GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

Over the next year or two, I expect GPT-4 and its successors to become a copilot for the mind: a digital research assistant that will bring to bear the sum total of everything you’ve read, everything you’ve thought, and everything you’ve forgotten every time you touch a keyboard. 

It will solve some of the perennial problems in productivity culture: remembering what you read, then helping you apply it to your writing, your business, and your life. 

It will bring back the ideas, quotes, and memories you need, when you need them most, with no organizing, tagging, or linking required. It will work as a personalized extension of your intelligence available 24/7 at the touch of a button.

I’ve written about this a few times in “The End of Organizing” and “Where Copilots Work”, but this week it’s clear that the dominos are starting to falling into place: 

• GPT-4 sports an 8x larger context window (the main thing bounding copilot use cases is small context window sizes)
• Microsoft is building copilots into all of their Office 365 products. It aggregates all of your notes, documents, and meetings together to help you autocomplete memos, emails, and spreadsheets

It’s still early, and these technologies will need a lot of work before they are ready for prime time. Impressive demos don’t equal actually useful software.

But in this essay, I want to explore in more detail the problems that I think this copilot for the mind might solve, and what’s feasible today with the advent of GPT-4.

Let’s dive in.