Personal APIs will become possible with AI
What is a Personal API?
What makes this different from a blog?
At the moment the best we have is links.
If someone asks a question, you can only provide them with links to existing content. It's not possible to generate new content on the fly.
But a Personal API would be able to pull from all your content sources and generate a personalized response.
The platform and location of information will matter less in the future. The only thing that will matter is can your platform host text, audio, and video files?
Content won't be paywalled but access to the Personal API will be.
One of the most exciting things to me about AI is that it makes personal APIs possible. This occurred to me when watching an interview with Matt Mullenweg. In the interview he shared how they worked with Seth Godin to create an AI-powered search bot for his blog.
WordPress Co-Founder Matt Mullenweg on the Ai REVOLUTION 🔥 - YouTube
You can play with the bot on Seth's blog: Seth's Blog
What problem does this solve?
- Seth's blog is an incredible body of work and it's all freely accessible. All of his knowledge, thoughts, and ideas are there for anyone to consume. But as this body of work grows it gets harder and harder to surface the right content at the right time.
- AI allows for a personalized response/summary to any question/search.
- The AI gets more valuable and useful the more content it has. This is a reverse of the problem without having AI: The more content you have the more work it is to manage and organize.
- There will always be a desire/need for personalization. How do I find the thing that's most relevant for me.
What would this kind of future look like?
Rather than going from website to website, you could bring the Seth Godin AI into your chat conversation. You could bring multiple Personal API
Who benefits from this approach?
If you're a creator and you have a large body of work, you are in a unique position in that you already have a massive headstart. It isn't going to be valuable to train your AI on a single document.
People can get "personalized" responses from their favorite creators. Matt Mullenweg pointed out in the interview above that Seth's time is limited, he can't offer personalized responses to everyone or if you do want that personalized advice it's going to come with a big consulting cost.
Open questions
- How does an AI actually train on your data/content?
- What will happen to websites?