Ashish Garg

Personal AI is going to be hugely important, and it works best when it knows everything about you. That's exactly what you shouldn't hand to a platform whose business depends on it. Wrote up why the version that wins is one you own.

End the Blank Box Problem Consumer AI is trying to go mainstream. But it’s still too hard to learn. We’re trying to onboard hundreds of millions of people to one of the most powerful technologies ever built with an empty text field. Open almost any AI product and you know the screen. A blank box. Maybe a few example prompts underneath. The message is simple. Ask anything. The problem is you have to know what to ask. Some products go one step further and start by asking you to connect your life. Email. Calendar. Social accounts. Finances. Health. That may eventually make the product much more useful. But it is a huge request for trust before the user understands what they are going to get in return. For experienced AI users, none of this is much of a problem. You arrive with something you need done and the experience can feel magical. I couldn’t figure out a domain redirect. I handed the account to an agent and it fixed everything. My daughter needed sheet music converted so that repeats and codas became one continuous stream she could play. My Muse, Alfalfa, did it in two shots. Something that used to take me 45 minutes of PDF editing was suddenly easy. But most people don’t arrive with a backlog of jobs for an AI agent. They arrive curious. They want to understand what this thing can actually do for them. And a blank box teaches them almost nothing. So they try the examples they’ve heard about. Book a restaurant. Find cheaper insurance. Cancel a subscription. Those demos are impressive. They also have a hidden problem. You barely do them. You might book a special dinner a few times a year. Shop for insurance even less often. Once you cancel the subscription, the job is finished. These use cases are memorable because they show off what AI can do. They rarely create a reason to come back tomorrow. Every product has a purpose, a set of core actions, and a cycle. The cycle is how often those actions naturally repeat. A lot of the famous consumer AI demos have very long cycles. That makes it hard for a habit to form. It also slows down something even more important. Learning. The missing piece in consumer AI is discovery. People need to learn what AI can do by watching what other people figured out. Consumer products learned this decades ago. TikTok didn’t require you to arrive knowing what kind of video to make. You watched other people. You saw a format. You copied it. You changed it. New behaviors spread from person to person. The feed was also an education system for the product. AI barely has an equivalent. You sit alone with your blank box. You don’t see what someone like you figured out yesterday. You don’t stumble across a clever workflow and think, “I could use that.” You don’t get better simply by opening the product every day. We built extraordinarily capable products without building the systems that teach people what those capabilities are for. There is an obvious complication. A lot of the best AI use cases are private. That doesn’t mean the learning has to stay private. You don’t need my daughter’s sheet music to learn from what I did. You only need the recipe. “Turn repeats and codas into one continuous score.” The result stays private. The idea travels. That may be the missing consumer AI primitive. A feed of things people figured out how to do. Recipes you can copy, adapt, and run on your own information. Every successful recipe teaches you one more thing the product can do. And unlike a tutorial, the library keeps getting better because the users are discovering the product for each other. Maybe the next hundred million people don’t need better prompts. They need to see what the first hundred million figured out.

Just show up.