TLDR:
I have built a custom GPT: What Would Jobs Do?
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68f7a59494c481918995e7eecb050617-what-would-jobs-do-wwjd
Becoming a Steve Jobs Fan
When I was 11 or 12, a neighborhood senior kid told me about Apple, Mac and Steve Jobs. I genuinely thought he was bullshitting me thinking that I don’t know about Bill Gates.
Fast forward, when I wanted to buy a gift for someone very close during my first US trip, a friend was like, if you really want to gift properly and on a budget, get them a iPod mini. It was the entry product and still it was too expensive when compared to other mp3 players. I was like, what this is on budget?
I was curious and went down the rabbit hole and that is how my fascination and adoration with Steve Jobs got started. It was too strong, I ended up writing a book about him in Tamil. It is been more than 10 years and now and then I still get fan mail for it.
The unfinished (actually unstarted) book on Steve Jobs!
The unintended consequence of deep diving about someone like Steve Job is, me losing my mind over when people (read tech bros, founders) channel their inner “A” and passing it as modeling the Jobsian behavior. Each and every time, I read an article referencing Jobs and the bad behavior of founders, I was like, guys, come on.!
So for a long time, I have always wanted to write a follow up book on Jobs in English. Well actually two. One, was a compilation of all his quotes. Two was to write about how one could learn from Jobs to make a dent in the universe rather than being a painful “A” I wanted to highlight the lessons, takeaways, and how he had evolved as a person and how his best was at his later point of time after learning his lessons.
I had collected, read, made notes on all the books that were available, created a playlist of his interviews running for hours.
I started compiling all his videos, interviews, books that I missed earlier and the books published after my book. (I had to rely a lot on iCon and lot of early articles across publications like Forbes, BusinessWeek, Time, Wired and Fortune to write my book; The Walter Isaacson wasn’t published when I was done with mine)
However, I never got around to writing them. I couldn’t get around to getting the transcripts from the YouTube video complilations.
Eureka! Eureka! How about a SteveGPT?
With the advent of chatGPT, and NotebookLM, I thought I could give this a shot again. I almost succeeded. ChatGPT helped me to get the transcript of the videos. NotebookLM made the researching from the books, the compilations, pretty easier. They compressed the time, it would have taken me to manually go through my notes, compiling, by a huge factor.
In the meanwhile, I also had to become AI literate and was reading a lot and seeing a lot. I also realized, the best way is to get the hands dirty, and actually build something so I can truly understand how it works. (It is one thing to lead vs actually build)
It was then it also occured to me, I could write a book, get to lot of people, yet people may struggle to apply or make it relevant for them. As one drama coach told me, “sometimes, an event/act is like a dot. There are 360 degree POV to see them”
I started wondering, what If I just don’t use AI, GenAI and LLMs to write a book but also potentially to actually help folks. For e.g people who write self help books, productivity books, run a community, where the readers/audience share their problem, learning’s, and people customize their learning’s. Well, the authors also leverage the readers mail as their content. Most of Dilbert’s strips were inspired by what the readers wrote to Scott Adam’s.
What If I could compile, consolidate, all of these things to model Steve Jobs behavior.
Building the SteveGPT
Initially, I was naive to think, I could just upload the books, give the links of the videos, and my old collection of material and voila the GPT would become a smart Steve Jobs.
Then came the learning’s on how the GPT works, need to chunk, how it stores, how it generates, how to build the knowledge base and at the end of the day, the output is a function of input, and how it really works and contributes to the mission of making the Jobs behavior, advice and input, personalized and customized.
Hopefully, unlike the book on Steve Jobs, sometime soon, I will write in detail on how I built this custom GPT and learning’s and how one could build their custom GPTs.
The name and the irony of the GPT
In the macintosh days, the team always wondered, How would Steve Jobs react to it? The team created WWJD. What Would Jobs Do? More like a play on the famous, “What Would Jesus Do? More like a dig at his messiah like complex then.
However, in the later years, when he handed over the rein to Tim Cook, one piece of advice he shared with him was something to the effect of, "never ask what I would do" and instead to "just do what's right". He often quoted that Disney fell in to trap because people always thought, what would walt do!
Anyways, it is okay to ignore the Jobs advice, and whenever you are in Jam, whenever you think you need the counsel of Steve Jobs like persona, ask this GPT, “What Would Jobs Do?”
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68f7a59494c481918995e7eecb050617-what-would-jobs-do-wwjd
