Why am I starting a Substack? AI + Humanity and the Experiments we are running. | by Stefan Kojouharov | Feb, 2024

It’s been a long time… a long time since I wrote anything of significance and shared my insights on where we are, where we are going, and what you can do about it.

Now, many of you may know my work in AI and chatbots. Many of us got our start back in 2016 during the first chatbot boom. Back then, the hype was sky high, and during this time period, I launched Chatbots Life, Becoming Human AI, and consulted many of the top startups in the space. During this process, I shared my insights and findings!

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Back then, we were solving problems around Conversational Design, NLU/NLP, and exploring use cases that added value. In the old days, bots were so arduous to build that it mostly made sense for large enterprises to implement the technology around the margins.

Today, everything has changed. What took a multi-million-dollar budget, an expert team, and months to build can be done in days by a single expert using an LLM like ChatGPT.

This isn’t the only change; it is only the beginning of massive change.

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Here are a few more obvious disruptions coming our way…

1. Content Creation: It is estimated that by 2026, AI will write 90% of the online content. If AI can write this content, what happens to writers? Why would anyone visit a small niche blog if AI can answer their questions?
2. App Development: I am not a developer, yet I have written many apps with the help of ChatGPT. Co-Pilot and other AI tools are making developers 10–100x more efficient, bringing down the cost of development. This will disrupt the SAAS model as new competitors emerge while their large customers can simply build tools in-house.
3. Task Automation: Today you use ChatGPT with Zapier to automate many of your tasks, which feels like having a smart personal assistant. This solution is a rough patch. In the next couple of years, companies will be able to use specialized AI Assistants for Admin, HR, Marketing, Sales, etc and deploy them on scale.
4. Internet’s Business Model: In today’s internet, businesses and people create content that is distributed via search engines and social media apps. When search engines answer most user queries (eg: Google’s SGE), what happens to the businesses and people that depend on that traffic?
5. Robotics: Robotic Assistants will become a part of daily life by 2030. By 2030, you will be able to hire a robot to clean your home, cook for you, and take care of tasks around the house.

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All of this represents a major shift. This shift will effect how we work, how we learn, the type of work we do, how we communicate and relate with each other and how we find meaning in our lives.

Such big changes will have a profound impact on our culture, our society and ultimately what it means to be human.

On one end of the spectrum, this new technology can further exasperate our loneliness, isolation and the crisis of meaning. Nihilism, and the feeling and belief that life is absurd, meaningless, and empty will continue to grow as people also begin to question their own value.

On a cultural level, we might see even more fragmentation into smaller and smaller communities and para-social relationships. Communities will be able to use AI agents to entertain, engage, and take personalization down to the individual, thus creating synthetic relationships.

These AI friends will know us better than we know ourselves, and with this knowledge, they will be able to hook our attention and sell us the moon and the stars. They will be the perfect hit of dopamine masquerading as fulfillment that ultimately leaves us empty.

On the flip side, AI can help us become more human.

It can free us from having to do mundane, repetitive, meaningless work. It can free our time so that we may ponder and reflect on the deeper questions of life. With time, we can get to know ourselves and our greatest potential, which lies above and beyond merely being productive or achieving our selfish goals.

The bright side merges human potential with AI in a way that improves people’s well-being and life quality.

Change and opportunity are like two sides of the same coin. And whenever there is a major change like this, there is massive opportunity.

futuristic peaceful green city

The first people who can figure out how to create value in this new world will be like the pioneers who struck oil in the early 1900s. And this is what this community is about!

In this community, we will explore ways to use AI for the fulfillment of human potential. We will run experiments, share our insights, and I hope you do the same.

Currently, we have a project in the psychology and wellness niche and are running a number of AI experiments on it. Additionally, we are running experiment on the technology itself and how to best do thing.

Our General Experiments

1. Prompt Design & Engineering: Prompt chaining, using multiple models within a chain (helps with cost reduction), etc…
2. Knowledge Bases & RAG: Explore best ways to organize information so that LLMs can easily and efficiently digest it.
3. Vector Databases: Imagine being able to ask your DB deep questions about your data and get a spont on repsonse. These can be use for match making, q and a, and more.
4. Fine-tunning LLMs: Creating mini-models based on our own data.

Our Project Experiments:

1. Conversational Web: We have created 70+ AI chatbots that can answer any questions you might have when coming to our website. They can also hold a conversation and entertain you!
2. AI Content Creation: How well does AI content perform in SEO? What is the best way to do it?
3. Published 500+ Articles: These articles represent a Knowledge Base that trains Semantic Search Engines and builds new relationships within them.
4. Semantic SEO: We utilize taxonomies, ontologies, and other advanced tactics for organizing the information so search engines can understand and learn from it.
5. AI Sales & Marketing: We are experimenting with ‘Product Genius AI’ that recommends a product based on how you answer a short quiz.
6. AI Assistants as a Service: If an AI Assistant can help you identify and achieve meaningful goals, what is that worth?
7. Website as a Destination: Instead of the website being an information hub, can it be a place where people go to have experiences, chat and engage?
8. AI & NFTs: We are experimenting with the interaction of AI & NFTs. NFTs are a great way to give users ownership of their own data. This then allows users to decide what apps they want to share their data with while remaining private. To this end, we have an NFT Collection that deeply personalizes your interaction with AI. You will be able to talk to your digital identity! More on this later.
9. Metaverse/AR/VR: We are thinking of ways to make the website a place you go with friends and have metaverse-like experience.

Originally Published on https://stefanspeaks.substack.com/p/why-am-i-starting-a-substack-ai-humanity