Inspiration

On January 23rd the Google Developer Group in Mountain View hosted an AI DevFest. During separate interviews with Peter Norvig and Rocky Yu, a common theme was discussed: In the future, computers will be programmed using natural language.

While I know large language models are trained on enormous sets of natural language documents, and assistants like Siri have been using increasingly complicated human commands to carry out tasks, I think Peter and Rocky were alluding to something far bigger: 1) using a natural language document with complex ideas and domain specific knowledge, and having AI focus on solving a problem using that document, 2) the natural language document was intended to be read by AI

The future is human authors writing books for AI to read, and AI using those books to drive conversations with a users. We won't read books anymore - we will talk with them to solve problems.

Back to the DevFest... I was fortunate to meet the event hosts, including Mariane Bekker. Mariane mentioned a hackathon she was hosting in two weeks and encouraged me to go. That evening the ideas from Peter and Rocky fully sunk in and I started working on a prototype for the hackathon.

An area I'm very keen to address is mental health, and more specifically loneliness. I believe a key way to solve loneliness is to help people find healthy long term relationships, for which most people turn to dating apps.

I've long thought that many relationships don't work out because people don't really know what they want, they don't know what they will bring to the table, and their expectations are too high. In short, they aren't ready to date. This imperfection benefits dating apps as the users continuously fall back into the dating loop. I want to help them break free!

So the plan was hatched. Create an app that helps people get ready to date, that uses AI, and is powered by books authored by non-programmers such as psychologists. I don't think there is "one way" to figure this out, so the app would let anyone write a book about anything, and then the app would let people chat with the book of their choice to solve their problems.

Much Bigger than Dating

I'm excited about talking books because the idea covers every book. This is a massive expansion of prompt engineering, as books will be tuned to speak clearly to AI, which in turn will provide these amazingly beneficial conversations. I imagine domain specific authors such as psychologists, teachers, coaches, and engineers working side-by-side with prompt engineers to develop books.

For now, I'm going to evangelize this idea, while burning the midnight oil to develop proofs of concept. While breaking the dating loop is a fun idea, I'd love to explore so many other ways of helping people, especially when it comes to mental health. If you have a new idea you'd like to brainstorm, please reach out to me. Thank you!