Humans As An Api

We’re born to serve

Humans have always been a service. Almost always to other humans. So have SaaS companies. (with service literally being in their name)

SaaS companies so far have been in the realm of solving structured problems. Humans have embodided logic and code which provides some sort of service to other humans. Here is a very simplified example - A project management software like Trello typically does the book keeping job of a project manager. Over here, the software provides the service of an equivalent human.

Okay but what’s changing?

AI is changing this dynamic.

Tradaitional SaaS is good at solving strucuted problems. However it cannot handle the different nature of tasks a human performs everyday. Which is why we have an extremely specialized SaaS company for almost every one of these tasks that we perform.

Fundamentally there are still 2 (maybe more) problems that are still left to humans - Communication and Decision making.

With the advent of AI and specifically LLMs, these 2 problems become more tractable and maybe a little more structured.

How can I be of service?

Imagine all the work we do today as email/slack pushers.

We get a message -> We read and understand the message -> We add any additional context around the message from other sources -> We formulate a reply -> We reply to message

Do you see where we’re going? If you had asked anyone if this was something that could be solved with AI about 2-3 years ago by a single person via an API call, they’d call you an insane person.

LLMs (with large context lengths and fine tuning) can fundamentally mimic an individual human being. They can communicate and make decisions in a way that would be very similar to the individual the LLM is trained on.

We can basically make being a human being an API call

Imagine the thousand things you do everyday. Most of them will be delegated to your AI via an API call. The things it can’t do, it will escalate to you. In such a manner another humans AI will also communicate with your AI like this.

Next steps?

I plan to act on this thesis. I want to build a slack bot version of myself that can reply to the 50-60 messages I have to get to in a day, allowing me to focus on the work AI cannot do as of today.