One in five of top AI apps aren't productivity tools but companions. Supposedly the number one use of AI in corporations is not spreadsheets or research. It's therapy. It's people looking for a friend. Essentially, when you have a friend, a good friend is someone you can ask embarrassing questions to. I have a friend going through a breakup and he's thinking about how to do it. And it's like, at our age, you'd think we'd have this figured out. And he doesn't. And we're close enough where he can kind of ask me embarrassing questions and we could talk about fairly intimate details. But there's just certain questions you'd rather ask, you know, you'd rather ask AI, like, 'Oh, it hurt. It hurts when I pee. Is that my prostate? Or is that aging?' You know what? There's just certain things you'd rather not ring up your mom or your close friend or talk to your boss about.
In today's office hours, we talk about whether AI can be your co-founder, the unintended consequences of regulating social media, and how to build confidence working abroad. Question number one. Our first question comes from asleep percentage 100 on Reddit. They say, 'Hi, Scott. I'm 25 years old, two years out of UCLA with a degree in sociology. Go Bruins. What are your thoughts on using AI for brainstorming, not just theoretical ideas and debates, but for business plans? I recently had a product idea that I ran through Claude. Do you envision a future where these tools really help form new companies and create new jobs, products, and markets? Is it really the mentor in your pocket or at this stage just a yes man for anything and everything?'
Okay, so we're obviously already seeing people use AI for way more than brainstorming. There was a recent New York Times article about a founder who used tools, including ChatGPT, to build a company projected to do almost two billion in sales with just two employees. He used AI to write code, generate marketing, and even run customer service. However, there's a flip side, and that is his chatbot began hallucinating products, and his ads were misleading, and the company is now facing regulatory scrutiny. So if you think about what AI actually does very crudely and probably incorrectly if you're trying to guess, or it says, all right, if I'm going to look at every pattern of words and then I'm going to look at the seventh word such if I type in the midnight sky is, it'll figure out blue or what have you. So it's sort of a predictive model that helps answer questions and looks at every piece of data or word pattern on the internet and comes back with patterns that might answer your query.
I would describe AI as all chip, no salsa, and that is real insight. Like, what is it you're going to do differently with your business? What is it that's unique about your business? Most new businesses make no sense at the outset, otherwise they would already exist. So you have to be, there's a touch of crazy, and essentially AI is regressing to the mean because it looks at everything, it gives you an answer that is scanned everything but is perfectly average, if you will. I think you use AI when trying to estimate the, say, total addressable market of a business idea, trying to come up with maybe corporate structure, how many people you need, or how much money you need to raise, or help you put together a business model. But I think the core idea itself, in terms of trying to find something truly differentiated and something that other people haven't bought into, in other words, creativity, I think that's kind of on you, boss. And fortunately for us, at least so far, the wetware between your brain still bests software around creativity and finding something truly differentiated. And that is, I think, if you were to start a business plan just using AI, including the idea, it would come up with something very anodyne that's already been done, where the margins have already been starched out. In other words, it would come up with a ton of businesses that already exist.
Having said that, I think it's like having the world's smartest intern who's read everything before you and can help you pull together your business plan and provide support in some. It's the chip, not the salsa. You're the salsa. And also, I don't like, I find whenever I ask ChatGPT or Claude and I do ask for advice, it doesn't do a great job. It gives me some sort of whitewashed, anodyne answer that is really ridiculously safe and risk-averse, giving you just some sort of safe PG-13 material back. However, when I say to it, I'm looking for a discussion around where decency originated and why, you know, who are the philosophers around decency, or what is the, how did modern architecture, what were the biggest influences in modern architecture. It can absolutely come back with some fascinating insights and do research that would take me a long time. But if I want to design a new building, I think there's a certain amount of creativity and things that ChatGPT would either disagree with or say don't make any sense or are risky. Because that's the whole point. The whole point of starting a business is to take risks and do things that no microchip or anodyne computer could come up with.
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Question number two.
