LowTech AI: Simple AI Tools for Everyone

Our mission

Simplify powerful AI systems to help more people harness their abilities and improve their work and lives.

What does our mission mean?

In a recently study from MIT on the usefulness of AI tools in the workplace, workers with access to ChatGPT were 2x as productive, produced higher quality work, and reported feeling significantly more enjoyment in their work compared to those without access to AI tools. This study was published in March 2023 using ChatGPT (an ancient model at the time I'm writing this in June), and it’s clearly just the beginning! Imagine where we’ll be 5 years from now.

With tech available today, these generative AI tools already have the potential to significantly change the way we do business and live our lives. We want to make sure more people reap the benefits of this technology. Right now tech-savvy people benefit disproportionately more from AI (their productivity doubles!), and this "intelligence inequality" problem will significantly compound over time.

We want to arm everyone with an internet connection with AI tools. We want to connect the best models to the best prompts via the simplest interface imaginable and pry out the maximum usefulness of these systems. We want to make AI more simple, approachable, accessible, and useful, especially for first time AI users and non-technical people.

We want to be the gateway for the next billion AI users.

What do we define as an AI tool?

We think that a well-crafted, templated prompt is the simplest form of an AI tool. Prompts combined with LLMs transform simple forms into powerful tools backed by decades of research and development. We label these templated prompts as "AI Tools" throughout our app, it's what they are at their core.

Here's a basic summarization tool.

What are we building?

We’re the platform for simple AI tools. ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, and the other AI Chatbots are amazing, but prompting is a new-age skill that requires practice. Writing a great prompting isn't as hard as learning to code, but it’s not something most people intuitively understand like an “experienced” prompter. Staring at an empty (but infinitely powerful) chat box is intimidating.

LowTech AI's tools today are simple fill-in-the blank interfaces tied to high quality prompts; it’s our earliest prototype as we figure out what works. We’ll continue to build out new ways to input/ingest information, search for relevant tools, save access to your most used/best tools, and share tools with your friends and coworkers. Our interface aims to be familiar and completely model agnostic. Behind the scenes we’ll switch out the underlying details and serve our users simplified magic. Just show up, follow directions, and use it.

Having a thriving AI tools platform is only possible with an army of motivated prompt engineers, so we're making the platform a place they’ll love too. We believe that prompt engineering is such a unique skill with its own set of problems, that it deserves a new home. Prompt engineers should be able to create prompts, fork prompts, track versions of their prompts, and most importantly display a portfolio of their their work to the world. We want to become this “Github for Prompts,” and help grow the usefulness of our platform for prompt engineers and novice AI users together. If you can type, you can prompt, and this will be a skill applicable across most industries and professions. We hope to onboard the first significant wave of both hobbyist and career prompt engineers.

Finally, in addition to our product, we’re creating a rich content library with the help of our LowTech AI Researcher Fellows. Twelve researchers are joining us this summer to publish a series of articles on the applications of generative AI in specific areas from “AI for Lawyers” to “AI for Math Teachers” to “AI for Fitness”. We’re excited to go deep into these niches and produce valuable, researched content to serve as an onramp into the world of AI. Articles are written to be easy to understand and immediately practically useful. Stay tuned for great insights.

This is an experiment

We’re not exactly sure where this project will go, but it’s solving a society level problem we think is important. More people should be using AI tools, but they’re not. Some don't know how, and others don't see the value in them yet. We’re trying to remove any remaining excuses and make tools so dead simple and unbelievably useful that they’re impossible to ignore.

We’re spreading our wings as wide as possible on the outset of LowTech AI. AI for Everyone. This is a deliberate choice, everyone will be affected, but it's also part of the LowTech experiment. Some professionals, academics, and hobbyists will find our tools extremely useful, others won’t. We’re excited to see where our intuition, users, and data takes us.

We’ve got a ton to do to make AI lower-tech for millions of people, so let’s get after it!

To get involved yourself, sign up for LowTech AI today.