Kevin and Dennis met with investors in the summer of 2019. They had a big idea about changing the way personal information is moved around the internet in a way that works for them. All of their mock-ups made it seem like they were building a note-taking app. They were clear from the beginning that this would not be a note-taking app.
The creators wanted to create something larger. It would include all of your notes, as well as your interests, viewing history, and works in progress. If you had a search bar, you would be able to find all the information you wanted. Every piece of information was unique to you.
They were actually trying to build that. They kept changing the approach until they understood it. At one point, they were going to call their app Supernote, a half-joke that stood for "Notes and Search for Work", and at another point, they were going to call it NSFW. They came up with the name "Mem" after a few meetings. A long- imagined device that humans could use to store their entire memories. It could be memory.
It is not a note taking app. It is similar to a protocol for private information, a way to pipe in everything that matters to you, and then organize and make sense of it all. It is intended to use cutting-edge artificial intelligence to give you the information at the right time and place.
A lot of technology that doesn't exist or barely works will be required for the most ambitious version of the product. It will require partnerships with huge tech firms that may be reticent to share their data, trust from users who have to assemble it all together, and a user experience that is infinitely flexible. It could become the most powerful productivity tool on the planet if it can achieve its goals. It could change the way the internet is used.
There is a lot of data about us, but we can't actually use it. It is all trapped in the server of one of the internet companies. We want to give that to you.
We can't actually use all of the data in the world about us.
Most of the app is a note taking app. It is fast and sparse, with a few simple ways to categorize and organize them. This is not a project manager or Second Brain system.
The app already contains a tool called Writer that can generate information for you, based on both its knowledge of the public internet and your personal information, as well as a sidebar that automatically displays thread summaries.
There is still a lot that needs to be done to be more than a note taking app. Neeva is building personal search right next to web search, and Evernote has a Chrome extension that allows you to search your notes through the internet. When it became clear cloud storage was the future, it gave up on its attempt to build this itself.
A search engine for your private stuff isn't a new idea. The time is ripe for someone to build it because of recent advances in artificial intelligence.
Over the years, a series of cobbled-together ideas have formed the foundation of the company. They talked about working together while they were in college. Moody remembers a particular moment when he was at a restaurant in Oregon. He says he forgets what he ordered and he was like, "Shit, I think I've been here before." He couldn't remember if he should change his order or if he was going to make the same mistake again. This was a problem that was easy to solve. He wanted to be able to come back to the same restaurant, and a note would just pop up and say, 'The seared ahi, 10/10; the meatballs sub, send it back before it even gets to your table.' He used Apple Notes to write that idea down.
The founders knew they needed a lot of data to get their idea off the ground. It doesn't work if there's no internet. To make the app fast to open and to type into, it was necessary to make it easy to capture. They built a way for people to text notes to each other. One of the most popular features was that. It was still one of the easiest tools to use when it wasn't doing much.
The dream is not easy to remember. The dream is for all your information to be available in a single place where it can besorted and searched on your behalf. It's possible that a tool could learn a lot about you if it were able to access your records. The team began searching for bigger sources of personal information that don't require users to take their own notes.
It began with one of the biggest players in the world. The inbox is a good place to start if you want to get a single source of important online information. Users will be able to connect to their Gmail with the help of Mem, which will be able to index all of their emails. The goal is to turn all of the information into something that is easy to use. Every other platform on the internet will need something similar after that.
Even though most companies have no incentive to give anyone access to the data they have, there is a good chance it is impossible to bring the internet's knowledge of you into a single place. It would be a security nightmare if it could pull it off. They took their security responsibility seriously and have invested in platform security since the beginning. If we succeed close to our goal, we will have the most valuable data in the world, putting a huge target on our back. They want to avoid having a single point of failure. They won't sell or abuse user data. At a time when trust in digital platforms is hard to come by, it will be very difficult for them to do what they plan.
It is possible that the tradeoff is worth it.
What are they doing with your data? It is often targeted ads, which are of questionable value. Sometimes it's to make better recommendations for things to watch or listen to. By combining all your information, it can help you find more information and make it more useful.
In our very first conversation in 2020, Moody asked a question that hints at things to come. It doesn't understand what your doc is about so it can't search through the words. It can't tell you which of your other documents are relevant to the topic at hand, and it can't generate a table of contents. In the months since, some of these features have begun to be rolled out by the company. Moody was telling the truth. He says it's not just the internet giant. There are too many note apps, document holders, and collaboration tools. Me would like to be more than that.
There is a real theory of the future. The machine-learning kind is not a robot-in-disguise type.
There is a real theory of the future. The machine- learning kind is not the robot-in-disguise kind. The way people think about artificial intelligence was changed by a white paper written by a group of researchers.
The short version of a long paper uses artificial intelligence to understand full sentences, paragraphs, even entire documents at a time. That gives the engines more context with which to infer meaning, such as whether the house of money is a happy place or a sad place. The tech industry is thinking about language processing in a different way. Over the last five years, a lot of these other interesting language models have flourished because of this breakthrough.
The transformer flips the whole model of information management. It means you don't have to because the computer can organize your stuff. Digital note-taking and information storage tools have required users to care for them. It takes a lot of time and effort to organize everything and keep it in the right place. It can be difficult because you don't know what connections are going to form and how you're going to use the information.
When he explains this to me, he opens up a mem with a thread on the demise of folders and digital organization systems. There is an automated list of related mems in the right sidebar, a few of which are related to the topic of information storage. If a human were to read this, he would understand what it was about. The things I have written in the past and the things Kevin has shared with the team can be used to create a hive mind.
It is the most advanced auto-organizational tool. The term "self-organizing workspace" has been used to describe the platform by the two men. The basic app will be free, but advanced features will come at a price. Through a partnership with Openai, Mem has begun to find connections without user input.
It's possible to grab a thread on the micro-blogging site and generate a summary of its contents, as well as recommend similar threads from other users. Mem wants to do the same thing for every URL you save to the app, not just understand the URL, but everything on the page and what it is about. It's possible to combine knowledge about your history, habits, and taste with the knowledge of the internet.
The tech is not perfect, and at one point it was searched for for "transformers" to prove that it understands the difference between language models. When he searched for my name, he only found a few results because I have more than one email address. The value already outweighs the flaws when it comes to Mem X. It isn't perfect and it isn't based on the fundamental principles. Both of them are already working.
Over a year after our first conversation, the team just finished building the most futuristic thing they've ever built, and Xu shared his screen with me on Google Meet to show me the finished product. It pairs your notes with an artificial intelligence to make note-taking more collaborative.
The press release announcing the new $23.5 million round of funding would become a press release after seeing what Mem could do. He used a slash command and wrote a link to a video. With no further instructions, the artificial intelligence of the program goes into the notes of the person and finds a video with the title.
The author wrote that he wanted to order books about large language models. He writes, "Here's a list of 10 books that I'm considering:" and has Writer fill out the bulleted list with books like Deep Learning. Writer gets links for all the books. There are summaries of each one brought in by another Prompt.
It was obvious that he was excited by his own progress. I want to know which books are most similar to books I have read before. He keeps notes on everything he reads because he is the co- CEO. The writer thinks for a second and says that he might like The Book of Why or The Master Algorithm because they both take a broad, conceptual view of their subjects.
Not all of the demos worked. Some of them do
You get to a world in which Mem becomes internet infrastructure if you go along with it for a long time. A16z partner David Ulevitch compared the potential of the company to that of the Iron Man character. It could offer a way to share your data with others once it's known. There is a sign in button for three years down the line. Newflix asks if you can access your list of favorite movie genres after you sign up. You say yes. It is not just an app, but part of the fabric of users' online lives.
The idea of a self-organizing workspace is a good one.
The idea of a self-organizing workspace already works well with the app. I have been using the app off and on for more than a year and it is so good at showing me stuff that I have learned to just dump everything in there. The mobile app is a minimum viable product but it is fast and reliable.
At times, the founders talk about changing the way the internet works, connecting platforms, and reintegrating systems that have been systematically separated off from one another, and possibly one day being a threat togoogle itself. Even if they can't take over the internet, they're pretty sure they can build a search engine that knows your PreCheck number, and whether or not you should skip the ahi. They think that would make your life simpler.
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