Former Shark Tank star Mark Cuban said AI is a “great” democratizer that can help disadvantaged young people get a leg up in life and the workforce.
Cuban, speaking at the Clover x Shark Tank Summit this week, said the technology is essential because it gives people access to the best teachers.
“Right now, if you’re a 14- to 18-year-old and you’re in not so good circumstances, you have access to the best professors and the best consultants,” he said, according to Axios.
Cuban, who has previously claimed to use AI every day, added that having access to these tools is especially important for people with fewer resources.
“It allows people who otherwise would not have access to any resources to have access to the best resources in real time,” he said. “You can compete with anybody.”
Young people are especially at risk of being affected by AI. In August, a study by Stanford University found entry-level workers between the ages of 22 and 25 are increasingly having a hard time finding a job, and the effect is worse for those in sectors being upended by AI like software engineering.
How Mark Cuban uses AI
Yet, Cuban, who is worth $9 billion, according to Bloomberg, has for years strongly advocated for workers to embrace AI, and previously told Fortune’s Nino Paoli AI will be a “baseline skill like email or Excel.” Speaking to former “Shark” and Skims founder Emma Grede, on her podcast, Aspire With Emma Grede, Cuban also said refusing to use the technology is a mistake.
“That’s like [a business owner] saying back in the day, ‘I don’t need to use a PC. I don’t need to use the internet. I don’t need a cell phone or Wi-Fi,’” he said.
For his part, Cuban has confessed to using AI for everything from writing code to evaluating his own health. Cuban, the founder of online pharmacy Cost Plus Drugs, used the coding assistant Replit to make his own software to track drug prices from other companies.
“Within a few minutes, it had the first pass of the software. Then I just ran it multiple times and gave it new ideas and things I wanted,” he said on a June episode of the High Performance podcast.
When he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, Cuban used AI to track his medications and his workouts. To be sure, Cuban said that while the technology is advanced, an expert programmer could do better and noted the tech has its limitations.
“It’s like talking to a friend who you think knows a lot about something,” said Cuban on the High Performance podcast. “You’ve still got to be careful and talk to an expert.”
