(2024-04-09) The Aboard App Is A Totally Different Take On What An Ai Bot Can Do

The Aboard app is a totally different take on what an AI bot can do. Aboard is not an easy app to explain. It used to be easier: at first, it was a way to collect and organize information — Trello meets Pinterest meets that spreadsheet full of links you use to plan your vacation... Rich Ziade is showing me something very different. He opens up a beta version of the app and clicks a button, and after a second, the page begins to change. A database appears out of nowhere, with a bunch of categories — Year, Title, Genre, and more — that start to populate with a number of well-known movie titles

Maybe the best way to explain the new Aboard is not as a Pinterest competitor but as a radical redesign of ChatGPT. When Ziade made that board, all he was really doing was querying OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.

Ziade and Ford imagine three main things you might do with Aboard.

The first, “Organize,” is closest to the original vision: ask the tool for a bunch of things to do in Montreal this summer, and it’ll populate a board with some popular attractions and restaurants

The second, “Research,” is similar but a little more exploratory: ask Aboard to grab the most interesting links about African bird species, and it’ll dump them all into place for you to peruse at your leisure.

Like any AI product right now, this is sometimes cooler in theory than in reality. When I ask Ziade to make a board with important tech moments from 2004, it pulls a bunch of them into separate cards: Google’s IPO, the launch of Gmail, the iPod Mini launch. And then the iPod Mini launch again

Ford says something to the effect of “Yeah, that just happens when you ping the models.” But he says it’s also getting better fast.

The third use case, which Aboard calls “Workflow,” is where Aboard figures its true business lies. Ziade does another demo: he enters a prompt into Aboard, asking it to set up a claims tracker for an insurance company. After a few seconds, he has a fairly straightforward but useful-looking board for processing claims, along with a bunch of sample cards to show how it works. Is this going to be perfect and powerful enough for an insurance company to start using as is? No. But it’s a start.

This is ultimately a very business-y use case and puts Aboard in loose competition with the Airtables and Salesforces of the world. Ziade and Ford are upfront about this. “We want to be in professional settings,” Ford says, “that’s a real thing we’re aiming for. Doesn’t have to be for big enterprise, but definitely small teams, nonprofits, things like that.”

Were all the movies it selected Best Picture winners? Nope! Did it get the ratings right, like, ever? Nope! But it still felt like a good start — and Aboard always gives you the option to delete the sample cards it generates and just start from scratch.

The Aboard founders say they ultimately plan to connect to lots of models as those models become, in some cases, more specialized and, in others, more commoditized. In Aboard’s case, they want to use AI not as an answer machine but as something like a software generator.