How Working On Artificial Intelligence Taught Me To Be More Human.

Almost five years ago, I never thought we would come this far with artificial intelligence and machine learning for social media. Being able to watch Meshfire learn and grow from our users has been incredible. Seeing the conversation around AI technology get a lot more sophisticated recently, and seeing the big tech companies catch on to the possibilities in AI, has been an amazing feeling.

People said we couldn’t do it. To be honest, at times we’ve felt ignored or put down by our peers, and told many times that AI will never be a thing or should be outright feared. Listening to Elon Musk talk about SpaceX and his journey as a company last week really put things in perspective for me. Rockets crash, millions of dollars are lost in an instant…you could walk away or keep on pushing into the future.

Where there’s a strong will and a need for innovation, there’s always a way. I used to have a poster of Nikola Tesla on my wall, for this reason: There’s much more to be done than just what has been done. People will always tell you it won’t work, it won’t be popular, you aren’t building fast enough, it’s broken, you’re broken, you run out of coffee and money and the next thing you know all you have left is the memories of the all the times people pointed out your failures.

No matter what you are trying to build, if you know in your heart it’s something valuable, keep pushing, keep building, keep networking. At base, it’s people who make a product. Our community members, our customers and the amazing success stories of our product keep us going every day. We’ll never forget the time our product helped assist find someone in a search and rescue effort. There’s so much data on Twitter and so little time in situations like this; it’s these challenges and solutions that inspire us.

My inspiration has always been helping others figure out the power of networking through Twitter. That’s because I know and have absolute proof about how much it’s helped myself and others. Some of the connections made have been life-changing from just one tweet.

Yes… Twitter is noisy. It’s difficult for many to grasp the value. But that’s why we made Meshfire, to help sort through the mess. It may sound silly, but we made an AI to teach people to be more human, to learn how to connect with others using the platform and find what they need to find when they need to find it.

This is why I’m beyond excited to announce that we at Meshfire will shortly be releasing a set of customization features that will make all of our lives easier engaging with people on Twitter. With our “Teach Ember” feature, we’ve really brought our machine learning to the forefront. You will essentially be able to teach our AI Ember exactly what or whom you want to find or ignore on Twitter, and what actions you’d like to take next. This has been in the works for years and I am so excited to see how it can be used.

It is only a little bit of the future we are building at Meshfire, but remember that just one tweet could unlock the future for many.

Keep building, keep burning.