Mar 24, 2026 · 54 min · 14 segments
What does AI actually mean for the people who build, design, and invest in the places we live and work — and what's hype versus reality? In this episode, we sit down with Steve Weikal, industry chair…
Steve WeikalGuestCaleb JohnsonGuestShannon RichardsHostYeah, okay, so that's exactly where I think we want to launch this conversation.
Why now for AI? What is that special thing happening right now? I know that's kind of what you discussed on stage.
Just to remind everybody, the AI became a term in the conversation and in the vocabulary in 1957 or 1958. at Dartmouth College.
And with some really smart non-real estate people, some really wicked smart technology people and data people started talking about this idea of intelligence that could be artificial.
And so it's important to remember that, that AI has been around for a long time.
And this latest one, though, is the one that everybody's reading about, that you read about in the headlines.
ChatGPT, one of the early large language models, and we can talk about that in a moment, it was released in 2018.
So, you know, even with all the headlines that are in the last 18 months, this has been percolating since 2018 before COVID.
And what's different now is these models, they actually generate their own code.
I'm not going to say they think, but they are dynamic and responsive and they, uh, they generate things in a way that we didn't use to.
And almost as a side benefit, we're seeing, you know, massive increase in computing power to allow them to do this, you know, deep kind of thinking and research that they're able to do.
So all of a sudden, we as users have just way more computing power at our fingertips than we did five years ago.
Yeah, okay, so that's exactly where I think we want to launch this conversation.
Why now for AI? What is that special thing happening right now? I know that's kind of what you discussed on stage.
Just to remind everybody, the AI became a term in the conversation and in the vocabulary in 1957 or 1958. at Dartmouth College.
And with some really smart non-real estate people, some really wicked smart technology people and data people started talking about this idea of intelligence that could be artificial.
And so it's important to remember that, that AI has been around for a long time.
And this latest one, though, is the one that everybody's reading about, that you read about in the headlines.
ChatGPT, one of the early large language models, and we can talk about that in a moment, it was released in 2018.
So, you know, even with all the headlines that are in the last 18 months, this has been percolating since 2018 before COVID.
And what's different now is these models, they actually generate their own code.
I'm not going to say they think, but they are dynamic and responsive and they, uh, they generate things in a way that we didn't use to.
And almost as a side benefit, we're seeing, you know, massive increase in computing power to allow them to do this, you know, deep kind of thinking and research that they're able to do.
So all of a sudden, we as users have just way more computing power at our fingertips than we did five years ago.
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