ChatGPT is blowing my mind!
The mind mindbogglingly good AI Chatbot and building an AI coach that'll revolutionize our lives.
We’ve all heard the phrase AI is the future. We’ve believed in the technology for a while, and we saw the real world impacts it can have when Anand V. (My co-author on The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities: How Information Warfare Shapes Your World) got our friend Chaitanya C. at OzoneTel to use an early beta access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 to create a fake religious guru trained on the tweets of Sadhguru - and people found deep meaning in the spiritual knowledge distilled by an AI who had no real idea of humanity, spirituality or religion. It was literally just stringing words together in a grammatically logical manner, and it still worked! This was way back in 2020.
Since then, OpenAI has been killing it! The new ChatGPT, to which anyone can obtain access, has scraped through all the knowledge on the internet and it’s ready to answer all of our questions on any topic you can think of!
I’ve been playing around with it for the past few days, and the results are mind boggling. Suddenly, the MVP I’m building is no longer a tracking application for weight loss, saving money and writing a book - it’s now an AI bot that’ll guide you through these processes, and we’ll add guidance on later versions for any goal that you can think of! The best part - the AI is already good enough at telling us exactly how to go about accomplishing any goal - and it knows more than almost any expert that you’d come across!
The Weight Loss Experiment with OpenAI
Credits to Alex Cohen of Carbon Health for demonstrating how ChatGPT could be used to create a weight loss plan. I’ve experimented with it, and it’s honestly good enough to create a plan detailed enough to include custom calorie targets, meal plans, grocery lists and a workout plan based on the information that you provide to the AI about your current fitness levels!
The Steps:
Step I: Based on your height, weight, age and gender - the AI computes your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure).
Step II: It advises you on your ideal weight and how much of a calorie deficit you’ll need per week to get there in say 3-6 months.
Step III: Get the AI to develop a meal plan - say, just lunch and dinner - for 7 days of the week, that is exactly as many calories as you should be eating, with the right amount of macros (distribution of proteins, fats and carbohydrates). Here, we let you decide what type of diet you like - maybe try out a high fat, low carb one and see how your body likes it for a week, then change to a high protein one and see how that goes, optimizing the plan based on your results.
Step IV: Get the AI to give out recipes and grocery lists! Telling you exactly how to prepare the food that’s on your meal plan. Best part: If you don’t like the meal it’s selected for you, you can keep asking for replacements and it’ll keep coming up with new dishes and recipes that fit the plan - after all, it knows all the recipes on the internet and their calorie + macro profile!
Step V: Get the AI to develop a workout plan for you, where you supply the constraints - like only 3 days a week, max 50 minutes, with a goal to get lean, or build muscle, or any other body goal you can think of.
Step VI: Getting the AI to follow up on how it’s going, and building in the motivation piece - this is the part that we’re working to figure out that won’t just be productized away (as anyone can use OpenAI - our differentiator is that we’ll know what works best for motivation, for you specifically, in different areas of your life).
Right now, using AI for this comes with major disclaimers that not all the information it supplies would be accurate and it’s all non-custom, based on a huge population, but we can build guardrails around it.
I need to think more around what kind of UI would work best for something like this, but the technology and the potential is truly amazing!! I’m super excited about this new angle that I have for the MVP. Planning to do it this way, even if it takes a little longer to launch. It’ll be way more than a tracker this way, and the potential to expand it are virtually limitless.
Do check out ChatGPT. You won’t believe how good it is till you try it, and the potential for it to augment jobs is limitless - from journalists and copywriters to legal research and a lifestyle coach… I believe in the coming years, like all of us have a smartphone now, we’re all about to get a fairly competent personal assistant that’ll do MANY tasks for us!
In fact, some people I know are already training the chatbot to talk to customer care to solve your problems!
Back from the USA
Back from the US trip, and on to the grind of building the MVP bit by bit from this week! Sorry for not sending out an email update last week, the US trip was super packed up with meetings! I’ve also finally met a lot of Schwarzman Scholars in DC and NYC, people I met in person for the first time, but have been in classes with for all of last year! So good to meet people outside zoom boxes! Why the US trip and what’s it leading to will be revealed early January! Some super exciting stuff.
Changing to Substack
Some of you might notice this email looks different. That’s because it’s come to you from a different email service - Substack, and not ConvertKit as it usually is. The purpose: I’m testing out open rates. Since GMail built in the “promotions” tab, newsletter delivery has become more complicated. Testing out what gets what sort of response from the almighty algorithm, and I’ll be sure to let you know when the results are in.
Also received feedback that people prefer having all the newsletters in one place to reference, and that it’s easier to sign up using substack since people are more familiar with it. Let’s see how it goes!
Until next week!
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