Interview with Hashem Al-Ghaili

Interview with Hashem Al-Ghaili Part 1

Kim Isenberg: Hello, it's a pleasure to have you here. You're my first guest in this new interview format. I'm known as “Chubby” or “@Kimmonism” on X and I'll be conducting the interview with you today. My focus is on tech and AI in particular, and I would like to conduct the interview with you against this background, especially. Who are you? What do you do? How long have you been doing it? And what motivated you?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: Thank you so much for having me. My name is Hashem Al-Ghaili and I am a science communicator. I started science communication around 2008 and it has been growing ever since. I have been communicating science through various types of content, including articles, images, videos, and recently filmmaking and 3D animation. I do it because, first of all, it's my passion and I enjoy doing it. I'm learning a lot. And at the same time, you get to tackle misinformation because a lot of people publish a lot of science content without citing their sources. So, I try to make sure that the sources are available. So I was one of the first people to actually fully dedicate my pages to science content sharing.

Kim Isenberg: I'm curious, because this is actually the first question I wrote down. Based on my research, you studied molecular biology in Bremen, Germany. So you come from a scientific background, right? What motivated you to do content creation instead? What was the moment you decided to prioritize content creation over research?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: It's faceless content. But ever since we had our first computer at home, which was around 2001, I was always passionate about graphic design and video editing. And then I got a degree in science, starting with my bachelor's degree in biotechnology from the University of Peshawar in Pakistan and then my degree in molecular biology from Jacobs University in Bremen. Then I decided afterwards to combine these things. I have always been combining my background in graphic design with my ability to communicate science effectively, but it took a major turn in 2015 when I focused more on video content.

Kim Isenberg: So you never aimed for a career in science? You had your passion in content creation.

Hashem Al-Ghaili: No, it's not really about whether I aimed for it or not. It's really about adapting to the circumstances. Sometimes you have a long plan that you keep chasing over and over again, and in the end, you end up doing that at all. You end up doing something else, and you find your passion in something that you didn't really work so hard on as part of your career. So, it's totally fine.

Kim Isenberg: So, I'd like to focus a little bit on artificial intelligence. Do you already use AI tools to evaluate your data for content creation, for example, to capture viral topics? Do you use AI tools already?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: Absolutely.

Kim Isenberg: So maybe you could tell us a little bit more.

Hashem Al-Ghaili: Absolutely. There are a lot of tools including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. You can just go to the social media platform, download the analytics and insights which contain information about your top-performing content, and then you can use reasoning models to turn this data into graphics. It will give you ideas about which content is doing well so that you can continue working on that, and then you can brainstorm with AI to come up with ideas similar to your top-performing content. So I do use that a lot.

Kim Isenberg: I'm curious because generative AI, in a way, is still a new tool, and you've been doing content creation for much longer, if I'm correct. How did it change the way you did content creation? Do you write all your scripts now with ChatGPT?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: My team.

Kim Isenberg: How did it transform it? Really curious.

Hashem Al-Ghaili: The team has shrunk because of AI. It did.

Kim Isenberg: Really, really interesting.

Hashem Al-Ghaili: It did because you want efficiency and cost-effectiveness. But essentially, I had a lot of scripts for video content and created AI chatbots that can replicate the same writing style without compromising quality. It was fed a lot of scripts. This is the style that I always go for. And that increased productivity. Instead of having to write 40 scripts or 30 scripts a month, you can now do that all in one day. And it also upgraded the quality. For example, I wasn't using a lot of voiceovers. And then as AI voiceovers became more humanlike, I started using them, and it became a standard for me to add voices. It's called captioned videos, and a lot of people love them because if you are at work and you're watching text rather than listening to a voice, people love them. But sometimes you can combine both. Captions used to take a lot of time. So now with AI, it's also much easier. So AI has integrated itself into every step of the process, making it easier and enhancing the quality.

Kim Isenberg: People are scared of losing their jobs, of being replaced by artificial intelligence, but it's already happening in a way, and as you said, I mean, it's inevitable.

Hashem Al-Ghaili: It's inevitable.

Kim Isenberg: But going further, what do you think, or could you imagine, how it will have an impact on you in the near future? But if you have to look into the future, what do you expect will happen? How will it continue to improve your content in the next few months or years?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: Right now it's, as I said, in every step of the process from brainstorming, writing, to image generation, video generation, generating sound effects, generating music, which is great because, if you're not using copyrighted music, you won't have to deal with copyright issues. Because each piece of music generated by AI is unique. And I have integrated it into each one of these steps. How is it going to change in the future? For example, you and I have just watched something that I'm about to release.

Kim Isenberg: Absolutely. It's fantastic.

Hashem Al-Ghaili: I appreciate that. But this still requires a lot of optimization. I wouldn't call it AI-generated. AI-assisted, because I did a lot of work to make it. It's AI-assisted. But imagine, in the future, my involvement in the process will be less and less because the tools will be better and better. And as tools get better, I won't have to spend much time on optimizing it to look that way. It will immediately know what I really want and it will deliver the result that I want without having a long conversation or needing more optimization. So that's the other thing where we're heading: AI agents. Rather than having to do each one of these steps one by one, you can create an AI agent that can go through all of them on its own without compromising quality, without losing your own style. And it will deliver the results without getting tired.

Kim Isenberg: This brings me to another very important and very interesting question. Are you scared that AI could make you superfluous as well? Or is there something like human creativity that cannot be replaced by AI? What do you think?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: I think AI is an augmentation to human creativity. I think it's not a replacement. It's meant to provide us with the tools that were not accessible to us or that were accessible but expensive. For example, someone wants to produce a movie that looks like a Hollywood production, but they don't have the resources to do that. Now, they have these resources. Their creativity, which is already part of it (which is the story that they have crafted), will be augmented or complemented by the AI tools that will help them deliver that story in high quality while still being really cheap and engaging. So it's not a replacement. I'm not worried about human creativity. It will never disappear. There will always be new ways to express it, and AI will only make it easier and will amplify it.

Kim Isenberg: That's a really, really interesting perspective, and it makes me think very much, especially when we look at the recent developments like AlphaFold, for example. You probably know Demis Hassabis and colleagues got the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold. We already have tools like Sakana AI which do theoretical research completely independently from us.

Hashem Al-Ghaili: Just imagine the time saved. So, scientists were trying to find out what's causing drug-resistant bacteria (a specific strain) to be resistant. They spent almost 10 years trying to find the solution. Imagine how many PhD students came and went, how many resources were spent, and then they used AI and it provided them with the result in less than 48 hours.

Kim Isenberg: It's fantastic, isn't it? It's absolutely stunning.

Hashem Al-Ghaili: And the scientist said, "We didn't even give it all the preliminary information, it just knew." AI will be there.

Kim Isenberg: Exactly.

Hashem Al-Ghaili: AI will be by our side. We just need to use it properly and ethically.

Kim Isenberg: And as far as I know, AlphaFold already took the work of - if I'm correct - billions of hours of PhD work in predicting protein folding, right?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: It's not going to replace these PhD students. It's only going to make their work easier. Instead of finishing your PhD in five years, you can now finish it probably in less time. Rather than having one publication or two publications, you're going to have 50, right?

Kim Isenberg: So, from what I'm hearing, you're a bit, I wouldn't say skeptical, but you see the limitations of AI, because you say it can't replace us humans. It will augment us in our tasks.

Hashem Al-Ghaili: I would say it cannot replace us. It will replace those who do not embrace it, definitely.

Kim Isenberg: You come from the background of biology, what's your stance on longevity? Do you think we will enter an epoch of longevity?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: I am pro-longevity research. I know a few scientists who are working on this. One of them is an amazing researcher. His name is Alex Zhavoronkov. And they are actually working on using AI to develop drugs. Generative AI for drug development. It's very much like how you use ChatGPT, but you feed it the right information and it just shortens the time it takes to develop a drug from years to less time. Some of their drugs are in clinical trials, which is incredible. So I am pro-longevity research. I myself wouldn't mind living past 500 years if I got a chance, while still being physically and mentally fit. But with AI by our side, it's definitely doable.

Kim Isenberg: So it's realistic, you'd say, in the very near future?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: I would say yes. Think about it. We are advancing towards personalized medicine where everybody is treated based on their own genetics and environmental factors. And AI is going to provide us with the fastest processing of information. Also including their genetics. So we are advancing towards that goal.

Kim Isenberg: I have to think about a sentence I read recently. I come from a sociological background. And I think it's interesting because Geoffrey Hinton and others say we as a society aren't ready for something like, let's say, AGI or longevity. Just imagine living 500 years, what impact will it have on society, on family, on children, on everything? I think this could be the biggest problem: We don't talk about longevity. This could be the biggest problem. What do you think? Do we talk enough about all these upcoming events, or is it something like a niche in an AI bubble?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: I think we're talking about it enough. We're discussing it in greater depth: the ethical issues, the boundaries, and the potential applications, both positive and negative. But there are people who are talking about it from every dimension and every direction, and it might actually affect how it's being regulated. You are now in Germany, which is under the EU law, which is very strict; when it comes to AI, the EU hasn't been very receptive to AI. I don't think it's a good idea, to be honest. I think you shouldn't regulate it so much that you limit innovation.

Kim Isenberg: Couldn't agree more. I think the EU AI Act is one of the worst things for technical development and advancement that could have happened to us.

Hashem Al-Ghaili: It creates too many fines. So as AI continues to advance, all these technologies that we see around us will become faster to create. Integrating it today is the key. You don't want to really implement it much later when everybody is already light years ahead.

Kim Isenberg: To be fair, DeepSeek was a wake-up call for the Western hemisphere, but at the same time, it showed us that compute is obviously not everything you need. So the EU maybe still has a chance without the compute because you can create good models without bulking up the GPUs, right?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: Definitely. It really depends on the training, how these models are trained, on what hardware, and there are people who often train them on limited hardware, which then is accessible to everybody. I have a computer here which can run complex AI models. It can run Llama, the biggest one. But the hardware exists, you just need the right materials to feed it and run it locally also. So in the future, I think we're all going to be having these AI models running locally. It'll be like you install it as software. You won't have to pay for subscriptions here and there. The only people who will pay for subscriptions are the ones who don't know how to use a locally-run model.

Kim Isenberg: I mean, today was when Qwen 3 was released, right?

Hashem Al-Ghaili: Amazing. I haven't checked it.

Links for Hashem:

• https://www.instagram.com/hashem.alghaili

• https://www.youtube.com/@hashemalghailiofficialchannel

Links for Kim and Superintelligence:

• https://x.com/kimmonismus

• https://x.com/getsuperintel

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