Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick from the webinar Vet, welcoming you to another episode of Vet Chat. I'm really pleased to introduce today Yannick Bloom, who is on, I think the podcast for the 2nd time. So those of you who are followers may have seen the first one, but Yannick is the CEO and CTO of Covet.

Yannick is, a Netherlander, but I think we can say a citizen of the world. He's currently in, in San Francisco. Obviously also has spent time in Switzerland in the past where he started his first business, a B2C startup, which attracted over 100,000 users over a fairly short time.

This got the interest of Apple. He then spent 5 years at Apple as a senior software engineer, where he was developing productivity applications for hundreds of millions, so a bit of a, a step up from the 100,000, although 100,000 still feels very good. He's obviously moved into the veterinary field using his expertise to really help us to be more productive with COVID, so.

Great again to see you Yannick, we met about 2 years ago I think at VMX and it seems like the company's going from strength to strength. Tell us a little bit how things are going over the last year or so. Thanks, Anthony.

It's great, great to be on again. Thanks a lot. I, I think that's right.

I think we, we met about, about 1.5, 2 years ago. The company has been going great.

There's been, there's been a lot of growth on, on all fronts. The team has been growing. Our product has been evolving a lot, so we're really excited about a lot of the new features that we've been, you know, adding to the product.

It's really evolving into more and more of a comprehensive You know, AI assistant for vets, so we're really excited about the direction there and the growth of the company as well. You know, we're, we're more and more present internationally. Obviously, we started in Canada, the US, still growing a lot in those markets, but, you know, we're really starting to get a presence across the world and, and we're really excited about that.

We really think there's a, there's a global impact to be had with, with this kind of technology and we're really excited about the direction that we're on. I mean, it can be sort of super productive, can't it, you know, saving time, particularly. With those consults where we can end up not really paying much attention to the clients because we're obsessed with our computers tapping all things down.

Just explain for those people who perhaps, you know, don't know about COVID, what what the the actual product does. Yeah, absolutely. So COVID is is an AI assistant for veterinarians at a, at a very basic level, we have the way it functions is, is you bring COVID into the exam room.

You can use it on either a phone or a tablet or on your computer, and you automatically essentially record the entire consultation ambiently, right? So you don't need to change any way that you practise. You can just do your consultation as you would usually do it.

Except that you don't need to think about notes or any of the admin work. You can just do your consul consultation, be completely focused with, you know, the patient and the client. COVID will record all of that and then as soon as you finish your consultation, it will automatically generate your medical notes for you.

It will generate client facing documentation as well. So with this start summary, maybe an email that you can send to the client for more complex cases, it might also help you generate, you know, a, a referral letter to a specialist or, or other kinds of documentation. So it's a very comprehensive tool.

So that's kind of the, the base of COVED and, and how it was founded. So that's, that's the, the, the core thing that, that we do, that's how we help save that's, you know, about an hour or, or more every single day depending on, you know, how much time you're, you're putting into these notes and, and, and that product is evolving. I think that, you know, once we're in the exam room with you.

And we can listen to what's happening. It actually allows us to start automating a lot of other things for you because most of the work that you need to put in on an admin side is already being discussed during the consultation, right? Things are already being set out loud and so our idea is you shouldn't have to do that again afterwards if it's already been done for you.

So that is, that is kind of the, the, the core of COVID and then and what we're doing today. And I think with there being a shortage of vets or it's difficult to find vets and nurses, having things that will help to augment the vets and the nurses is massively important because you know all the time I hear from people, from vets saying we're too busy, you know there's too many cases, we can't do our CPD. This is a way of really freeing up time to help you do other things because it's not as if we can just find another two vets if we need them, it's, it's difficult to find team members at the moment, isn't it, so anything that automates or actually augments the, the, the vet and the nurses, is, is really, really useful.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it goes in so many different directions, right? I think there's definitely a shortage, so just helping essentially with with the caseload is is a massive part, but there's also a whole other side of it, which is, you know, the, the The, the work-life balance and the kind of the mental burnout of the vets as well, right, because you go through a long day at work, and you need to spend another couple hours at the end of the day, you know, writing your records or doing other things, that's incredibly hard, and we know obviously how big of a problem, you know, burnout and, and mental issues are in, in this industry, and so that is another major thing that we help with, and, you know, a lot of testimonials that we get in our.

Are, are kind of along those lines, right? I, I'm just, I was just back at a conference and someone really came up to the booth and said, you know, it's funny when I started using COVID and suddenly I was, I was coming home at 6 instead of at 8 and my wife was looking at me like, like, what are you doing? What are you doing at home?

It was the first time in 10 years that, that I was home for dinner, right? And, and she was kind of confused as to what I was doing. So, I think we hear.

A lot of that and I think that's what we're really proud about is that we can both help the vet just have a better life and we can also help you see a couple of extra patients, right? So it's kind of a win-win situation, right, for, for the clinic for the veterinarians and, and for the whole clinic, for the whole practise as well, right, like our tools also help the technicians, help the support staff, and everybody's kind of involved in using these tools. And so yeah, the impact is, is really on multiple levels.

No, that's that's fantastic and I think that you know the burnout situation is, is really important, so anything that can help with mental health is, is good, you know yourself, obviously known you for a little bit, worked for Apple, you know, super intelligent, fantastic runner, good looking guy as well. I mean, where are your weaknesses, you know, within the team, you're, you're obviously CTO and CEO of Covet, what are the things that you kind of find that you er. You aren't so good at that you need other people in the team like Mike or other people, so where are the, yeah, where are the gaps?

And I suppose if you make a mistake you just run away from it and run quite quickly as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just, I just run and and bury my head in the sand.

No, no, no, Anthony, a lot of things, a lot of things, and, and you know I wouldn't be able to do, what we're doing today at COVID without. You know, the amazing team that I have with me. I think a very, a very basic thing to start with is, is, is the veterinary knowledge, right?

Like, I'm not a veterinarian. I don't come from the veterinary space. That's not my background.

And, and for me, it was, it was very clear from the very start that I needed to be surrounded by people that really know this industry and, and, and know, obviously, now it's been a few years. I, I actually, you know, I know the industry pretty well now, but I'm obviously not, not, not at all. Same way that, you know, all of you guys, do.

So, you know, my two co-founders are from this space. One is a veterinarian, the other one is the son of a veterinarian, both, both Mikes, and our entire team is full of people that have worked in the industry. So I would say that is one major thing, that, that I do.

But then apart from that, you know, there's so many things that we have a fantastic team at, at COVED of, of truly passionate, you know, passionate and dedicated people, and you know, whether it's kind of more sales focused things, there's, there's a lot of things that I don't necessarily have in my background in the same way. And, and for me, a real sign of you, you need to know what you don't know, and you need to be able to rely on people that, that do know these things. And so, you know, whether it's marketing, whether it's, you know, people and recruitment, like we, we have wonderful people that help us every day, you know, doing those things as, as, as well as possible, and I think The, the culture of COVID is really around empowering those people to be able to, you know, grow in those positions and, and, and do their, you know, do their best work and we trust them fully.

And, and that's the only way to really scale up companies, right, because, you can only be involved in, you know, so many things on a daily basis and you need to trust the people around you for, for all the other things if you want the company to, you know, continue growing as, as we do and, you know, we've grown from 2 to 75 people in the company over the span of essentially a year and a half. And so, you know, that, that is a lot of growth, there's a lot of new people and then that can only happen if you trust a lot of people around you as well to, to help in that process. So where are most of the people based, obviously at the moment, you say that your major sales areas have been in Canada and America, but I know you're wanting to do more in Europe.

So where is the sort of team positioned, Presumably, it's a global virtual team. It is, yeah, so we're fully remote. Most of the company is in kind of like North America, Canada, United States, some, some people in South America as well, but we've started, we've been growing our team internationally quite a bit.

So we now have, 2 or 3 people in Australia and New Zealand. We now have a few people in France, in the UK, and now, you know, also, growing the team in, in Spain, in Germany, and other parts of, of Europe as well. And so I think we definitely see, you know, a lot of the innovation in this space has come initially from, from North America, but The same problems exist everywhere in the world and, and, and, and for us and for me, you know, with my background I've I've grown, I was born, I grew up in Switzerland and I'm Dutch.

My two parents are Dutch. I've lived in multiple places. It's always been so important to me to try and bring this, you know, this technology to, first of all back to Europe, but more globally in general, right, like bringing it to the rest of.

Of the world because vets everywhere have, have the same, have the same, the same problems. And we're really excited about being able to really do this at a global level and I think we're, we're kind of the only solution out there that's, that's really trying to, to do that and, and, and make sure we can bring this to people of every language and every background and, and, and bringing the same solutions to them. Yeah and I think it's really interesting for those of you who are watching on the platform as a podcast or listening on the platform, the webinar platform er you will be able to listen to this or or see the subtitles in different languages if your er English isn't super fluent, so do have a look at that we'll put some notes underneath to show you how you can er look at the translation, so you'll hear us both in English.

We could try Dutch, but I think, your, your English is a lot better than my Dutch, so we'll stay in English. But if you wanted to hear Dutch subtitles or French subtitles, you'll be able to just click on that and, and spot that as along with some of the other languages as well. Yeah, I think it's really super that, .

The veterinary profession, you know, I, I similarly travel and whenever I meet vets. Although culturally, you know, you might be Dutch or you might be French or German, I think culturally as vets we're actually quite similar, so the national cultural differences seem to some degree to lessen, er, and most of the time I think vets get on with vets, so it's er it's, it's probably very similar to sort with the problems and the solutions that we wanna have as well. Yeah, yeah, I think it's, it's, it's a very similar type of people, right?

I think it's extremely passionate people, people that care a lot about, you know, about their work, about, you know, the veterinary industry, about animals, and I think that that kind of brings people together, and that's definitely what I'm seeing when we go across the world. Now, there definitely are differences, right? And, and a lot of those things also come from just workflow differences, you know, a vet in France doesn't practise the same way as a vet in, in, in the US and so, you know, for us.

Us as a company, we want to be able to help both of those, you know, both of those countries, and that means that we need to build and we have built a product that is extremely flexible, right? And I think that's really what is important. I think there's a lot of tools out there that force you to do things a certain way, and that's really frustrating, right, as that, when you're kind of being forced to do things a certain way, but it doesn't actually fit your workflow, it gets frustrating.

And I think for us, it was really important from They want to build a tonne of flexibility into the platform and that means that whether you're an equine vet or a large animal vet or a specialist, you can use the platform, but it also means that whether you're in Spain, you know, in Spain, in France or in the US, you can also use the platform because we've, we've built it in with that, you know, that flexibility and obviously in those, obviously in those different languages, so it's, it's translating in the language obviously that's being spoken in which I know sounds obvious, but I thought. No, correct. No, absolutely.

So it's like, I think, you know, offering a product in multiple languages comes with a lot of different things, right? Like that you have the UI itself, of the product that you want to be, you know, translated to be able to use it, but then obviously it needs to be able to understand people in that language. It needs to be able to produce, you know, documents in that language, and the beauty is because we've built that for other languages, it means that you, you know, if you're in the UK, and you know, maybe one of your customers comes in and they don't speak English.

You know, you can still use our product and you can, you know, do the, do the consultation in another language and still generate an English medical note or the opposite, you can do a consultation in English, but then you can maybe generate a client facing discharge summary in another language because that's going to be more comfortable for the client to give home to them. So those, those barriers are also being, you know, kind of torn down, which is, which is another kind of great impact of this kind of technology as well. Yeah, because I think the communication's really important to the clients because often what we talk about, you know, as a vet, I, I could talk for 1015 minutes and then send people out and.

They may not remember anything because of course they've heard it and as they walk out of the consulting room they begin to forget, so I was always very keen on writing stuff down, sending people out with, with notes about what we talked about, you know, how many tablets they needed, how often they would give it, whereas this is again saving all that time where we can send it to people's email or presumably text or we can print it out for them if they prefer that and, You know that gives them a template to follow because in 2 weeks' time they'll go well, you know what do the vets say, whereas if it's all written down, it makes it really easy for them, so I I think that's a massive piece because actually I think communication is such an important area and, and most of us are actually not that great at it. Yeah, it's fascinating that you say that because I think there's, there's a couple of things there to bounce off of. I think one thing is that people often underestimate, you know, they think, oh, it takes me 2 minutes to write that, that document or like, you know, only a few minutes saved, but it's also the downstream effect, right, of saving that because, but we automate that, you give it to every single client, you don't need to think about it anymore.

That, that's also less time spent where the client is going to maybe call back the, the clinic to ask questions, right? Because that's gonna take time of someone else. So, there's always these downstream effects that I think are, are really interesting.

So definitely there, there's, there's a huge, huge added benefit and another example there is, for instance, phone calling, right? We have a feature where you can call back clients directly from COVED and it automatically records that conversation and it summarises it, but it also, it's, it summarises it for you as a vet so you can, you know, you have it for your records, but it also produces an email summary for the client. So as soon as you hang up, you have an email that summarises the whole discussion and you can just send that off to the client.

So that's another thing where the client, you know, they've been on the phone with you, they hung up and they're like, oh, I don't remember everything. Now within 30 seconds, they get an email from you. It's an amazing client experience because they're like, oh yeah, this is like, this is great, right?

So those small things are, are, are, are crucial and then the communication side is, is, is really interesting because we are, we are heavily working at the moment on exactly that what we kind of call our communication feedback module and The idea there is exactly what you've been mentioning is I think a lot of vets, you know, they, they, they love being a vet, they love the, the medical aspect of it, but they haven't necessarily been really taught or, or know how to communicate well with clients and, and that can be in a lot of different ways like how do you correctly convey why some treatment might be important? How do you, how do you help them understand some of these things and Often when you look at performance, right, between different vets in the same clinic, some, some vets might have, you know, financially, they have many more, you know, treatments, many more clients accept the treatments, and, and often it comes down to how they communicate things and, and so we're building tools that can, you know, since we're now in the exam room with you and we listen in, you can kind of have this objective, you know, tool that's sitting there and that can maybe Give you a tip, hey, you know, Doctor Anthony, like, you know, maybe there you could have, you, you were using a lot of technical terms, but you didn't quite explain them well to the client. They, they probably didn't, they probably lost you there.

And so I think those are, those are really great because I think it's, it's not always easy to hear feedback. It's impossible to have someone in the clinic sitting with you for every exam, like, you know, we don't have enough people for that. But so having this kind of objective tool that can listen and.

Give you some tips and some tricks and it's, it's your assistant, it's your friend, who gives you some ideas, is, is incredibly helpful. So, we're really excited about that. It'll be coming later this year.

And we think that those, those kinds of tools are really what make, you know, AI special because they can really be personalised to you. It's not some generic tool that gives you tips on how you're supposed to communicate. It's something that actually knows how you do it today, and that can help you do it a bit better, in the future.

I think also if you've communicated and if you've written stuff down, if there is a conflict where oh you didn't say that, well here are the notes, I did say it, I explained it, I think it also helps to just, cos people do forget things. I this wasn't explained properly. It helps in those situations where perhaps there is, oh, you said it would only be 200 pounds, whereas, you know, actually I said it would be between 200 pounds and 400 pounds, so there was a range and actually it's been 350 pounds because we ended up doing other things.

So I think that's, that's useful in, in helping to clear misunderstandings as well. Yeah, no, absolutely, I think, the legal kind of backup and, and, and, and not only legal but just in general, right, like the backup of knowing exactly what was said is, is a really important part. We've .

You know, unfortunately or fortunately, we've been able to help quite a large number of our customers in, you know, cases that were brought against them, you know, by the board, by, you know, a customer that wasn't, you know, wasn't happy, and they were able to to use their COVID recording, to show, no, no, this is what I said, and, and, the, the It's usually very complicated because it's kind of your word against someone else's word and it's hard to prove those things, but now with a recording as a backup, you're able to prove those things. So that is definitely a nice kind of peace of mind aspect of this as well where you just know, hey, I know exactly that it is being recorded and no one else can say that I didn't, that I didn't say this. Just going a little bit bigger picture away from COVID, we're speaking together at the end of October in 2025 for those people who might be listening to this later in the day, you know, in a couple of months' time.

And I've noticed over the last few weeks we've had a big AWS, you know, was down for a while, also I believe Microsoft was down even yesterday for a short period of time. I, I obviously I'm not aware of exactly what the problems were, but can you talk a little bit about cybersecurity, not just for, you know, big firms but also for small practises, you know, the dangers that are there, you know I heard about a company. Basically it got hacked and it finished the company and it was, it was basically a weak password that an employee had had, and that in the end took the company down, and then maybe as a secondary we can go on to the whole concept of AI where is that going over the next couple of years, where do you see some of the trends that might come in to help us in the veterinary profession as well.

Yeah, no, so I think the, the large cloud providers of each, if you take all three of them, right, the major ones are Google Cloud, Amazon, AWS, and then Azure from Microsoft, each of the past few months have had their own outages. None of the three were, were direct kind of cybersecurity attacks. It was, it was often, it was, it's much simpler mistakes.

It was one engineer that pushed some code to production and it turns out that it was like catastrophic because usually it's things like, it's, it's, it's kind of these mistakes that propagate in the networks and then they're very hard. You can't just roll them back. It takes hours for these things to propagate and then it takes hours to fix them again, which is why they become these, these big issues.

So, so it's very hard to do anything about, you know, directly those kinds of larger scale cloud, things. You know, at scale for us as a company, we try to always have, you know, different providers that we can rely on, so you can always, you, you can have a fallback, but it's, it's hard as a small clinic to really, really, really think about that. I think these tools are as reliable as it gets, in, in our ability, right?

If you're running your own servers in your own practise or, or in general, right, like you have a lot of other risks that come in maintaining that, right? Like if there's a, if there's a fire or if there's a power outage or an issue, then your servers are going to be down as well. So risks obviously exist all the time.

Now, on the cybersecurity front, I think. Truthfully, the, the, the vast majority of of most cybersecurity attacks are, are social engineering attacks, and, and that's something that a lot of people kind of underestimate, like they think it's all about, you know, kind of shady hackers in a room that managed to, you know, get into your systems, but most often it's someone that contacts someone on LinkedIn or, or via email and pretends to be, you know, pretends to be your boss and they're like, hey, can you, can you send me your password for this? Like that's truthfully how, how most of the security attacks happen because people Or people are always the weakest link, right?

Like someone has access and if you can get through them, it's easier than trying to kind of hack the system in a more direct fashion. So I think having, having basic security training and knowledge around those things, right, like understanding what are some of the easy signs when you get a phishing email, right? Like, can you look, look at the address that sent the email, you know, is it really, does it match, right?

Like those kind of basic things, being kind of aware of, of what to look for, I think, I think that's the best that you can do. As a person just be an extra letter in the email address like Chadwick and things so exactly, yeah, so look out for those small things when you get an email always kind of double check if someone like, you know, if someone sends you an email asking for something, maybe you, you contact that person through another channel of communication that you have with them, right, like to double check, hey, was that, was that you, because I think that's usually where, where most problems come from, and, and those are very easy steps to take to kind of protect yourself a bit more. Yeah no that's really good.

I think we've also on our site take various measures, obviously we're not a vet practise, we're a you know a CPD provider and we've got things like cyber essentials so there are some government things that they recommend, some er certificates that it's always worth looking at. Also when you're buying from a company off the internet that you see that there is those safety er methods in place as well, you know for your own purchasing of products off the internet. Yeah, yeah, I mean, where do you see then AI going over the next two years?

What, what's your sort of thoughts on that as an expert in this area? Yeah, you know, I think it's, it's, it's moving incredibly fast. I think that, that hasn't stopped and so I think it's always very hard to predict because I think no one would have been able to predict, you know, where we would be today, you know, 2 or 34 years ago.

So that's always one thing to keep in mind, like no one, no one really knows. Obviously, we're seeing a really fast rate of improvement on a lot of the base models, right, like the, the opening eyes and the Gemini's, like these models keep on getting better and that allows tools to be built on top of them that, you know, become more and more powerful. So I think we've seen.

You know, if you just think about, you know, a year ago, you would probably, you know, you'd be asking some questions sometimes with LGBT and be like, oh, this is clearly wrong, right? We had these like hallucinations. It was quite a common theme.

Those things have been, I'm not going to say that, that, that they're not a problem anymore, but they're very close to not being a problem anymore. Like these models have gotten so much better at a base level and then with extra things on top that, for instance, we implement in the vet space, we're really able to bring those hallucinations down to, to pretty much zero, right? So.

That is, that is amazing. What we're seeing, I think in this space and what I think in the vet space with AI, it's going to be more and more things that are, that are done for you as a vet instead of, of a lot of things that you need to do today, right? So I think the picture to paint is you, you do your consultation, that part is never going to go away.

You're always going to have that client contact, you need to do the physical exam, you know, like AI cannot do the physical exam for you, you need to do, you know, you need to set your diagnosis, but You finish your consultation and you know, your, your notes are written for you. Maybe you've said out loud that we should book another appointment next week. Well, that's just done for you, right?

Like, you get some feedback, communication, information is sent to the clients so they can automatically come back next time, like just all these things are kind of done for you, you just have to review them. And you can move on to the next appointment and I think that's really the future. I think that is not that far away, right?

We're talking a couple years where more and more of that is just going to be, it's going to be very seamless, it's going to be integrated with your different systems and all these systems are just going to be working together and I think it's a beautiful future to kind of think about because as a vet, you know, you've gone to vet school for your passion for the, for the, for the, for the, you know, the job itself, not, not for the admin work. And so this kind of world where you're able to just do your consultations, be with your clients, and the rest is, you know, handled for you is, is an amazing world to think about, right? So, I think a lot of things are going that direction.

Now, there's obviously other exciting things happening in AI. I know, you know, companies are doing a lot of things with, you know, vision and and being able to like, you know, look at a pets when they walk and can they detect issues and there's obviously a lot of, of, of AI innovation that is still happening, but I think it's always When something evolves as quickly as it has done over the past few years and people get kind of a bit scared of like, hey, how much faster is that gonna just ramp up, but I think pretty fast you get into a, a path where, you know, you get a bit more used to the fact that these things are evolving and it just becomes, it's, it's, it's more incremental. Improvements that, that just get closer to you.

I don't, I don't necessarily envision an explosion happening over the next few years where things are drastically going to change. I think it's just a lot more of the same and just better quality, more integrated, more seamless. And I think for me that's really the big theme over the next couple of years is you're almost gonna notice that less and less that AI is there, but it's just that more and more things are going to be done for you and taken away from you, that you previously just didn't like doing.

And, and that's kind of, I think the, the, the perfect way for it to, to, to go. Yeah, I, I mean I think with AI it's still really important to check it because of these confabulations and hallucinations and that will be something that will continue to need to do because obviously if, The AI gives the dose 10 times higher than you've actually said, so I think there still needs to be a check, like we would always check medicines. But it's been really exciting for us at Webinar Vet to be able to offer 22 languages because our mission was very much to make veterinary education more accessible and more affordable to vets and nurses across the world.

But when that was just in English, that was really then only looking after vets and nurses who spoke English well enough to and heard English well enough to. To be able to benefit from the knowledge, so being now able to put it into different languages I think opens it up and makes that vision of, making veterinary education more accessible and more affordable you know so much more, likely to happen because all of this democratises learning, doesn't it? If we tried to do this ourselves with translators for 3000 hours, it would have probably cost many, many millions of pounds and it just wouldn't make economic sense to do it, so yeah, I think this is really powerful, seeing where AI is going.

I think from the worrying side of AI and obviously certain people, you know, worry I think about things more than others. But I've been really interested to to hear about AI searching becoming much more common. Obviously even Google search maybe taking a bit of a backseat because now if you want to learn something, you go onto AI and it kind of can give you a full history.

And at the moment I'm hearing that you know the energy requirement for that, so from a sustainability perspective is often 10 times, you know, what a Google or a a a an ordinary internet search would be. But I'm also noticing people like Google are understanding that search is changing, they're looking at how they power their data centres which holds all this information. Can you talk a little bit about where you see the industry working harder to become, you know, more energy efficient and more thinking about the bigger picture of the planet as well?

Yeah, absolutely. I think there there's a lot of different layers there to the kind of the, you know, energy side of things on the AI world. And I think one thing to keep in mind is, is, there's a very clear distinction between two things when you think about AI and these large language models.

There's the training of these models and there's like using them afterwards, right, which is commonly referred to as inference. So when you infer a result out of these models, and the, the training stages is what is Really kind of computationally heavy and thus by extension, energetically, you know, very heavy. And so that has a very big impact.

Often when people quote, right, like what is the impact of search, in, in AI, what they'll do is they'll, they'll, they'll combine those two, right? So they're gonna take like the energy that it took to train and they'll kind of divide that by how often it's being used and then they're gonna say, hey, when you, so when you infer this is part of your energy usage, which, you know, is a fair way to look at it, but I think what it kind of hides a little bit is as these things get used more and more after they're being trained, the energetic impact actually goes down, right, of, of how much it took to train that model, right? Because the inference itself is not, is not very heavy computationally like just to like generate one answer out of these models is, is not extremely, it's not way heavier than say, sending an email or, or, or, you know, doing a search.

There might be some deltas, but we're not necessarily talking 10 or 100 times more. So. That's, that's one thing to keep in mind.

I think the other thing that's really important is that, you know, no matter what your views are on the matter, you know, Google is a, is a, is a, is a, is a very capitalistic company and and their goal is to, is to do things in a, in a, in a more efficient way, in terms of, you know, being able to save more money and for them using more energy to train these models is literally spending more money and then so their incentive is directly aligned. And how do we find ways to do this in a, in a cheaper way energetically because for them that's a huge benefit. If they figure out a way to train these models 10 times cheaper, it's gonna be a huge advantage for them in, in, in, you know, in a lot of different ways.

And so what's great there is we've seen incredible advances already over the past 2 years, in, in, in the training costs, and, and we continue to see those. There's a lot of investment that goes into that from the kind of large labs in the world now that are working on these models because it's to their directive. Advantage to figure these things out.

So that is, that is another great thing is that we're definitely trending in the right direction, which I think is is obviously what you want to see in these cases. And you know, to take Google as an example and then you know I think Google is our, our largest partner in, in most things that we do on, on whether it's storage and AI, they, they do a lot of work on the kind of, you know, climate offsetting of, of their costs and, and, and trying to really be, be neutral, right, in, in their, in their targets and obviously they're not quite there yet, but they're, they're doing a lot of strides in that direction. So I think that's It is important as well, like whatever is going to always be there because there is going to be, you know, energy usage.

I mean, everything we do has some level of energy usage. What we need to figure out is what levels are we, you know, happy with and what else can we do to also like offset some of that and make sure that we're kind of minimising the impact. So I think for me, there's always the the kind of the three different things that I, that I try to think about when we think about the energy and, you know, one great thing that someone mentioned to me the other day, and it was, it was actually a veterinary group that I was talking with and I forget who it was, but If you think about for instance something like COVID, if, if you can use it and it allows you to save an hour every day, if, if saving that hour every day allows you to maybe that one time a week, you don't need to take the car to go somewhere because you can walk instead, or, or there's these other things that you can do that are gonna help you save some energy like that, that, that car ride is likely gonna have a much bigger energetical impact than, you know, the couple of notes that you've generated with COVID and so ultimately it's always about thinking about things.

As a whole, right? Like when we focus too much on, on one individual tool, there's always going to be an incremental energy usage for anything extra that you do. But if that allows you to maybe change your behaviour or change something else, then the, the, the net impact might be super positive.

And so I think that's always, I, I really like that example because I think it's important to keep that in mind as well. It's always important to see what is the overall impact on my, my day to day. What am I doing, you know, if I'm not using digital notes and I'm not writing on paper anymore, my records.

There's a big impact energetically as well, right? We saved, we don't write on paper anymore. So, you know, you could look at the transition to using computers as being negative because now it's more energy.

Yeah, but there's less paper that's being used. So like things also offset. So anyways, I, I always, I like that analogy because I think it's important to keep the, the global picture in mind as well.

I think it's, as you delve more deeply into it, you realise that it's not black and white, but it's grey, and this is where distinctions that we have like at the veterinary green discussion forum. I think are really important that we can find a way forward in in regenerative green sort of veterinary matters that isn't very binary and isn't no you're right, I'm wrong or or vice versa. And and of course you know, a lot of the AI tools and and the.

The digital tools developed by people like AWS and Microsoft have helped in in monitoring forest fires er that maybe have started illegally or illegal trawling. So I'm still very hopeful that AI can be used for really positive things around er the environment er crisis as well and helping in those areas. Yeah, no, I totally agree.

I think the monitoring possibilities with some of these tools are, are huge, and, and I, I'm, I'm with you. I'm, I'm, I'm definitely, I'm an optimist, and I'm definitely very optimistic about, about this technology as well. Yannick, I know how busy you are, it's very early in the morning, so thank you for getting up so early in in San Francisco.

It's in the middle of my afternoon. It's been a pleasure. I know you're gonna be travelling a bit, but hopefully might see you at London Metro in, in two or three weeks' time, November 21st, 22nd, 20th, 21st, I think it is 2025.

Yeah, absolutely. It'd be, yeah, I'm definitely going to be there. The COVID team will be there.

So we, we, I mean, excited to see you, obviously, Anthony, and then anyone who's listening obviously as well. So yeah we we're very happy to go over to have a look at the booth, but maybe we can have a, a coffee or a beer together as well. As, as usual, we'll definitely do that.

Brilliant Yannick, Yannick, so pleased again to speak to you, er enjoy the rest of the er the day and the week that er the weekend that's ahead and looking forward to seeing you at London Vet show. Thank you, Anthony, and thanks everybody for for listening in today. Take care, thanks Yannick.

Thanks everyone for listening, see you on another podcast or a webinar very soon, take care.