One of life’s biggest challenges is communicating the context behind your feelings, decisions, and actions. How do you take the thoughts swirling around in your mind and translate them into something that other people — your coworkers, your partner, your therapist — understand?
生命中最重大的挑战之一就是传达你感受、决定和行动背后的语境。你如何将心中翻腾的思想转化为其他人——你的同事、你的伴侣、你的治疗师——能够理解的东西？
Imagine you’re overwhelmed by a bunch of things and a close friend asks how you’re doing. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably wished that you could just give them a direct line to your brain to bring them up to speed instead of trying to rattle off everything that’s stressing you out.
想象一下，当你被一堆事情压得喘不过气来时，一个亲密的朋友问你过得怎么样。如果你和我一样，你可能希望直接给他们一条通往你大脑的线路，以便让他们了解你的状况，而不是试图一口气说出所有让你焦虑的事情。
My favorite example of this might be Gen Zers making decks to educate their therapists about their “lore” — they’re trying to condense the history of their lives into the most impactful moments and people.
我的最爱例子可能是 Z 世代制作牌组来教育他们的治疗师关于他们的“传说”——他们试图将他们一生的历史浓缩成最有影响力的时刻和人物。
I call this idea “exporting your brain.” It’s taking the context that exists in your head — which is essentially unstructured data — and translating it into a format that can be understood.
我称这个想法为“脑力输出”。它是指将你头脑中存在的、本质上是无结构的资料，转换成可以被理解的形式。
This sounds like science fiction, but it’s now possible for the first time, thanks to LLMs. We can take massive amounts of information, extract the insights, and summarize the takeaways. In this same way, we can now keep a record of our thoughts — like a digital journal or therapy notes — and consult that trove of past experience to guide our decision-making, interactions, and personal growth. There are both personal and professional use cases for this. It can even help you better understand yourself.
这听起来像是科幻小说，但现在，多亏了LLMs，这第一次成为可能。我们可以处理大量信息，提取洞察力，并总结要点。同样，我们现在可以记录我们的想法——就像数字日记或治疗笔记——并咨询这个过去的经验宝库来指导我们的决策、互动和个人成长。这既有个人用途，也有职业用途，甚至可以帮助你更好地了解自己。
How do I know this works? I’ve been doing it. For the past few months, I’ve been using ChatGPT like a daily journal: recording my thoughts and feelings and even sending (anonymized!) screenshots of interactions that I wanted advice on. I’ve used it to analyze how I communicate with family members, talk through options for a tricky work situation, and get an external perspective on confusing messages from a friend. And I’ve been blown away by the results.
我如何知道这行得通呢？我一直在这么做。过去几个月，我把 ChatGPT 当作日常日记来使用：记录我的思考和感受，甚至发送（匿名化！）我想寻求建议的互动截图。我用它来分析我如何与家人沟通，讨论棘手的工作情况，以及从外部角度解读朋友发来的令人困惑的信息。结果让我印象深刻。
I don’t think that ChatGPT is ultimately the right product for this (more on that below), but I’ve had some interesting learnings in the process. I’ve identified three core use cases for “exporting your brain,” and I hope to see startups building in each of these categories:
我不认为 ChatGPT 最终是适合这个产品的（下面会详细说明），但在过程中我获得了一些有趣的见解。我确定了“导出你的大脑”的三个核心应用场景，希望看到初创公司在这些类别中构建产品：
Communicating with others
与他人沟通
We’ve all had conversations where it feels like the other person just isn’t getting it. They’re not understanding what you’re trying to say, how you arrived at a given conclusion, or why you’re so emotional about something. Whatever you’re trying to communicate isn’t getting through. Or maybe you aren’t in a conflict with someone, but you’re struggling to get them up-to-speed quickly on something.
我们都有过这样的对话，感觉对方好像根本不理解。他们不理解你试图表达的内容，不理解你得出某个结论的原因，也不理解你为什么对某件事情如此情绪化。无论你试图传达什么，都没有被理解。或者，你可能并没有和某人发生冲突，但你正努力快速让他们了解某件事情。
These types of communication issues can be assuaged with AI. Imagine an AI companion that has accompanied every step of your experience and understands exactly how you think and feel. It can help you formulate the most concise and effective way to voice your internal monologue to the other person. This is especially true if your AI companion already knows the other person and how to best communicate with them, based on your past interactions or conversations with that person’s AI companion.
这些沟通问题可以通过人工智能来解决。想象一下，有一个人工智能伴侣陪伴你经历每一个步骤，完全理解你的想法和感受。它可以帮助你以最简洁有效的方式表达你的内心独白给对方听。特别是如果这个人工智能伴侣已经了解对方，并基于你与对方的人工智能伴侣过去的互动或对话，知道如何与他们最佳沟通。
Suddenly, you’re no longer playing a game of telephone where you’re never sure how your words will be interpreted by the other party. Your AI companion helps you frame your words to ensure that your intent has the best possible chance of being understood – and may also guide you to better understand the other person’s point of view or what they might be thinking.
I’m not the only one doing this. There are countless Reddit posts and TikToks about how to use ChatGPT to help you better communicate with your co-parent, partner, friends, and coworkers.
You can also imagine professional use cases for this. Have you ever worked on a months-long project with hundreds of little decisions, only for someone to ask what alternatives you considered for choice #36? Or bring up another obscure data or process question that you no longer remember?
An AI companion that watches your process could help you answer this, essentially unlocking infinite memory. The ability to access this archive of knowledge can make you more effective in communicating about your work or handling objections.
Understanding yourself
One thing I didn’t expect when I started using ChatGPT as a daily journal was how good it would be at helping me with self-reflection. This isn’t something that the product does inherently — you have actively prompt it — but when you do, it’s quite insightful.
After you’ve used the product for a bit, ask it to describe you (and to include both strengths and weaknesses). If your experience is anything like mine, I think you’ll find it to be startlingly accurate. And you can ask follow-up questions to dive deeper into specific recommendations: e.g. “If you were my therapist, what are the three things you’d want me to work on?”
Beyond helping you better understand your own strengths and weaknesses, AI can combat the pesky limitations of the human brain — particularly when it comes to memory. AI companions can remember and surface relevant context that you’ve forgotten. Two examples that illustrated this for me:
- I once told ChatGPT that I was worried someone was upset with me, based on the terseness of their messages. It reminded me that I had expressed the same concern several weeks before (with the same person), and they were just busy. ChatGPT asked if I had reason to believe that this time was different.
- I offhandedly said that things were “great” with a friend until one interaction that seemed strange. ChatGPT reminded me that I had, in fact, expressed different concerns about that friend’s behavior multiple times over the last six weeks, and that things weren’t as perfect as my rosy recollection.
There are also professional use cases for better memory. I constantly struggle to remember all of the companies I’ve met in a given space — what were the names of the four “Uber for dogs” startups I talked to? Or the website I landed on three months ago for a company that claimed to be building an AI brain? Or the interesting insight on customer acquisition that someone brought up on a Zoom last month? I’d love an AI companion that could answer these things!
Communicating with applications
Human communication (with yourself or others) is one use case for “exporting your brain.” Another is interfacing with applications. I’ve long believed that many apps would be better if they had more context on their users — but few know as much about you as TikTok or Spotify.
Imagine a new app that immediately understands who you are and what you care about. Your DoorDash feed is instantly populated with restaurants that reflect your taste and budget. Your shopping app only recommends items that fit your style. Your dating app doesn’t show you an endless pile of cards to swipe, but gives you a few people who truly match you. And if you want something different, you can just ask for it!
You would maintain control over your “AI brain,” choosing which applications have access and what type of information they’re allowed to access. But I genuinely believe this could be game-changing in filtering through the noise we all experience with products that give us seemingly endless choices: food delivery, hotels and Airbnbs, events, streaming TV or movies. We can finally have truly personalized recommendations.
I can also see work applications for this. Imagine a smart writing assistant that sees all your emails, blog posts, and tweets and can write this content in your voice. Many products today claim to do this, but I think most simply don’t have enough context on each user. Tapping into your AI brain could improve this ability.
Your AI work companion could travel with you across jobs. As the thing that knows you best — after all, it’s trained by you, an encapsulation of your past experience — it’s perfectly positioned to plug into the tools you use for finding new roles, identifying people you should network with, and developing your skills.
What’s next?
There are clearly real use cases for an “AI brain.” But in my experience, ChatGPT isn’t the ideal product. It’s meant to be a helpful, general assistant – which it’s great at – but it’s not optimized to be a personal or professional companion. A few places where it falls short: memory is fairly rudimentary, it can’t “view” your screen, it doesn’t proactively reach out to you, and it’s limited in modality (text and voice).
My early take is that this AI companion should be able to ingest information about you across all content modalities: text, image, and audio. Some people will want to text with it, others will want to call, and most will end up simply sending screenshots for analysis. TBD how this happens – is it just an app? A hardware product, like glasses or a pendant?
Especially in work contexts, it’s important that these products can “see” what you’re doing. It might sound invasive today, but so did capabilities like location sharing or facial recognition in your photos app when they were first introduced. I think we’re not far from a reality where most people have an always-on AI that’s viewing their screen. Your daily tasks, emails, or even Slack messages provide valuable context.
Finally, I don’t yet have conviction around whether these AI brains will be horizontal (one AI that follows you across every aspect of your life) or vertical (e.g., separate work and personal ones). The former makes more sense to me — there’s shared context between your job and your personal life — but consumers might not be comfortable with it yet.
A few early examples of companies with tangible products here:
- Dot – a personal AI companion that acts as your “living history,” with infinite memory of whatever you’ve discussed. The founders, Sam and Jason, both shared stories (linked) of things that Dot has helped them with; they’re worth a read if you’re curious about use cases.
- Limitless – an “always on” AI assistant with desktop and mobile apps and a wearable pendant to capture everything you say, see, or hear. It then makes all of this information searchable and surfaces insights.
- Delphi – this is an interesting use case I didn’t explore in this post. Delphi enables prominent minds to export their brains into “AI clones” that people can chat with. Most of these people can’t have 1:1 conversations with all of their interested fans, but they can now leverage AI to scale their presence.
