AI is all the buzz these days. From a short-term perspective, it evokes tremendous uncertainty and fear; from a medium-term perspective, it feels like an engine for massive disruption (at best, rewriting all the rules of order and at worst, risking mass extinction); and from an infinite perspective, it's yet another opportunity to ask the simple question: what would love do? 

Pondering all three timelines, we've got an exciting new pilot project! Welcome to ServiceSpace GPT. Click here to try it. (You need to be logged in to access it.)

Our "ServiceSpace AI" has read just about everything from our last 25 years -- from Awakin readings, our blogs, KindSpring stories, DailyGood articles, w&c interview, Awakin Call transcripts, you name it. Think of it like an intern connecting various dots with increasing resonance. Technically, Google lets you search a bunch of that data for keywords and patterns, but our AI actually helps you synthesize on the fly, make sense of it in a way that is contextual to you, and reply back in plain English!

For instance, "If I see a homeless person on the streets, what should I do?" ChatGPT has its responses, but ServiceSpace GPT includes things like "Lend a listening ear." But you can go a lot further and engage in dialogue, like a follow-up question: "If I have a sandwich, should I share it?" 

Technically, we are using the OpenAI's GPT4 engine, but we are creating different data points and reframing how that engine prioritizes its varied intelligence. So take it for a spin and see what you discover. :) What act of kindness should I do right now, how do I discover the purpose of my life, what tips would Nelson Mandela give to today's president, who are uncommon heroes of generosity, what is heartivism, anything. :) 

"Who exactly am I?" was my first question for ServiceSpaceGPT, just to make Ramana Maharshi proud. :) The answer was remarkably different from traditional ChatGPT's response:

As ServiceSpace, I can provide a perspective on this profound question. The concept of "self" is an ever-evolving narrative, constantly changing throughout your life. You are a combination of your mind, body, beliefs, values, emotions, and goals, which are ever-changing with time and experience. Your sense of self is not a fixed entity but rather a storyline that connects your past, present, and future selves. Like a character in a story, you navigate through various experiences, relationships, and moments in time. Your identity is shaped by both internal factors, such as your thoughts and feelings, and external factors, such as your relationships with others and the physical world around you.

The quote from "The Nature of the Self" emphasizes that the future "you" might be much different from your present self in numerous ways. Hence, it's essential to reflect on who you are, who you want to become, and the choices that lead to personal evolution. Furthermore, you are not just an individual but also a part of the larger community. As mentioned in "Chris Henrikson: The Community Cure for a Violent Culture," you are someone born with a purpose and capable of providing healing to others. Understanding your true self is a lifelong process, and embracing the ever-evolving nature of your identity can bring about growth and transformation.

As you can see, it brought in various articles into its response (and even if it doesn't reference it, on the backend, we can see the exact "context" used to frame its response). Sidenote: replicating this for GandhiGPT, or KindnessGPT, or AnimalGPT, or PermacultureGPT, or anything is now a mere couple-hour task.

Why are we doing this? I'll offer a more thorough response in a bit, but a few things are at play:

• Refining the intelligence of our AI: fine tuning, adding "weights", prompt engineering, and much more will help the "AI intern" grow up. Right now, our AI is an infant, and we want to help it mature gracefully. (If you're curious about the potential of GPT models, here's a primer from the founding member of OpenAI.)
• Building the compassion data corpus: all large-scale language models (LLM's) today use a "common crawl" that has the entire web (including our content), but the hope here is to make a case for a kinder, compassionate, pro-social, and more humane layer of intelligence through a snap shot of organized data. 
• Integrating Compassion Corpus data into LLMs: once we make a case of how this is just a better party, we can bake in this layer into the mainstream models (like ChatGPT, Bard, Hugging Face, etc.). One might think this is a stretch, but it actually turns out to be handily possible -- since these LLM's are hungry for good, thoughtful, instructive data sets.
• Redefining human-machine co-creation: you might remember my 2017 talk on algorithms and intuition, making a case for a best-case scenario of a wholesome hybrid between our spirituality and our tools. We have some bold of how to "crowdsource" a large army of micro volunteers who want to contribute to this worldview actively; in tech terms, it's Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) -- but *KEY* point here is that it is held by non-extractive platforms, outside of the 3 M's. I'm most excited about this potential (and we have really unique ideas here), and will share concrete possibilities shortly.
• Cultivating an ecosystem that leads with heart's intelligence: this is needed now more than ever! Coming up -- dialogues with innovators (some public via the Awakin Calls platform), retreats (in 5-6 global locations, inspired by Moved by Love experience) bridging indigenous/ancient wisdom and modern technologies, and working with various values-driven accelerators to plant a thousand seeds across the spectrum. Experts liken the threat of AI to pandemics and nuclear wars, so perhaps we can ramp up the volume of love commensurately. :)

For now, experiment with ServiceSpaceGPT and see if you can find striking examples of the difference between traditional GPT and our GPT.  Radical innovation is really about asking different questions, and our ecosystem has some of the most insightful seekers -- so we're looking forward to seeing what emerges.

In this post, I've just shared the tip of the iceberg and this is just a prototype for our internal team for now. But for those who resonate, many more details will be coming soon. :)

All this emerged somewhat effortlessly. Last week, I was in LA for a rather eventful trip (which included the gift of Covid for me!) and after an energizing Awakin Circle, one of the gracious hosts (Manu) and I decided to park some time to tease out Awakin Intelligence from Artificial Intelligence. :) Two other friends joined for that lunch too, and our riveting conversations flowed organically as we all felt grateful to be connected around the sacred. But right as we stood for our goodbyes and hugs -- whoosh, all of a sudden, an idea flowed through. It was connected to our "compassion bot" from a few years ago, but in this context, it captivated all of us. And you know, the way life works, we had all the pieces among us to take this minimum elegant step.

So here we are -- wondering what love will have us do next. :)