ChatGPT recently solved a five-year-old medical mystery in seconds, and its healing powers quickly went viral after the person in question’s Reddit post was picked up by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman says this is the latest example of how artificial intelligence chatbots are increasingly being seen as “advisors” by younger generations, and the next step could be even more precise “AI life coaches” that offer specialized advice on everything from our relationships to our careers, to our finances and even healthcare. It’s a future that will be dominated by highly-personalized AI agents that promise to transform the way people seek out knowledge.
The anonymous Reddit user who posted about ChatGPT’s brilliant cure related how he’d suffered from five years’ of chronic jaw pain, and despite seeing numerous doctors and specialists and undergoing various scans, no one was able to provide him with any relief.
Desperate for a solution, the ex-boxer, whose jaw was injured as a result of that pursuit, finally turned to ChatGPT, describing his symptoms and asking it what could be done. After waiting patiently for a few seconds, the famed chatbot generated a response that put all of those medical experts to shame. It said that his jaw was probably “displaced, but moveable”, and described a simple technique he could try to try and reset it and alleviate his symptoms.
“I followed the instructions for maybe a minute max,” the user wrote. “Suddenly… no click. After five years of just living with it, this AI gave me a fix in a minute. Unreal.”
The user’s jaw-dropping story caught the attention of Reid Hoffman, who subsequently shared it on X, marveling at how it was able to deliver instantaneous relief where numerous healthcare experts couldn’t. His post was flooded with replies from others who had suffered similar jaw issues and who, like the original user, were cured by ChatGPT. According to Hoffman, it’s an illustration of the “superagency” AI provides, a word that describes its unique ability to solve almost any problem.
The story illustrates how immensely popular AI chatbots are, especially among younger generations, who turn to them for all kinds of advice. Besides their medical issues, people are turning to AI for answers to all sorts of questions they might have.
At Sequoia Capital’s AI Ascent event in May, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told an audience that while older people use ChatGPT as an alternative to Google, younger people in their 20s and 30s instead treat it as a kind of “life advisor”. What he meant by this is that younger users don’t just use chatbots to find out the weather forecast or look for a nearby coffee shop, but for answers to all kinds of personal dilemmas, such as decisions on where to study, their career choices and advice on issues with their romantic partners.
According to Altman, there are a growing number of people who immediately consult with ChatGPT for every life decision they make. “It has the full context on every person in their life and what they’ve talked about,” he said.
There are some data points to back up Altman’s claims. For instance, a Vox Media survey found that 61% of Gen Zers and 53% of millennials are now using chatbots before they turn to a search engine like Google. The younger generations are increasingly using AI, which provides concise, instantaneous answers to their questions rather than a list of links they must wade through themselves. By using AI, they can also dig deeper with follow-up questions, providing more context to get more nuanced advice.
In this way, AI chatbots have evolved beyond tools for discovering information, becoming trusted guides, mentors and life coaches. These digital aides are always-on, they never get tired or angry or frustrated with your repeated questions, and they can recall everything that was discussed before, outperforming even the most reliable and friendliest human advisors you might be able to call on.
Even as millions of people globally turn to general-purpose chatbots for advice, the technology is evolving rapidly with the emergence of “AI agents”, which can provide even more specialized assistance. Agentic AI is the next generation of large language models. AI agents are smarter, trained on more specific datasets, which makes them extremely knowledgeable about certain topics. The result of this shift is that instead of relying on an all-powerful guru that knows everything, people will rely on multiple AI-powered, domain-specific advisors.
Imagine, if you will, your own personal chatbot that serves as a kind of lifestyle coach, providing advice on how to improve your health and improve your productivity. Vyvo’s VAI OS is designed to act as a kind of “Life CoPilot” that works in concert with wearable devices that feed it a continuous stream of behavioral data. Because it can access personalized information on how active you are, the kinds of things you eat, what time you wake up and go to sleep etc., VAI OS can adapt to provide customized health-related tips and context-aware answers to your queries, based on your unique lifestyle.
VAI OS is based on a modular architecture that enables multiple AI agents to work together, consisting of a user interface layer that takes care of interactions via a mobile app, telephone or messaging platform such as WhatsApp, and an AI processing layer that combines speech-to-text, text-to-speech and general-purpose LLMs to process your data and generate its outputs.
AI agents such as VAI OS promise to transform the way people learn and discover information. No longer will knowledge be accessed via laborious search engines, which require users to trawl through a list of links and open multiple websites to find the answers they need. Instead, it will come from conversational interactions with intelligent AI agents that are aware of your context and can access a global knowledge base. They’ll be able to take autonomous actions on your behalf too, booking flights and hotels, noting appointments in your calendar, penning emails and more.
The only downside is the question of trust and privacy, but VAI OS solves this too via its blockchain layer, which manages the user’s data and identity and ensures their interactions are kept private. The data generated by wearable devices is verified, anonymized and hashed before being stored on the blockchain, so only the user can say who is able to access it. Ownership of this data is governed by a special “Data NFT”, which gives the user exclusive control over that information. This prevents the user’s data from being harvested and used to train newer AI models or sold to advertisers.
AI life coaches promise to have tremendous implications on the way people learn, solve problems and come to decisions. Since the world’s most ubiquitous search engine appeared, humans have a natural inclination to “Google it” when looking for answers, but that’s becoming much less popular now. More people have come to realize that there’s a better way.
These days, it’s not at all unusual for a 22-year old college graduate to consult an AI chatbot on their career options, even before they ask their parents. It’s a reality that speaks volumes about how far AI has come, how much younger people trust it. AI doesn’t just tell us the facts, it serves to advise, with a full understanding of the context of what people are asking of it.
In future, as AI evolves and becomes more capable, these increasingly trustworthy companions will become more proactive in the ways they assist us. We’re entering a new era where AI-based life coaching is becoming more personalized and intuitive. As the younger generations come of age, AI companions will take on an increasingly important role in their lives.
