Check out our latest post in our series about building AGI-proof businesses. Today's post is on OurRitual in honor of Valentine's Day. OurRitual passes the test for being AGI-proof ✅ because love -- and all of its complexities -- isn't going anywhere.
Why I am long Valentine's Day and human-to-human romance Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. The annual cultural celebration of romantic connection. And as February 14th approaches I find myself wondering the same thing about Valentine's Day as I do about any new startup that I meet these days: will it be a thing of the past in a post-AGI world? How can AGI disrupt Valentines Day? AI-generated romantic partners of course. As dystopian as it sounds, consumer apps that enable you to design the looks and personality of your AI girlfriend or boyfriend to your exact specifications are exploding in popularity. Already today these apps offer the ability to converse via text-based chat, send pictures, exchange voice notes, hang out on a video call or even take real-world pictures alongside an augmented reality version of your partner. Eventually these looks and personalities will be embedded into humanoid robots and the companionship will be both physical and super intelligent, blurring the lines between artificial partners and real ones and perhaps between artificial love and true love as well. A future where we are all paired with a perfectly compatible significant other doesn't sound too bad does it? Sure it does. Perfectly compatible sounds like it would be fun temporarily but ultimately extremely boring. In the words of John Legend: "Cause all of me/Loves all of you/Love your curves and all your edges/All your perfect imperfections..." The richness of our relationships stems from learning to love the idiosyncrasies that we never would have thought to design into one another in the first place and from working through our moments of friction to grow together. Without that, relationships become stagnant and happiness plateaus. If there is one thing that I have learned by being an investor in OurRitual it is that human love is worth fighting for. Millions of couples each year seek out marriage counseling precisely because it is worth putting in the work, because the payoff of true human connection is so great. It is amazing to see how many couples emerge from counseling stronger and more fulfilled in their relationship than before they had identifiable issues in the first place. So while it is true that human-to-human love might have more bumps in the road than human-to-AI relationships, as Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night's Dream: "The course of true love never did run smooth." I'm long true love. Happy Valentine's Eve.