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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Communicating with others
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.
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.
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.
