Project Update
Dear Friends of Unsearch,
We started Unsearch to help people find better answers to their professional questions. In our build over the past 3 months, several learnings have become more apparent to us.
There are already many existing networks and communities. Walled gardens that have proliferated partly in response to an increasingly less trustworthy internet
People share a lot of valuable information in conversational dialogue, whether in communities or companies. Most of this information is never captured or used.
Recent advancements in AI, and NLP in particular, make it increasingly easy to mine this previously untapped reservoir of knowledge.
We are excited by some of the possibilities that this presents. Instead of knowledge bases that are mostly manual and tedious, there could be a AI-concierge in every organization that is an oracle of collective wisdom. This could facilitate accurate information transmission across a large number of people. In addition, instead of pinging 10K+ people to find a few, a machine could enable people connections based on skillsets, know-how or experience.
To that end, we have started working with a few communities and corporates over the past month to pilot this idea, primarily training the AI on the organization’s conversational data in Slack as a start. Our early results have been promising and we are excited by this new direction. Unfortunately, given our limited resources, this also means that we will need to sunset the public Unsearch network. While we certainly see potential for an AI to facilitate professional introductions and knowledge sharing across organizations, it is likely much further down the road from where we are today.
With that, on behalf of our small team, I want to thank each and every one of you for being a part of our journey so far. Many of you are friends and/or professional contacts we know personally, and have been more than generous with your time and expertise. As a small gesture of thanks, we would love to offer this tool for free to anyone here to deploy in an organization of their choice. If you might be interested, just reply to this email, and I will ping you when we are ready.
Again, thank you for being a supporter over these past 3 months. Please let us know if we can ever be of help and don’t be a stranger :)
With much gratitude,
Shawn