So You Want To Digitize Your Mind
This is part of a series breaking down some of the pieces behind YouAi—exploring why they need to exist and why we are building them in the way we are. For more, subscribe here and sign up for the waitlist at youai.ai.
This post builds on the foundations laid out in the YouAi whitepaper.
YouAi is building a mind indexer—a tool to digitize your mind.
In this post, I’d like to briefly explore what that actually means, how it works, and why digitizing your mind is an imperative step in interfacing with the next generation of information technology. It sounds crazy, but at the end of the day, it’s quite simple and intuitive.
Let's clear one thing up early: we are not talking about implants or hardware. The mind indexer is completely software based.
To index your mind, YouAi presents you with a never-ending feed of prompts—bite-sized interactive experiences designed to capture various aspects of your inner landscape. It feels a bit like a mix of TikTok and Buzzfeed quizzes.
As you engage with each prompt—or skip any that you do not wish to engage with—YouAi learns a tiny bit more about you. The more prompts you engage with, the more you render the digital map of your mind.
You should think of each prompt like a pixel in an image. No single prompt means anything on its own—just like no one pixel in an image means anything in its isolation. But when you have a lot of pixels, the image becomes clear. The higher the density of pixels, the higher the resolution of the image; the more you can zoom in and still make things out.
This is a helpful analogy to keep in mind as we talk about what the mind indexer is not. For example, the mind indexer is not a personality test. It’s not like Myers–Briggs or Enneagrams. It’s not trying to ask you questions and use your answers to those questions to compute some kind of result.
In fact, you really shouldn’t think of prompts as being questions and answers at all. Prompts are, simply, stimuli that generate responses from humans.
Some of them might take the form of questions and answers, because these are entertaining and can be useful (“Describe a core childhood memory”, “Would you rather eat pizza or sushi?”, etc.), but to spend time examining the natural-language interpretations of those prompts is a pointless exercise because it misses the bigger value of the exercise.
The goal of the mind indexer is not to learn things about you in any form that humans can comprehend. The goal of the mind indexer is to generate massive amounts of data; to generate as many pixels as possible on the digital map of your mind by tokenizing your responses to various stimuli.
One of the places we’ve already seen a form of this in the wild is the TikTok feed. TikTok, too, is indexing your mind—but only on a very narrow dimension by digitizing your preferences for video content. In the same way as ChatGPT uses tokenized word fragments to predict the next word in a sentence, the TikTok algorithm uses its dataset to predict the next video in your feed.
We are doing this on a massive scale. The goal of this is that over time, given a prompt, YouAi will be able to predict your response without asking you.
Once the YouAi model has enough data that it is aligned with your mental state (which is constantly changing and evolving—so it’s not simply a one-time thing), it can begin to act autonomously—to engage with the digital world in the same way you would, only radically faster, smarter, and more effectively.
In the next post in this series, we’ll explore how we can look at this data as a graph—extracting features and clusters by playing with dimensionality—in order to help you understand yourself and others in radically new ways. This data will be able to help you find your soulmate, your community, your nemeses. You will understand your mind in ways never before possible. We are building the most powerful mirror to ever exist. Subscribe for more!
I think you need to think through your goals.
Why would I want my personal AI to automatically answer my prompts.
I don't get how that is important, fun or even the slightest bit useful in having your Bot answer your own questions (prompts.) Building your own personal knowledge is great, but maybe you're just being cagey (or in stealth.)
There ARE avatars and bot products out there that do this already. So either:
• you think you're doing the same thing = better
• you've got something else in mind = but you're not telling us
• you're not aware that this isn't new or revolutionary= and you NEED to make sure you're investors don't find out
Iteratively building Knowledge Graphs to train your own personal Bots is a thing. And please don't tell me you're trying to patent that!
Creating a digital image of your mind and saying that any one single pixel is not as helpful as looking at all the pixels together reminds me of strange attractors and fractals in mathematics and chaos theory. In my very limited understanding, fractal & strange attractors are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems – the pictures of Chaos.
Some might say the inside of a human mind is like chaos.
In many ways, the You.AI app is taking the simple process of asking questions that ultimately creating an image based on your data points that will look specific to you. Furthermore, like a strange attractor/fractal, you can't see the image until enough of those data points are amassed. Again, look at one data point and you say, no idea what this is saying to me. Even 100 and I still don't really have a sense at what I'm looking at. But, look at the whole set together (1000's of datapoints) and see the image it creates and you're like, whoa - that's cool.