Why Real Estate Needs a New Mindset to Succeed with Generative AI

Midjourney / Antony Slumbers

STOP!!!

I need you to take a deep breath and work through this step by step.

Those of you who, like me, spend too long talking to large language models, will recognise this counterintuitive phrase.

An instruction to an inanimate object to do something we know it cannot, but that weirdly, does produce superior outcomes.

What is going on? What delusion is being played out here? It’s a machine yet telling it to take a deep breath makes it work better.

What’s going on is that you ARE dealing with software, but not software that behaves as you have come to expect.

And that’s why, most likely, you are making mistakes in your plans to incorporate it into your business.

Historically software has been very deterministic. It does A, then B, then C. And it does the same thing over and over again. So we can easily decide what we want it to do and then expect it to do just that.

But large language models DO NOT behave like this. You don’t know if they will do A, then B, then C and you certainly do not know if they will do the same thing twice.

You also don’t know if they are going to tell you the truth. Ask the wrong sort of question, in the wrong sort of way, and they’ll give you an answer, a very plausible one. But it will have little to do with the truth.

Conversely, they will also make things up when you WANT them to - ‘give me 10 ideas about XYZ’.

So is that 'hallucination' bug actually a feature?

Can you have creativity without imagining things?

Either way, unless you have deeply internalised the actualité of what you are dealing with, you are going to come a cropper.

And you cannot deeply internalise the actualité of large language models unless you have used them extensively yourself, in a myriad of ways.

Which brings us back to STOP!!!

I am hearing and reading many accounts of real estate companies saying they are building this or that application, but doing so in a manner that suggests only a tendentious familiarity with the above. Not least of all a general lack of awareness as to what is generative and what is not generative AI (Generative AI is a creative tool, whereas Predictive AI is an analytical tool. That's quite some difference)

Which is of course understandable. Everyone is forever under pressure to deliver. And when we’re talking ‘flavour of the month’ the pressure can be intense.

But the outcomes will not be good. We need to approach generative AI from a different direction.

And that involves two things; practice and patience.

Practice in that you need to have as many people as possible within your company trying to incorporate using a language model in everything they do. You need to see what emerges from this. What works, what does not, what is surprising, what is disappointing. Where ‘might’ these things REALLY be useful? What should we get them to do, what should we do together, and what should we keep for ourselves?Where will they allow us to do something faster, better, cheaper? And much more importantly, where might they enable us to do something we could not do before? And what might that mean?

And patience in that Claude 3 has just been released but soon (in weeks maybe months, but not a year) we will have ChatGPT 5 and Gemini 2. And we’ve already been told, by Sam Altman himself, not to try and make certain hard and complicated things work today that the next version, coming soon, will happen right out of the box.

Bloomberg spend a fortune on BloombergGPT, their own customised version of GPT 3.5, only to find that today’s GPT 4 Turbo beats it for $20 a month.

So practice and be patient.

This is the fastest developing technology in history but it is more like an alien being than anything else we are familiar with. There is no user guide because the developers do not know what it can, or cannot, do. It is an emerging technology.

Ultimately, use of these tools will be embedded in everything your company does, and everyone in your company will use them in everything they do. But for now, the best advice is to use them, learn about them and see what comes from that. Only then should you be trying to productise them.

So ….. take a deep breath and let’s work through this step by step.