Getting Personal
AI is starting to take notes
Do you want to see your own profile on (domain)? Say hi to Doma and see for yourself.
In the world of AI, all purpose privacy concerns are giving way to dreams of anticipatory experiences. It’s about time! At ON_Discourse, we’ve been talking about anticipation and AI since 2024.
Has our early prediction finally come true? Last week’s headlines give us an answer.
A few days ago at WWDC, Apple announced the new Siri AI, which will read, analyze, and ultimately act on its own interpretations of the content of your own screen. The email you are drafting, the messages you are texting, and the calendar on which you are scheduling are all coalescing into a smarter experience that people actually like.
It wasn’t just Apple, in the same week as WWDC, OpenAI quietly announced a major upgrade in their memory system, calling it “Dreaming V3.” Similar to the new Siri, this system will monitor and interpret the sum total of all your interactions on ChatGPT - every chat, every reaction, every file you upload and edit - to generate smarter, anticipatory recommendations.
One feature is an idea. Two features is a trend. Three features is a newsletter post.
I’m going to get to the third feature in a minute, but first, I’ve got to get this out of the way.
PROVOCATION OF THE WEEK
Anticipation does not need to be a solo experience
The first two ideas I shared had a common, solitary theme. On one hand, it makes perfect sense. What you put into the system shapes what you, yourself, get out of it.
But is that it?
Let me introduce the third feature in this trend. You can (and should) rightfully call me out on it because there is a self-serving element to this reference (and the scale of this feature is minuscule in comparison). Nevertheless, it is a novel conception of anticipation that serves groups of people, collectively.
I’m talking about (domain).
On (domain), Doma engages in its own form of passive personalization. It builds a profile of you so it can find you collaborators that will help you make better work. This profile comes from a combination of your LinkedIn profile, public info about your career, and your conversations with Doma.
I wrote about this phenomenon on the (domain) Substack. The point of this feature is to help you find the right combination of professional experience, personality traits, and willingness to collaborate. These profiles will help drive a new type of professional networking that is derived solely out of the work you already do. The output of this experience is relevancy more than it is anticipation.
The output is also (and most importantly) shared across multiple people. This is what distinguishes the (domain) version of passive personalization from the others. Everybody benefits. The individual who finds the right collaborator benefits. The new invite into a collaborative group chat benefits, and finally, everyone else in the group meets and works with a new person as well.
As we’ve been saying for the past 2 years in this network, anticipation is the next logical step for smarter AI experiences. But the problem with solo anticipated features is that they serve an unprovable need. Without any checks, the whole experience can feel like a magic trick: did the model anticipate my needs or give me something I am choosing to accept.
When you open the experience to other people, the value expands.
What’s Next
If you have thoughts, feedback, or a perspective worth sharing, reach out: chmiel@ondiscourse.com. You might see your reaction in next week’s edition.
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