alzheimer's having a memory bank that's. Real time accessible to them for any question that they may have to ask, which they're embarrassed to ask because they don't want to keep forgetting things. So you could always go and say, Hey where was I? Or where was this? What happened in, in this time of year? Yeah. Uh, so there'll be some amazing applications of it, but there'll be some that's, will actually look like back
Richard Gillis, UP:I was thinking about that when I was looking like this week, this is completely off topic. Well, not really, but it's a bit of a leap, but which is the enhanced games. And I'm instinctive, I'm instinctively. Sort of against them, but then that sort of case that you've just outlined, I think, well, I don't if I, if they were clever, they, that's how they would present themselves. That's how you would present an enhanced games would be. We are on the bleeding edge of that conversation. And actually this is a sort of, there's a. Formula one effect, which what we learn over here is gonna filter down to your car at some point. I can sort of see if I was a, in a comms role in there, I would think, okay, that's where I would go with that. It's probably not where they go'cause they're sort of, you then get into anti-vaxxers and all of that bit. But actually there's a bit of the enhanced games, which is interesting.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:The part where you're looking to at least. Safely enhance Yeah. Human performance. Uh, which is probably, like what the pentagon's experimenting on humans somewhere, I would guess. Uh, in and for years, how to enhance capabilities of soldiers, pilots, with various different medications. Uh, some legal, some, temporary increase in performance that may have health effects in the long run. And as a society, we've deemed that as acceptable. Like, we're fighting terrorism here. It's okay that, maybe our pilots are gonna have health issues when they're older And these guys are saying, well, why can't athletes make that same call for entertainment? Uh, but yeah, I can see how like you could position that as, somehow helping the evolution of humanity, developing longevity, Based, products. Uh, yeah, it's a bit of a stretch though, in, in terms of, if I understand their vision, it's just all about, making money and, creating
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah. As I say, I'm just, to be clear, I don't like it and I think it's run by the wrong people and whatever. There's a bit of it that is sort of, I guess, intellectually interesting, but it's not something that I want to, uh, become mainstream anytime soon. But anyway, what, let's just finish off then with a. It's almost impossible, the sort of future gazing question, isn't it? It's become redundant now in terms of, normally people say, well, where, what I can see a lot of, again, just to put some distance between this question and live score and, I can see a lot of money being wasted in this world. It's
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:usually what happens in the early stages of a transformation. Uh, there is gonna be, first of all if so much money is. Chasing the same industry or segments, there's gonna be less returns. Uh, and there's gonna be a lot of failures. Uh, so yeah, I think you can even go as far as to say you can measure someone's intellect and skill in, in today's world by seeing how convinced they are of the future. Especially around the development of technology. If they come and start predicting, three years from now how AI is gonna develop and how the world is gonna change, you can already start dismissing that person as an expert. Um, so the smartest people in this space that we're seeing, are producing a lot of content, are stressing the unpredictability of it. They're like, well, we don't know, uh, what's gonna happen. So we're just preparing and we're investing in many different areas. And then we'll continue to iterate. You can't, declare winners. Uh, at this stage we're so far away from what's happening. And so the safest thing to do, which a lot of companies are doing, is usually, invest in the shovels, in the infrastructure. Uh, this is where you usually make money in a technology rush until the winner starts, uh, surfacing. Like, what is it? What is needed? Uh, across the entire ecosystem of AI energy, uh, data centers, chips obviously, but you know, there's a bit of a monopoly there. But you know, all the technologies that are necessary for the infrastructure of ai, those industries are booming right now. And then you'll start, there are the big companies doing the big LMS and then there's application layers, and then there's companies who use these to create a strategic edge. And it's, I think it's impossible to identify, where the winners are gonna come from, uh, right now, apart from energy companies that for sure, or energy owners, uh, they're certainly gonna benefit. And that's probably part of AI that doesn't get talked much about, uh, like we know it consumes a lot of energy and we know we're gonna need a lot more of it. I don't think people understand the scale of that. Yeah.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah. Uh,
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:and how much more, uh, we're gonna need.
Richard Gillis, UP:If you were to sort of, again, just to go back to my intro, just to finish off, there is a, I'm going around now and talking to people about this subject. What questions do you think I should ask? So if I go to a rights holder, if I go to a media company or if I go to a sort of, one of the pl bigger players in the sports infrastructure, what do you think? You, they should be thinking about. Are there any specific questions about sport that you think are vulnerable? Where quite often when sport moves into this sort of area there, there is a reliance on, I mean, brand and loyalty and fans and all of those questions, and it will be about, okay, now removing inefficiencies within. Rights holders, for example, or within media companies, all of which is sort of, cost reduction. I'm just wondering what other questions there are lurking for sports
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:sector there's a lot of opinions out there that label sports and in particular sports media as vulnerable, um, to this, to these developments. More vulnerable maybe than other industries. And I can see how they would make that conclusion because, we've had AI produce content, for years now and has never been really that good. Uh, so it's a cost saving, maybe a or for resio content, but now, like you can see how that can actually compete with, proper journalism. Even. Um, in
Richard Gillis, UP:when you compare it to say like entertainment film, I can see. A catastrophe for, if you are an actor or a, an unless you're a
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:superstar. Exactly. And you could see that, content producers in sports, with all the automation that can be done. Yeah, there, there are areas that are going to be disrupted. How content appears on YouTube, a minute after like an event is finished, without any producers or content owners. Um, and these are going to start accelerating to a point where, you know, when I turn on YouTube every morning, I watch NBA highlights. And now, like, somehow YouTube figured out that like, I like to watch longer highlights. And so now I'm getting highlights that show every, uh, uh, play, not just the highlights. Uh, just removes the timeouts, the free throws and the commercials. And there's. Highlights per quarter. Uh, and the moment first quarter's finished, two minutes later, the highlights are there. I didn't tell YouTube that this is how, but obviously when I saw it first, I started consuming that. And it could be like somebody seeming that demand then gonna be like, okay, like maybe more people you know who want to consume that. And that's all being done by probably someone in their basement. Uh, so what did that disrupt? Probably another producer of highlights that used to. Put up like 10 minute highlights of the whole, event and they're getting less traffic. If there are many of me who consume it that way, and this is happening, like really,
Richard Gillis, UP:like, you get back to the old, the age old question of TV rights. And you ultimately, in terms of the, that undermining
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:It's a completely different like environment. Like I wake up very early in the morning and sometimes my friends from the US would say, you got to, tune in and watch the end of this game. And I would be like, no, I'm gonna start from quarter one. And by the end of like that four quarter, I will have caught up. And I didn't have to watch any commercials and, then we can go on and chatting about, the post game. I was like, if you think about that like 10 years ago, how like ridiculous that would've been. So I think this content world is adjusting to how each one of us wants to consume media. So to some people it is unthinkable to wait till the next day. To watch, a game seven of an, NBA conference final. It was like, no, you have to do it real time. It's like, no I, value my sleep and I like to watch it at, 5:00 AM in the morning and I don't think I'm missing out on anything. Yeah, sure, I'm missing out maybe on the conversations in real time, but that's not important for me. So that's one individual's preference. Like, I don't want to hear anything about social media. I don't want any spoilers. I wanna watch it now to compare, for example, like. TNT or BT Sport has not figured that out. And the moment you want to watch a Champions League or Europa League highlight, they have the score on the thumbnail. Say, I don't wanna see, I want to like actually enjoy, in nice maybe 30 minutes. Highlights of the events, and of eight events that you covered one by one even, uh, because you know that's what I wanna do in the morning. How many years is it gonna take for them to know that there are some people who are not watching the game in real time, maybe in other geos. They don't want to see the score, the moment they turn on YouTube. That's the difference between, people who are embracing this technology and others who are not.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah. Yeah. It is funny I turned on YouTube and they had the highlights of the, uh, spurs Man United Euro Cup final. I thought there can't be many highlights in
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:that. Yeah. know, the thumbnail had one nil with uh, poster jo picture on it. Yeah. Like I was like trying not to see it.'cause I wanted to watch, I didn't watch the game live.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah. But the moment I saw his
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:face and one nail, I was like, I didn't, I, managed to block the teams with my hand, but I could. Yeah, Exactly. Exactly. So you know exactly what happened and like what are you watching the highlights for? You waiting for that goal to happen and then you knows
Richard Gillis, UP:yeah, yeah. there's no ruined that me. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Fantastic. Listen, Sam, thanks very much for your time. I really appreciate it.'cause it is a, it's so fast moving and it's really interesting to get your views on. Yeah. Everything we said Yeah. Yeah. But you know, that's welcome to my life.
Sam Sadi, LiveScore:Cheers. All right. Thank you.