Humans will talk to machines more than humans in 3 years
A thesis on opportunities in AI for consumer products
What are some interesting questions to understand the above thesis better
Why is this inevitable
What are some early examples to build your gut on this thesis
What are the core human motivations and what are the business opportunities that can be built on this thesis
What are the potential second order effects and opportunities that will get created
Do DM me on twitter with any other questions that pique your interest and I’d be keen to jam.
Humans will talk to machines more than humans in 3 years
Why is this inevitable
Adaptable and personalised: machines are faster and more effective in personalising to your interests basis your existing data and early conversations
99th percentile: machines are perhaps smarter/wiser than most of your human friends. Additionally, the wisdom is not limited to a specific field. They’ll do better than 99% experts in each space. Most of your curiosity conversations will likely happen with machines vs humans
Vulnerability: most important of all, you can be vulnerable with the machine. It’s incredibly hard to be vulnerable with humans. You don’t know whom to trust. You fear judgment. Machines have utmost patience, they won’t judge you and answer all your naive questions and doubts
PS. Try it, go talk to chatgpt about your day or about a problem statement you are facing, yes try it.Attention spans: humans need dopamine stimulation every few seconds to hold their attention level and the time bridge is only collapsing. The ability of machines to catch attention by generating new pattern breaking media real-time is unparalleled and no human can match it
Closer to fantasy: when you make humans experience things they want/aspire for but can’t have in the real world, you are successful - the reason the content of Mr. Beast and other creators with larger than life videos works. With evolved form of media technology like AR and real-time media generation via AI, you can not only experience what your imagination can look like, but you can almost be a part of it
It’s just easy: humans are lazy. Making the effort to reach out to people, finding the right person to talk to, and investing in relationships is hard. Similarly, going out and practicing hobbies is hard. Why did the internet and smartphones take over hours of human time - it was much easy to sit in the bed and scroll. Now whether for the good or bad, AI is making things even easier
Some apps that I have personally tried and would recommend to check out to build your gut on this thesis
chatgpt voice chat
smarterchild.chat built by the team at Sindarin
replika
character.ai (the most used consumer app after chatgpt with >30 avg sessions per user per month)
For the curious, some other tools I have tried to understand the lay of the land - Cypher, Anima, Chai, everything bagel, AIDungeon.
Interestingly, the first wave of AI apps hitting the market are companion apps since it caters to the most fundamental human need, but talking to machines is much beyond companionship. And we ll explore more next.
What are the core human motivations and what are the business opportunities that can be built on this thesis
This question is quite broad and we can break it down into categories by Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. In each of these categories, we can expect a specialised AI to exist.
Physiological needs: Health AI (basic), Spends AI, Safety AI
Social and Belongingness Needs: Companion AI, Relationships AI, Therapist AI
Esteem and Recognition Needs: Wealth AI, Career AI, Social Media AI, Gaming AI, Shopping AI, Travel AI
Self-Actualization and Growth: Work AI, Learning AI, Hobbies AI, Health AI (advanced)
Now, when we say ‘talking to machines’, you can imagine that you’d replace humans with a machine in that context. example: want to learn guitar - now instead of taking in-person lessons from a tutor or a friend, or even self-learning via Youtube - you’d have a specialised Guitar AI companion who would not only teach you the techniques, but also see, observe, interact, and give real-time feedback. You can visualise the same for each of the above use-cases and more.
PS. do share thoughts or your worldview on more opportunities you see.
Note - the focus of this piece is on Consumer Product opportunities that exist, while there would definitely be a parallel market for b2b products arising.
Derived opportunities and second order effects that will be interesting to explore
Co-pilots in every app
building on to the guitar AI example above
voice-first apps
making it normal to talk to your devices in public
Co-pilots for every job
making smaller teams possible
AI-native businesses will be more efficient than incumbents who’d find it hard to be as cost-efficient
also any new innovation looks stupid to incumbents, who are as a result very slow/late to adopt
one person in Finance with a Finance AI, one person in Talent with a Talent AI and so on
the other way to look at it is that we ll see specialised/vertical AI for every JBTD you can think of
Companion for each interest/hobby
imagine learning basics to advanced from the world’s best in each space. AI would be 99th percentile if not better
dedicated apps around music, dance, instruments, or any hobby you have
while there are definite pros of AI companions, it is also inevitable that loneliness will increase more than ever
opportunity for curated offline experiences would always exist and shoot up further
Companion for existing human relationships
two or more people using AI together to enhance the quality of their conversations and interactions, be it a couple or work colleagues or a professor-student
example: opportunity to build a companion app for a couple - AI will definitely enhance existing relationships vs. only replacing relationships as one might think
Physical devices evolving beyond mobile
enable your co-pilot to see and listen to everything that you do - the start to capturing more data and personalising to you, as a human companion would
example: tab and rewind pendant are the two players in this space I am excited to be an early customer of
devices like the Apple Vision Pro will also leverage the above to solve for multiple co-pilot use-cases
mobile devices also evolving to support AI use-cases, computing and data storage (the google Pixel)
PS. this is not an exhaustive list, and I’d keep evolving this as I explore the space more as well as get inputs from the FutureX community.
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to hit me up on twitter with thoughts, questions and your worldview. Keen to learn :D
Dots for future exploration: here are few more trends/things that I am bullish on and would deepdive into in the future pieces
Access to private data of individuals becomes a moat
and ability to personalise a user’s experience basis the data will enable very high stickiness
Every company becoming a media company
easier, cheaper, faster to create media
harder to differentiate yourself amongst a sea of content, yet an opportunity to create new varieties of media - the definition of creativity will expand with AI
Opportunity to connect humans better
similar to internet, AI will also enhance the ability to connect humans more efficiently - a huge problem today, whether in hiring, dating or simply finding an expert to talk to
a detailed piece on this topic to follow given my interest in this problem statement
For the curious: check out the top 50 AI consumer apps compiled by Olivia Moore, a16z
AI will not replace you, a person using AI will.
Nice. Good thinking. Looking at the tools you mentioned.