James' World 2

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Fittingly, the CEO of a startup that hopes to take over the AI world appears on screen with what appears to be a robotic limb. 

“I’ve got this piece of metal in me now,” Dmitry Shapiro says of the high-tech brace. “It’s kind of cool, like a cyborg arm.” He ruptured his bicep while helping his family evacuate during floods in San Diego, all of which sounds kind of cool, too. Then Shapiro, 54, admits the cause: Picking up a box in the garage. As he and his wife discovered doing research afterwards, a bicep tendon rupture is most frequently felt by … middle-aged men picking up boxes. 

The problem and the solution were both duller – and more widespread and more helpful, respectively – than they seemed at first blush. Which makes the not-so-cyborg arm an even more fitting visual for Shapiro’s startup, and for where the AI industry is going next. Shapiro, a tech veteran who previously ran Google machine learning teams, co-founded his startup YouAI and launched its product MindStudio last year. MindStudio lets managers build apps using any or all of the major AI services, like OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo or Google’s Gemini. Fresh data can be sprinkled in from all kinds of other non-AI databases or documents. These AI apps can be constructed in minutes, visually, like a flow chart, without the user needing to touch a line of code — the way Windows runs on top of DOS, Shapiro notes. (Left unsaid: putting Windows atop DOS made Microsoft the wealthiest company of the 1980s and 1990s.) 

Less than a year in, MindStudio can boast more than 18,000 user-created AI apps (putting it ahead of Dante AI, a similar brew-your-own chatbot service with 6,000 user-created apps). Its growth was based entirely on word-of-mouth. Again, the 18,000 number sounds awesome and a little terrifying — like a flurry of drones — until Shapiro offers an example that drills home the mundanity of those apps. A friend of his exited the tech world, bought a pool-cleaning business, and used MindStudio to build a “pool-cleaning copilot” in a matter of minutes. Now his employees test the pH of pools and the app tells them what to do with the result. 

“The things you can do with this now would have been seen as science fiction last year,” Shapiro says, suggesting he needs to read more interesting science fiction. Still, his point stands. As it comes into focus, this technology looks less like the Terminator, and more like giving robot arms to people lifting boxes. 

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