I start most of my mornings by writing out a to-do list for the day. I’ve noticed that generative AI has been getting really good, and it made me wonder how much of my list could be done for me automatically. I’m imagining I could write down my tasks and then AI could just do some of my tasks, or at least get started on them.
For example, if I need to schedule a meeting, AI could look at my calendar and the other person’s calendar and find a time (here are tools to do that). If I need to fix a problem with my car, an AI could Google the problem plus the specific model of my car, then write up suggested actions and suggest some products to buy. If I need to respond to an email, an AI could write a draft.
You get the point. There’s already AI tools to do most of this stuff. But usually the way I think about my problems doesn’t exactly match up with the tools that are available. I want a manager AI to break up the problems I have and find narrower AIs to address the smaller problems.
Recently I pitched the idea to do this to a venture capital firm. Here’s a slide from my pitch:
Most of these aren’t things that I would trust an AI to do, at least not right now. I’d want to have final review, but I could save a lot of time if AI wrote the first draft.
The feedback from the VCs was that too many people are already working on this problem, so it’s a little late to start. That gives me hope that I’ll be able to use the product I’m imagining in the near future. Overall, the experience made me more likely to write up my ideas and pitch them. I knew that generative AI was getting better three years ago, and in retrospect, that would have been a good time to work on this.
Thinking about it has left me with some big questions about how to architect AI to allow it to do larger projects. Right now, ChatGPT can write novels, but only if they fit in its context window. And even then, it typically writes the novel in one straight shot, not in the careful outlining and plotting process that many writers use. Well, maybe not all of them. It seems necessary to break big tasks up into smaller ones. Can a writing AI like GPT4 do a good job making its own subtasks, like AutoGPT does? Or do we need to use reinforcement learning or some structured approach in order to actually do a good job?