Founder's Story
Empowering Intellect Over Labor: Syed Hussain on SHIZA’s Decentralized AI Revolution | S2 Ep. 158
Sat, 14 Dec 2024
In this episode of Founder's Story, we sit down with Syed Hussain, the visionary Founder & CEO of SHIZA (Shared Human Intellect Zonal Agents), a company at the forefront of agentic AI. Hussain shares how his early entrepreneurial spark—as a resourceful kid in India—laid the foundation for a career in technology and data-driven innovation. He offers unique insights into the impending shift away from labor-driven economies toward intellect-driven models powered by personal AI agents. As Syed explains, the future might not be about working more hours, but about owning and monetizing your intellect and data through agentic AI solutions. Get ready to explore what it means to “own your AI before AI owns you.”Early Entrepreneurial Roots:How Hussain’s first venture at age eight—renting out comic books—ignited his passion for solving real problems in creative ways.Transitioning from small entrepreneurial endeavors to technology consulting and eventually building his own tech-focused companies.Embracing Emerging Technologies:Hussain’s journey from early web technologies and data analytics to diving into big data, blockchain, and now AI.The moment ChatGPT and GPT-3 opened his eyes to the immense possibilities and cost efficiencies of AI-driven infrastructure.Agentic AI Explained:Understanding agentic AI as chains of AI agents (or processes) working together to execute tasks autonomously.Why these solutions go beyond chatbots: AI agents can handle complex multi-step tasks and feed results into one another, reducing human workload.Shaping a Post-Labor Economy:The shift away from traditional labor: as tasks and jobs become automated by AI agents, how do humans create value?Hussain’s vision of “individualized learning models” (ILMs) let you own your data and intellect and then monetize it.The importance of decentralization and Web3 in ensuring individuals maintain control and profit from their data and personal AI agents.Opportunities and Challenges:How younger generations, less tied to a 40-hour work model, may embrace this technology more readily.Potential pitfalls: the risk of repeating past mistakes where large corporations harvest and profit from personal data.Hussain’s call to action: “Own your AI before AI owns you.”The Future of SHIZA:Building the infrastructure for a decentralized, agentic AI ecosystem.Creating digital intellect marketplaces where individuals can share and monetize their unique knowledge and experience.Positioning Shiza.ai as the hub for these agentic solutions, shaping a collaborative, globally connected web of human and AI intellect.Actionable Takeaways:Start thinking about how emerging AI solutions can handle repetitive tasks, freeing you to focus on creativity and strategy.Consider how your personal data and unique life experiences could be assets in a future driven by intellectual property rather than labor.Stay informed about developments in agentic AI, Web3, and decentralized platforms to protect and capitalize on your digital footprint.Connect with Syed Hussain & SHIZA:Website & Waitlist: https://shiza.ai/Twitter: @SerialTechX (Syed Hussain’s handle)Join the waitlist on Shiza.ai for early access and updates.Our Sponsors:* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com
Chapter 1: What sparked Syed Hussain's entrepreneurial journey?
Welcome back to Founders Story. Today we have Saeed Hussain, who is the founder and CEO of Shiza. And Shiza is doing something very unique. This whole agentic AI, all these things. I mean, the world is moving so fast. And you and I had an incredible hour plus conversation just around how we see the future. Why did you even get into entrepreneurship? And why did you start this company?
Yeah, great question. There's probably a... a simple answer to this. And the simple answer of why I got into it is because I'm a... I'm mentally challenged and I'm just a sick person to want to put myself through this and put the rest of my family through this as well. So for anyone that's an aspiring entrepreneur, the first thing I will tell you that it's very, very glamorous.
It's very, very sexy from the outside in, from the inside out. It's an absolute nightmare, especially if the ones that are going to be affected by it are your closest ones. So if you're crazy enough to convince them that this is the path you want to embark upon, then certainly entrepreneurship is for you. So lay the groundwork there for you, Dan.
Chapter 2: How did early experiences shape Hussain's business mindset?
How I decided to get into it was, you know, I've always been fascinated. I've always been intrigued by the world of entrepreneurship and the world for entrepreneurship. My first foray into it came at the ripe old age of eight years old when I was actually in India at that time.
And the way that I got into it was it was just, you know, for me, it was just being an entrepreneur was just finding a solution to a problem that people had and people really didn't realize that the problem was. So just come and go with novel solutions around it. So what I did was I was big into comic books.
And the only way that you could sort of, there was no concept of collecting comic books in India. And people, the only option you had was to buy a comic book. But people would, there were, those comics were episodic. So every month there would be a new episode that would come out and I was totally into it.
And I was like, me and my friends were like, oh, can't wait for the next, next episode of these, these comics to come out. And what we ended up doing was we would just buy the comic, read it. And then after we were done reading it, it's like, okay, you chuck it, you wait for the next episode to come.
the the following month and then something hit me where i'm like well instead of me sort of just just buying it myself what if i were to buy it and allow people to come in and just read it for a fraction of the cost that it would that they would pay to actually buy it and that was sort of my first Yeah.
As a result of it, I ended up getting the most value from it as a kid that you can get, which is what popularity points. And I was I was the man at that point. And who doesn't like, you know, being a being an eight year old kid who doesn't like being the man when when you have to pay people or try to convince them to stop calling you boy. Right.
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Chapter 3: What is agentic AI and how does it work?
So for me, it was that was sort of the first foray into it. And then fast forward, we get into the the into the mid to late 90s. And that's when this whole dot-com boom was starting to come about.
And that's where I started reading and really understanding more and more about technology and the power of this thing called the internet, which was essentially just connected computers with one another and giving people access to be able to share the data from within it and get that out to the outside world. So I started off with the Web 1.0 era, excuse me, I started off in the Web 1.0 era.
And that's at that point was where I collaborated with a family friend of ours, who got into the he was working for IBM at that time. And I said to him, I said, Look, what you're trying to build out here, we could do this for smaller businesses. So let's do it that way. That's how I started to get into the real world. And that was sort of my entry into the world of, of technology.
And from there, just got heavy into the data side. So I started off on the network side, then I got into the data side from data warehousing to ETL to business intelligence to geospatial analytics to advanced analytics and then to the world of big data, eventually finding my world into the world of Web3 and blockchain. I started getting into that.
And then from there, we started to realize with this explosion thing in data solutions, this thing called GPT 3.0, when that first came out, at that point was when we were like, okay, we want to build out this, we wanted to build out this predictive analytics engine. But the cost for doing so was significant. But then when GPT-3 auto came in, that's where I decided to start playing with it.
And before we knew it, we were able to build out essentially agentic solutions as a result of it. And then at that point was when I realized that there was going to be just an explosion in terms of these agentic solutions that are going to be coming about. What is that going to leave? What are the second order and third order effects of this going to be?
And based off of that was essentially what the concept and the premise of shared human intellect zonal agents or Shiza.ai was born out of.
You know, the funny thing, it doesn't matter how successful someone becomes. You can always trade it back to when they were a kid. You could ask anyone, like, what is the first product that you sold, right? Or you resold. It's really funny. I think like every entrepreneur has a story of when they were a child, they were reselling something, they were...
The entrepreneurship, I feel you're almost born with these traits. And then as those traits, then you realize that translates really well in the business. But I was listening to a recent interview with Eric Schmidt from the previous Google CEO. And he mentioned just how groundbreaking it was even for them when ChatGPT came out.
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Chapter 4: What does a post-labor economy look like?
But the reality is that these kinds of things are easily, uh, you know, if you put, look, the reality is if you assign an AI to figure out how an AI thought of, that's a lot easier to do than if you were to put a human behind it to do it. The point is the human is the one that created it.
So it's, it's a lot easier to be able to figure out machine based tasks and machine based creativity than it is to figure out human creativity. So I, you know, I, I certainly am not one of those who was like, oh, you know, um, How did a machine figure that out? And I don't know what it is. You just haven't had enough time. You haven't put in enough time to be able to figure that out.
But if you put enough time into it, there's a very easy way for you to be able to do so.
I love how AI can analyze things on the next level that we can't even imagine. The fact that AI can possibly figure out how to talk to animals. or figure out your dreams that you had and analyze the brain. Because I think we don't really understand much about the brain, as we probably should, right?
The fact that they can figure all these things out, create drugs that we probably need in the future to solve maybe cancer or something. I mean, it seems an incredible future. I can't wait. But let's talk about agentic AI. I think there's people that, many people have no idea what that even means. Can you explain that?
Sure. So the way that I like to explain to people is it's an AI agent. For those who are sort of the technical nerds here, the easiest way I can explain is think of it as a demon, not D-E-M-O-N, which is what the vast majority of the world thinks AI is going to end up becoming. But D-A-E-M-O-N, right? Which is essentially a process. So think of it as being able to execute a single process.
So if you can create something simple enough and you're passing a command to be able to say, okay, do this specific task. This is what you're responsible for. That's essentially what an AI agent is able to do, is it handles a specific task.
Then what you're doing is you're combining that agent with another agent that can take the output of the previous agent as an input and then take the task to another level. So what you end up having is you end up having this chain of agents or the swarm of agents that's able to do one task and followed by another that's being taken in as the input for that.
So it's intelligence being built on top of additional intelligence. You end up having the swarm of agents that does the assigned work. And then, of course, then you can have intelligence.
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Chapter 5: How can individuals monetize their intellect in the AI age?
that particular swarm the output of that becoming the input of another swarm and that's essentially what an agentic system ends up becoming right so we have if if anyone who's a coder if anyone that's actually developed code right that's what we do we form we formulate these arrays and and we start to package them together what ai is able to do the beauty of ai is it's able to automate all of those and instead of a human being being being at the at the back end to to create it
You're providing it with a set of rules. And then what it's doing is it understands in that because of advances in NLP, it's able to understand what it's going to be doing.
And then it also has to its advantage, and this is the beauty of LLMs, is that it has to its advantage, it's sitting on top of human-based solutions captured from all kinds of public data that it's also learning from, and it's continuing to enhance that.
So agentic solutions are really, they're essentially, it's where all of these processes are coming together, intelligence-based processes that are coming together, being packaged together,
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Chapter 6: What are the opportunities and risks associated with emerging AI technologies?
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and understand how to interact with one another.
I can't wait. I don't want to say perfect employees, but it's having perfect solutions that can execute the tasks that I need to get done, but are just like hyper-focused and very good at that one task. And then it gets to another task. I mean, we all need that. In business, we all really need that, right? What is the future of Shiza?
I know you explained what you're doing, what you're working on, but when you look a few years out, how do you see this company transforming?
Oh, boy. Okay, so look, we have a very, very grand vision for where things are going. My background and the majority of my team, we're all capital markets guys, so that's the background that we come from. And we're really... the way that we're looking at this is not from where things stand today, but where things are going to end up going.
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Chapter 7: How do future generations view work with AI advancements?
And this is why our slogan with Shiza is own your AI before AI owns you. So what we're doing is we are utilizing Web3 Rails with decentralization and distributed technologies. We're utilizing those Web3 Rails to be able to provide people with...
ai agents that they themselves will own and there's a couple of moving parts to this the first part is that what we're doing is you want to capture the human experience but that human experience that you're capturing it shouldn't be a part of a large language model that's centrally owned instead what it should be is it should be owned by you the individual and should be novelly yours it should be owned plainly and simply by you no one should have access to it including the builders behind it like a shizzo for example
So this is where we're introducing the concept. We're shifting away from large language models to individualized learning models or an ILM.
where you will own it, only all of your experiences are being captured by it, and if anyone else wants to have access to it, you are the only one that can give access to certain components of it, what we call these intellects, these custom knowledge stores off of the entirety of your data, right, that you have.
So what we're envisioning then is a future in which these intellects that you have, right, will then be shared, right, By others, people will have access to it. And every single person that has access to that intellect, you as the individual who owns it are being have the ability to be able to monetize off of it.
So this is how we're seeing how we're envisioning the shift of a future economies as we start to move away. from a labor-based economy into an intellect-driven economy where you have all of these digital intellects that people will be able to share off of, that people will be able to monetize off of.
And with Shiza, what we're doing is we're laying the infrastructure and we're building that out for this post-labor economy.
And the future is bright. I'm excited. I think we've learned from mistakes of the past. We just freely give out basically priceless data. We've just given it out. And now, you know, it's the ability to take some control, hopefully. So I can't wait. If you want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more information. They want to see how they can be a part of Shiza. How can they do so?
Well, the best way to do it is, as of right now, our waitlist is open. So go on to shiza.ai, S-H-I-Z-A.AI, and sign up for our waitlist. Or you can find me on Twitter. You can catch me on LinkedIn, on Twitter. It's Serial Tech, S-E-R-I-A-L, tech. Find me on Twitter. And like I said, the best way to do this is sign up. Sign up on our wait list. I look at it every single day. Yes, I do look at it.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of AI on human creativity?
And if you're interested in getting involved in some capacity, the future is, in your own words, Dan, the future is very, very bright. And we can't wait for you to be a part of this with us.
Saeed, thank you so much for joining us. Shiza.ai, billions of agentic AI is going to be everywhere in the future and you don't want to not be a part of it. So I appreciate your time today on Founders Story.
Thank you, brother.
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