‍

Join us for a conversation featuring Dmitry Shapiro, CEO of YouAi, and Eye on AI CEO, Craig Smith.

Listen on Spotify:

Dmitry Shaprio's Early Career 

Dmitry Shapiro is no newcomer when it comes to startups and tech. Before becoming CEO of YouAi, he already had an impressive resume - serving as CTO of Myspace Music and founding two venture-backed companies. But his tech journey started much earlier than that. 

"I was 14 years old. I saw the movie War Games in the theater and then came home and started hacking around on a computer," Shapiro revealed. Though he has a degree in electrical engineering, he's been a self-taught software developer from the very beginning.

After getting his start in the '80s, Shapiro went on to hold major roles at companies like Fujitsu and Google. At Google, he spent years running product for machine learning teams analyzing user data. 

AI in Education

During the podcast, Shapiro shared his vision for how AI could transform education in the future. He believes AI algorithms combined with mind indexing technology (more on that later) can enable exponentially faster, personalized learning.

"I think education is at the heart of this," Shapiro stated. "If we're successful and other companies are successful in doing this, you will have this incredible world where all of us are going to learn again exponentially faster."

He envisions AI that can track precisely what each student knows and where they lack understanding. It could then fill those knowledge gaps on an individual level - essentially mimicking the capabilities of a human tutor. This is far superior to today's standardized curriculum that lags behind in customization.

AI's Role in Content Creation

Shapiro also discussed how AI could change the way we interact with content online. Currently, websites and products are mostly static, targeting broad groups of users. 

He argues that instead, "websites shouldn't be sort of pre-created, they should be these interactive things." AI could generate content on the fly based on what it knows about each specific user. 

For example, an AI shopping assistant would learn about your interests and knowledge level. It would then explain a product in terms that resonate with you personally - not just generic marketing speak.

"A human sales person can do a better job because they can see what the other party is grocking, not grocking," Shapiro explained. That same principle could allow AIs to educate us far more effectively.

Customizing AI Applications

So how does Shapiro's company YouAi fit into this vision? YouAi offers a platform where anyone can build customized AI apps without coding.

The apps can collect user data to personalize interactions. As Shapiro described, "We've created what we call a mind indexer, think of it it feels like TikTok, it's a never-ending feed of full viewport experiences that basically ask you for input."

This easy customization has allowed the creation of over 1,000 niche AIs already on YouAi. The possibilities span from parenting advice to diagnosing pet illnesses and more. 

Leveraging the Right LLMs

YouAi isn't just a fixed backend - it allows developers to choose different large language models as the engine powering their apps.

As Shapiro explained, "If you're dealing with larger documents that the consumer is bringing to you, you don't want to exceed the window, the token window, so you might switch it to Claude."

This optimization allows apps like long document summarizers to leverage Claude's huge context window size. Other apps may opt for the lower costs of GPT-3. YouAi plans to add orchestration that combines different models for an even more tailored approach.

AI Assistants Explained

Shapiro envisions a future where AI assistants have a detailed, personalized understanding of each user. This results from a process he calls "mind indexing."

"If humans could sort of digitize their own minds and have a data set that we could then present to AI and say this is me you figure out what you should help me with and how you could help me instead of me trying to figure out how to type prompts in with my thumbs maybe the AI could simply figure out what I need," he described.

Rather than relying on generic chatbots, users could have an AI enriched with their unique context, preferences, and experiences. This makes for assistance that's exponentially more helpful.

What is Mind Indexing? 

So what exactly is mind indexing? It's YouAi's process of having users actively feed personal data into a large model. 

Through answering questions, sharing preferences, and giving open feedback, the AI forms a nuanced profile of each individual. This disambiguated data better captures the context around a person's actions and interests.

Shapiro is excited about the potential here, stating: "We think that if we can take that data and merge it we can do that again that sort of longer term vision for that and we think long term that's really powerful and important."

He believes that mind indexing will unlock exponential leaps in how AI can benefit each person. It may just be the personalized interface we need to utilize these powerful tools to their full potential.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Preview and Introduction

4:11 - Dmitry Shapiro's Early Career

11:29 - AI in Education

18:20 - AI's Role in Content Creation

25:24 - Customizing AI applications

36:26 - Leveraging the Right LLMs

44:54 - AI Assistants Explained

53:22 - What is Mind Indexing?

‍