A few months back, my friend, Brian was coming over to my place. He’s a baseball fan. I know a baseball is white and about this big. Which is to say I know very little about the sport beyond knowing Shohei Ohtani transcends the game’s traditional fans. It was late enough in the season that Ohtani was a virtual lock to be MVP. But, not so late in the season that it was a known. That’s where this story starts.
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I asked ChatGPT, “Is Shohei Ohtani going to win the MVP?” What I got back was more useless than what I put in. “Shohei Ohtani is a great player and one of the first players to both hit and pitch in the major leagues at a high level.” See. Told ya. Useless.
These days, we chat with AI about things that happened. Past tense. “Tell me about Newtonian physics.” Notice how it ends with a period not a question mark. AI scours the billions of things it’s read and summarizes an answer for you. Something like, “An object in motion stays in motion.”
Then, there’s Akinator. You can go back and read about it here. Or, you can just stay here and I’ll give you the gist. Akinator is an inverted AI-like game. Its pre-AI engine asks you questions.
You think of a famous person. Real. Unreal. Living. Dead. Whatevs. But famous. It can’t be your aunt Mildred. Akinator asks you, “Living?” You answer yes or no or not sure. It keeps asking you questions until it figures out who you had in mind.
On the day Brian was coming over, I tried Akinator with a secondary character from SpongeBob. Squidward. That Akinator guessed it wasn’t that surprising. That someone had used Squidward nine minutes earlier,… that was a surprise. “OK,” I thought, “Kids game. Kid characters.” I tried Winston Churchill. Seventeen minutes.
Who the hell was playing this thing? Turns out that wasn’t the right question. Akinator has 100 million downloads at Google Play. Yeah. Every time it asks you a question it shows you an ad. At a $10 CPM, that’s one cent per ad. It asks you about twenty questions. Twenty cents. Before it tells you the answer it insists you watch at least a few seconds of a video ad. Five cents more. Twenty-five cents. Every minute or so. Times 100 games at any time. That’s twenty-five bucks. Meh. Per minute. Ok, less meh. That’s $13 million a year. Yeah.
Inverted AI makes a lot of sense and a LOT of sense. But no one is doing inverted AI.
That got me thinking about Benedict Evans who rails that AI lacks a killer app. I wrote about this way back last August.
Akinator has been around for a decade. It doesn’t use AI and, while I wouldn’t say it’s a killer app, it’s pretty darn stabby. A killer app needs to be something we want to use. Something we play. Something that shops for us. Something that connects us. A year and half into AI, I strongly believe we’re still waiting for a killer app.
Inverting AI is the first step to making a killer app. To be cool, I’m going to call that an innovation. Innovation one. AI can do a lot of things. It can’t create. Akinator solves for this by getting you to start the process. Think of a person.
So, how can you solve for creation at scale? Simple. You get creators. Creators will seed the system with the first questions. “Is Shohei Ohtani going to win the MVP?” Once the creator gets the ball rolling, you answer it, “Yes.” Then, the law of physics take over. A question in motion stays in motion. AI can’t start a conversation, but it can keep a conversation going.
Where do you find creators? On every social platform. So, innovation two is to put our inverted AI in the center of a social platform. Creators put their questions here. Something about Ohtani. Maybe that betting story that’s getting so much attention. Or, something about who the NFL team with the first pick will draft. Or, what will happen when the NHL’s team in Arizona moves to Utah. Will the players still be able to drink?
In sports, questions abound. And, there’s no end of people who will answer them.
So, you have a social app that connects fans and experts and shares questions. Shares questions, like say, the way Instagram made it easy to share pictures. Right away you know what the app will look like. A feed of questions with pretty pictures. Fans click on the things they find interesting to chat with AI.
A funny thing happened when you start thinking about this model. You realize that this is a private social network. In a public social network, for the most part, you see people’s posts. You like them, comment on them, etc. This is private. The chats happen between each fan and the AI. The AI summarizes what the fans think of a particular question for all fans. But no fans sees what any other fan says.
Private social is cool for so many reasons. First, you don’t need to police bullying. If you bully the AI, the AI turns the other check. Second, no one is showing off trying to get likes or gain followers. Third, fans are more likely to be candid when they’re speaking one-on-AI instead of with other fans. Fourth, AI makes this platform symmetric. We’re so used to asymmetric social that we think it’s normal to have conversations the way King Henry I played chess with King Louis VI. Actually, it’s nuts. I post about blah on platform Foobar. And, then, wait to be notified when someone replies. It could be seconds. More often for conversations off the beaten path, it takes minutes, hours, or days.
And, fifth, and this is the biggie, the economics are really solid. Since you don’t need to police anyone, you don’t *need* people to log in or download an app. Those are two big and very costly friction points to generate use.
At the end of the day, this platform has arbitrage economics. Even at pennies, you get more from ads than it costs to run the AI. Which means you can cut creators in for a piece of the action. That’s always good. Here, it’s better than good.
Normally, creators do a ton of work to get social platforms going. They’re the rhythm section. My cousin had 18,000 followers on Instagram. She posted pictures of herself wearing nice clothes and clutching fancy bags while sipping pretty lattes. She spent four hours per week interacting with fans in the comments section. The return on time for most creators is lousy. And, creators burn out. Here, we’re asking creators to pose a question. The AI handles the drudgery. Decent economics for no work and none of the worst work. Yeah.
There are only two questions left. One, which creators will be the first to like something like this? Podcasters. They know their local teams, have relationships with fans across multiple platforms, and have an innate sense of what questions fans will want to banter about. Plus, they tell me how much they loathe how much time it takes to keep people engaged on YouTube and elsewhere.
More than 30,000 podcasters cover sports in the U.S. Some are big deal folks in big deal cities. The vast majority are not. They are passionate solopreneurs in small- and mid-sized markets. You start with one. You prove your solution. You get him or her to love it. You go to a few more. Then, you put out a nice press release, talk about being in with the number two podcaster covering the Bucks in Milwaukee. The duo who talks about the Chiefs in KC. Someone in Baltimore, Minneapolis, and one of the 47 other cities that have at least one other major league sports team. We covered it here.
All the pieces lined up. An inverted AI engine at the center of a social app that connects fans with experts makes a lot of sense. Start in sports. It’s inherently brand safe, further secured by an AI that polices private, one-on-one chats. Oh, and it’s simultaneously hyperlocal and national. Bonus, this might be the first killer AI app.
If this works, you could expand it into other verticals where people love to banter about events that have yet to happen. Investing, “Is Apple stock a good buy at this price?” CNBC could ask that one. How about, Anderson Cooper asking, “What happens to America if Trump wins in November?”
You could syndicate the stories to other outlets to replace the washedupness of the Associated Press. Why have derivative stories when you can have fresh stories crowd-sourced by fans. News outlets can choose from hundreds if not thousands every day.
There’s only one thing left. We need a name. A name for where fans banter. And, that’s the best part. Fanter. Check it out at: https://fanter.ai/
This idea has been percolating here for months. Buried in all the stories. Each story helping me clarify my thinking on this. Each one a breadcrumb to a bigger, newer story. Fanter.
Thanks for reading.