iGaming Daily

Fernando Noodt (00:02.286)
AI continues to change our lives and even though it has been around for a while, in different things we use regularly, models like JAT GPT put this technology in our daily conversations. Over the last few days, a new model shook the world and the stock market as DeepSeek was introduced from China with love. Welcome to a new episode of iGaming Daily.

I am Fernando Nott, Senior Business Journalist for SBC Noticias and... Sorry, again. Welcome to a new episode of iGaming Daily. I am Fernando Nott, Senior Business Journalist for SBC Noticias and your host for today. And to discuss this very intricate topic, I am joined by Christian Lee, Business Journalist for Gambling TV. Christian, how are you today?

Anaya McDonald (00:54.449)
I'm Godfrey Kiefer, thanks for having me.

Fernando Noodt (00:57.131)
It's great to have you, but today we also have a very special guest, a friend of the house, Cristian Barbosa, founder of Inside Play AI, Cristian. We'll call you Chris for clear purposes, like you'll be Chris and Cristian will be Christian. So Cristian Barbosa, how are you today?

Chris Barbosa (01:16.659)
Excellent, excellent guys. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to this one.

Fernando Noodt (01:21.626)
Yes, great to have you. There's a lot to discuss, but first let's thank OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market and sponsor of iGaming Daily. But like I said, DeepSeek shook the world over the last few days by launching a much cheaper AI model that threatens Google, OpenAI, and all the largest companies in the artificial intelligence segment. So Christian, in this case, I'm talking to Christian Lee, of course, why don't you break this up?

first for our audience so we can all be in the same page.

Anaya McDonald (01:55.385)
Yeah, so as you said, Deepsea did release their new AI models. And along with that, they released a report that said that they were able to produce these models for as little as $6 million, which is what sent Shockwave through Silicon Valley, given that the common consensus for sort of technologies like ChatGBT from OpenAI is that it costs hundreds and hundreds of millions to produce. So with that, that sort of left investors

So that question, why do we need to put all this money into AI? Will money keep being put into AI given that it appears to be a lot cheaper than expected? So I think overall, the US tech market lost about one trillion in value. And one of the biggest hit in this was Nvidia, who were actually the people who created the computer chips that power a lot of AI models. They lost nearly 600 million in value, which is the greatest.

is the biggest one day loss in US stock market history. Obviously with that, the companies you mentioned, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, there was a lot of panic around sort of what will happen now with investment and what sort of will happen going forward with this Chinese model that is sort of threatening the status quo.

Fernando Noodt (03:16.497)
Yeah, so Nvidia actually was forbidden to sell the chipsets to China in order to prevent China from developing a powerful AI model like they have just did. They just did. So Chris Barbosa, how have Deep Six revelations shaken up the AI industry in the West, even though they try to avoid it? How does this impact the...

the AI industry.

Chris Barbosa (03:48.573)
Sure, so it's bad news for Silicon Valley.

but it's good news for startups everywhere that are building on top of these large language models, which is the technology that, for example, OpenAI does. So basically what they've done is a process called distillation where they use, in this case, actually, Opioids AI LLM model and trained a much smaller version that is very capable. So at the very early hours of DeepSeeks R1 lunch, if you would ask,

it what are you it would reply something like I am a creation of open AI it's kind of like using something to build something completely new which is far efficient because you didn't have to train it from the beginning however it changes a lot of things for companies that are using AI in general because it's democratization right so if you would if we were to take this 10 years ago we would all thought that Google will be the main contender in

this fight because they had all the users, all the money, all the labs to develop this. Now you don't have a clear winner on the labs LLM race to build large language models. So you have OpenAI, have Metas, Lama, you have a lot of them from Anthropix and you can pretty much use whatever you want.

It's the main impact here is that the claim is that they built it as you said, Chris, with less than six million dollars in comparison to the billions and billions of what these companies are pouring in to develop these models. However.

Chris Barbosa (05:33.605)
It's a different thing to train a model and then to run it at scale. So I'm not a financial advisor, but I wouldn't sell my Nvidia stock right now. Not yet. Because it's like I said, it's not really that expensive to train a model, especially if you use distillation. What's very expensive is what it's called the inference part, which means whatever happens in the GPU use

after you as a user give it a query. So if you were to type in something like, hey, give me the weather for today, all that GPUs power and in general is what is very, very expensive to run. And if you're using DeepSeq right now, you can see that it's excellent. It's thinking process and chains of thoughts are amazing. And it works even better in some cases than the latest old one model.

of OpenAI, but it crashes, especially if you're using the APIs as a company.

because they don't have the scale to run it in a very large scale as people are intending to use it. So again, it's going to change a lot of things in terms of the economy of using this technology, but not as drastically as everyone thought at the beginning. So clearly, there was a market overreaction in the last week.

Anaya McDonald (07:07.345)
Yeah, I think as well, I think Nvidia know this themselves that they sort of said that DeepSeek's model highlights the usefulness of their chips. So with that, that will then lead on to, as you mentioned, the startups who are seeing this and thinking they can do this in the US. So they'll come to Nvidia, OpenAI, other companies that use Nvidia chips. They'll also see the usefulness with DeepSeek and then continue to invest with Nvidia as well.

Chris Barbosa (07:38.245)
Absolutely, absolutely.

Fernando Noodt (07:41.878)
And so Chris, if the claims are true, how will this impact AI development going forward? Do you think developers will be forced to evaluate their methods given like they are apparently overspending on this technology?

Chris Barbosa (08:00.625)
Yeah, mean, again, there's a lot of claims that allegedly this technology was developed using very low budgets, which there are some indications that they actually did. But there's also this narrative where there's a lot of money, like non-official money.

that went into building this and scaling this. I would say, however, the fact, yeah, it's going to change how these companies actually run their business because they're burning a lot of money into developing this technology and the data centers to use it because it's demand and offering. So companies that are building on top of us, just like we are right now, we can use pretty much

the best language that is available because we're agnostic and just use it to be as efficient and cost effective as possible. So yeah, it's going to change a lot of things.

Anaya McDonald (09:04.625)
Yeah, definitely. agree. I think one another thing to take note of as well is that Donald Trump has recently revoked Joe Biden's AI safety bill as one of his first moves in office. Talking to you Chris, what do you think the implications of this are for removing what the sorry, let me start again. On another note, Donald Trump has also revoked Joe Biden's AI safety bill as one of his first moves in office. What do you the implications are?

of removing these guardrails for the future use of AI and development of AI.

Chris Barbosa (09:37.991)
Yeah, it's a serious thing because basically there's two ways you can use AI for. The good way is improving people's lives. I believe that in the next, we're gonna see the first effects of AI like in mass adoption in this year, but 10 years from now, you can use AI for a lot of medical things. I mean, people in general have better medical healthcare and access to information because the scarcity of knowledge

is not going to be a thing anymore because you will have it in your pocket. You can improve people's lives. AI has the potential of being a deflationary asset for world's economies because we're pretty much building better things with better economics in general. But then the other route of this is using it for bad purposes, which is mainly, I would say, control.

of population and decisions in democracies and in a very contested and very... Yeah, it's a very complicated time right now in terms of the global politics. So what I'm seeing with what's happening and coming from the China models and this latest Trump decision is that the gloves are off. This is going to be a fight. This has the potential.

of changing the world and they know that.

and they pretty much removed the guardrails and I don't have the answer of how that is going to impact our lives. I'm more on the making people's lives better part of things. But yeah, definitely it's a concern. You see some companies that are actually, for example, Palantir is a company that deploys AI for government applications. I believe they're up 25 % this

Chris Barbosa (11:40.975)
week and yeah that gives you an indication of how things are moving forward in that battlefront, new battlefront.

Anaya McDonald (11:49.852)
Yeah, I think something I've wrote about this week as well is when looking at it from the UK perspective of what Keir Starmer needs to do is that you've got on one side the EU Safety Act is coming into effect and on the other side you've got the US taking away the guardrails, so I suppose it's sort finding that middle ground of allowing business development, AI development for sort of economic growth, but at the same time putting them necessary guardrails on to ensure that

Fernando Noodt (11:50.299)
Wow.

Anaya McDonald (12:19.918)
AI doesn't get in the wrong hands or is using a way that is detrimental to people.

Chris Barbosa (12:26.127)
Absolutely, Yeah, AI has, it's, I have to say it's, it's the...

biggest disruptive technology since the invention of the internet, I would say. And it has the power of thinking by itself and making decisions by itself. So, I mean, I don't want to get into that conversation and making people paranoid and all of that, but in the nuclear arms race, there was somebody that actually had to drop the bomb.

With this, I'm not so sure of that. So guardrails are necessary. And at the beginning of the AI development from the very early companies that started this, they were very aware of that fact. And that's why they, even in an unregulated landscape, they made their own guardrails. So yeah, it's something that we definitely need to think about.

Fernando Noodt (13:32.21)
We have definitely given you a lot to think about, but since this podcast is called iGaming Daily, we still need to talk about AI applications in iGaming. So we will do a very brief commercial break and we will talk about AI in iGaming just after that.

Anaya McDonald (13:32.486)
for sure.

Fernando Noodt (13:52.034)
break and now we will be back with the second part okay

We are back on iGaming Daily to discuss more about artificial intelligence. We have already discussed the developments with DeepSeek and Fight, let's call it, USA and China over this technology. But now we have to discuss the technology's vast applications within the iGaming industry because there's a lot of ground to cover with AI in the iGaming industry. So Chris.

How do you think AI can improve iGaming?

Chris Barbosa (14:33.807)
Absolutely. No, I believe and I'm definitely invested in the fact that this year we're going to see a lot of AI applications within the industry. I would say the companies that I've seen in the space are the

at the beginning using AI for analysis and market insights and all of that. I would say we are one of the early companies that are using AI applications for anything player interaction. But I don't want to for this to become an infomercial or an advert of my company, but there's a lot of applications that I see in the very early stages. One of them is that we're going to see a lot more of personalized experiences at scale.

If your marketing manager is still talking about localization you're late to the game. The name of the game right now is extreme and hyper personalization that goes with everything you do.

before getting to the operator or within the operator so that you have the most, again, personalized experience as you have. you don't have to navigate around a lot of games and a lot of sports. Everything is going to be custom and tailored to your preferences as a user. That's one of the applications that we're seeing. The other one is going to be fraud

prevention and it's even going to become predictive. So I don't see how this technology is not going to be massively adopted in that sense. Definitely. And the third one is the application of voice and conversion, conversational AI agents within the industry for everything regarding player interaction. And that is exactly what we do at Insight Play AI, which is my company. We're building AI agents.

Chris Barbosa (16:36.693)
to make everything player interaction much more sophisticated and competent and much more cost effective.

Anaya McDonald (16:48.1)
Yeah, I think for me, when I think about the conversations that I've had with people or we've had on this podcast previously, a lot of it's about just taking away that quote unquote grunt work that people have had to do in the past that now it can be ultimate to give people, sort of free up people's time, them that time back to do what they're best at in terms of being creative, especially for marketers. And I think when you look towards the future, I think...

That hyper-personalisation you talked about is a big one in terms of for each individual person, you can take the information, what their favourite sports team is, where they're from, who their favourite players are, and then from that, you can deliver personalised bets for every person rather than demographics of people.

Chris Barbosa (17:35.525)
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I think in general, not only for companies, but also for any professional in the space, AI adoption is a must need. for example, just to put an analogy, if you're an iGaming company that is in adopting AI right now, it's kind of like,

being in 2005 and not having a website. And if your company's executive, someone that is working in the industry, and you're not adopting AI for your daily usage, it's like you're in 2010 and you don't know how to Google things. Because this is going to change a lot of things on your day-to-day activities, definitely.

Anaya McDonald (18:24.752)
Yeah, of course. think gaming companies have sort of looked at how AI can be used for things like support chatbots and things like that, some people do tend to want to avoid. you think there's any recent developments in AI that can sort of push the industry to adopt other types of applications?

Chris Barbosa (18:44.933)
Absolutely. Absolutely. So that's exactly what we're doing at InsightPlay.ai. We're building conversational AI voice and text agents. I hate, I don't love the word chatbot because we've all interacted with them, not even just only in the industry, but anything you do with your banking or your airline. These chatbots used to work on flows of logics. And if you drift away from that, you kind of like break it.

But right now, what we're building is AI agents, which are autonomous and they make decisions for themselves and they have memories. So they're not only going to work for hyper-personalization, but to actually solve customer issues at scale with the largest capabilities of customer service, terms and conditions, local regulations, compliance.

works in a much more sophisticated and competent way than traditional solutions. Definitely.

Fernando Noodt (19:52.455)
And how have you found companies in the gaming industry and their posture towards the application of artificial intelligence? Do you think that they are eager to get involved with AI or are they just like, hey, we know this exists, so let's tap into it on the surface?

Chris Barbosa (20:18.563)
No, the reception has been incredible. Incredible. We launched very recently. We were developing a technology quite some time ago, but everyone is eager to adopt AI because they know that if they don't do, their competition will. They're going to out-compete them if they don't get in the race. you know, every company, not only operators, but companies in the industry are looking to adopt AI. And that's exactly, again, what we're using.

We are the AI transformation partner of the AI gaming industry. yeah, again, the premise is that we're building better and more cost effective solutions than the ones that are currently available. So everyone is eager to jump in to anything that makes sense in the world of AI.

Fernando Noodt (21:13.179)
Christian any final comments on this?

Anaya McDonald (21:18.375)
Yeah, I think from me one last question to Chris and it's quite a broad one, sort of when you look in your, if you were to envision how AI will be used in the industry in the next sort of five years, what would your ideal scenario be in that situation? I'll sort of like, where do you envision AI will be in five years time?

Chris Barbosa (21:39.027)
Absolutely. This thing is moving so fast that it's very difficult to do that.

that sort of claims, but it's not only gonna affect the industry in terms of how the general player experience goes, because right now everything is kind of like one directional. So you have either content consumption is that if you have a media platform, they have either articles or.

Anaya McDonald (21:51.401)
Yeah, of course.

Chris Barbosa (22:12.593)
Yeah, for example, a few of companies, have their website and you just consume it and you don't interact with. Same thing happens with operators platforms. I believe that the whole interaction feature is definitely going to change and it's going to remove a lot of barriers, which is what we're currently working on. And definitely this is just going to change our daily lives. So for example, for SBC Rio, I built my own agent that pretty much bought the tickets for me. I didn't go into the airline.

I it's changing a lot of things. You can build your personal work assistant to do the repetitive tasks for you. at the, mean, if you put a gun to my head, I would say 10 years moving forward, and it's of old claim, but the interface between us as people and machines, it's limited by our digits because we are using

cell phones. I believe they're now working on smart glasses where you can through your eyes and what you speak with the AI just be an enhanced human in general and I believe that's definitely the future and that is definitely going to affect the gaming experience.

Fernando Noodt (23:35.104)
Well, hopefully no one programs an AI to put a gun to your head, but I would like to thank you, Cristian Barbosa, founder of Inside Play AI. If you want to know more about it, please contact, make sure you contact Cristian Barbosa to know more about AI applications in iGaming, in the iGaming industry. Thank you very much for participating, Chris. Thanks very much, Cristian Lee, Business Journalist for Gambling TV, of course.

Chris Barbosa (23:39.559)
Hahaha.

Fernando Noodt (24:04.187)
And thank you Anaya McDonald for producing this episode. To our listeners out there, we'll say you, we'll meet you, to our listeners out there, we'll meet you in the next one. Goodbye.