GPT-4: A Copilot For The Mind (2023)

Large language models are perhaps the ultimate study buddy, that one thing that might help you actually absorb information while you’re reading. That’s Dan Shipper’s vision, as outlined in this essay from March 2023. Dan’s essay from last year stands out as a prescient reflection on what’s come since. And with OpenAI’s Dev Day set for October 1 and Every taking a quarterly Think Week, we thought it was ripe to republish as part of our week of essays on the power of ChatGPT.

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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 its 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.

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