Oscar Hong

Ideas I like (October 2024)

  1. Memory Palace—Converts anything you want to remember (list, numbers, speech, etc.) into an AI-generated visual memory palace and walks you through it using the best known memory training techniques.
  2. NerfGPT—Robert Greene doesn’t like AI because he appreciated the struggle of translating a passage of Thucydides when he was in college. There’s something to the idea that AI as the “answer machine” might become a crutch and make us dumber over time. What if instead of giving you the answer straight away, we designed an AI to help you derive the answer yourself (perhaps with hints or through the Socratic method).
  3. Better Maps—Add semantic search over maps. E.g. I want to find “a neighbourhood that is safe, close to public transportation, within 10m walk from one of these gyms, and has good bars & restaurants.”
  4. Language-agnositic Search—So much of the world’s knowledge remains inaccessible to many due to language barriers. A search engine that serves results regardless of the language it was originally created in.
  5. Good or Bad Deal?—Type in a purchase you’re considering & the quoted price and AI tells you if this is within distribution, along with any useful data points it finds. Especially useful for markets with non-transparent pricing. E.g. “I’m about to pay $800 for pest control in zip code 27707. Is this a fair price?” TrueCar, but for other high-ticket purchases / services. Saves consumers time researching & levels out information asymmetry.
  6. Who else is thinking about this?—Using vector embeddings + semantic search over the internet, find people who have written about the exact (niche) topic you’re researching / interested in. One flow: Link to something you’ve written and it finds the closest semantic matches across online essays, videos, podcasts, etc. Can be used by researchers, investors, ppl seeking collaborators / cofounders. The internet way too noisy to do this with a simple search on Google or X.
  7. Simple Video Rules—Describe (in natural language) a rule or trigger for a video stream, e.g. “alert if this lever ever falls off the assembly line” Can be useful in factory, home, or public space settings. Casino example to demo.
  8. AI for Patent Filing—Give it all your product docs (PRDs, design files, press release, etc.) and it generates a draft of a patent ready to submit to USPTO, complete with prior art references. Saves $5—10k per filing.
  9. Omakase—Using AI to quickly understand a user’s subjective taste and eliminate the paradox of choice with a Spotify-level recommendation system that can be plugged into any large database of content (e.g. books, films, podcasts) or marketplaces.
  10. Personal Consumer Rights Advocate—Ghostwrites letters to credit reporting agencies and banks. Initial focus on reducing debt burdens. Do what @patio11 does manually, but with AI.
  11. Disposable Software—Generate simple utilities at the speed of thought. Not sure if this is legit, but see this demo.