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Some research says ~50% of US teenagers regularly talk to AI companions. Sensortower says AI companion apps get downloaded 25 million times per month. It is sometimes listed as one of the top personal use cases for AI.
AI companions may refer to specific apps or using ChatGPT/Claude like a companion sometimes.
In theory, it could increase engagement and offer such an interactive experience but it can get pretty unwieldy to offer such an open-ended experience.
Have you tried doing that? Was it helpful at all? How did you approach re-designing the product experience? Any unexpected benefits/risks?
Here is an example request:
"I am currently enrolled in a nonprofit computer boot camp program. I am taking the 12-week software development course. I lost my job in higher education last June due to the pandemic and wanted to change to a high-demand field. As the only blind student at the camp I have, however, found it quite challenging as I am trying to figure out accessibility issues along with coding and am never sure if my problems are because I don’t have all the tools my sighted classmates have at their disposal or if it’s because I don’t understand. As I have done some online research I have found that most of what is available are either short videos of people talking about how they code as a blind person but without enough detail to be really helpful for my purposes or references to projects that, when I look them up, haven’t been worked on for a few years or involve one-time courses that were taught here or there. Not only am I interested in this because of my desire to learn but I also think that coding would be a great field for many blind people whose unemployment rate continues to be unacceptably high."
(Unemployment among the blind is estimated to be around 70%)
I think I have a problem. My want-to-read list on Goodreads currently has more than 2100 books. I probably have more than 50 online classes that I want to take.
I constantly find new things that I want to learn about. I have multiple lists on Goodreads with titles of "Urgent reads" and "The most urgent reads". Things get reprioritized so often that I don't actually end up reading or learning much.
I recently started building syllabuses around different topics for myself to put together relevant things together and then I try to force myself to focus on a single syllabus at a time.
I am experimenting with another system for books. I have a table of books, where when I get excited about a book, I upvote a book. Only after a book is upvoted more than 3 times, I download a sample of the book (if available on Kindle). Only after I read a book, I buy the book. This helped a little, but not enough. Now, I have 10 books that I started reading.
I am curious about how others approach this. What is your framework? How do you self-discipline? Are there any good tools?
I know government grant process can be very cumbersome but so is trying to raise VC money (especially outside of SV). And government money is non-dilutive.
I am noticing more startups (e.g. Palantir, Anduril) starting off of government opportunities, but they seem very rare.
Why isn't gov funding a more common way of starting a startup? Is it mostly because people don't know about these and/or don't know how to navigate the process?