By Jekhan Aruliah
“If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger”. This slogan could have been written for Artificial Intelligence. Actually it was coined over a hundred years ago by the nineteenth century German philosopher Nietzche. Coined at a time when intelligent robots were the stuff of science fiction and baloney.
Nowadays the upsides and downsides of Artificial Intelligence are full of promise and full of fear. Slogans abound: The approaching “robot army” has feet to trample the slow, and shoulders for the quick to climb onto; Standing on AI’s shoulders you can see further, carried by its trampling feet you can move faster.
3Axis Labs, one of Jaffna’s smartest software engineering companies, saw the AI locomotive coming at an early stage. They weren’t going to get run over, they climbed aboard.
This bootstrapping company (relying on its own money not early stage investors) had been chasing revenue. They took almost any work that paid cash to pay their bills. Running a company costs money: salaries; rent; electricity bills; equipment. Chasing the money took all their time: finding the work, doing the work, finding more work. This unceasing cycle continued until a diasporan in the USA impressed by the team gave 3AxisLabs a substantial cash injection, a zero interest loan. The money allowed them to take one of their top talent off billable work to invest time and talent in building a product. Build the product once, own it, sell it many times. Time to give birth to their own proprietary cash cow.
3AxisLabs had been developing a website builder product. A product better than the market leader WordPress. In January 2023 they abandoned it, seeing AI tools would quickly make it redundant.
The three directors of 3Axis Labs made the decision to get off that track and climb aboard the AI locomotive. With so many possibilities the board, Prasanth Subendran; Jestan Nirojan; Saahithyan Vigneswaran, had to decide which direction to go. They chose the direction in which one of the directors, Nirojan, had great expertise: Mind Maps. In December 2023 Nirojan started the journey.
Jestan Nirojan (R)
Nirojan, has for many years already been a keen user of the mind-mapping process. Mind-mapping was popularised in the 1970s by Tony Buzan, a British born educationalist and author. It is a method to create pictorial maps of ideas, questions, information, knowledge. Maps that can be powerfully used for brainstorming, planning, problem solving, design, documenting, etc. In the 1970s mind maps were produced by hand with pencil and paper. Now there are many mind-mapping software apps, with some rushing to bolt on AI capability. Better than bolting on, 3 Axis Labs’ is developing a product from scratch with AI in its DNA. And so was born their product Mindmap AI, https://mindmapai.app/ .
The modern connected world, with its social media and online communities, has become highly collaborative. In January 2024 Nirojan built a small prototype. He exposed glimpses as animated gifs into a tech online community forum on REDDIT. REDDIT enables subject specific sub communities of people with common interests: Jokes (65 million members) ; Cake Decorating (500k members); and many less serious and many more serious forums. With the positive informal feedback from REDDIT, providing free appreciation and suggestion, within four months Nirojan had a basic working model. Nirojan created a forum on ZULIP, a more structured online chat application that says of itself “We created Zulip to empower teams to collaborate effectively, so that they can accomplish amazing things together”. Nirojan relied on Zulip to handle customer requests and address questions, fostering a very community-oriented approach to support.
For the next three and a half months Nirojan tweaked and polished the app, putting out versions for comment from the forum. Until he was ready to publicly launch the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in April 2024. MVP is the next level of getting visibility and feedback. Making the product, warts and bugs and all, available to a limited group of live users. Putting the product out there for the target market to actually use: identify faults and strengths and suggest new ideas.
So with the MVP out there it was necessary to get people to actually come and use the product. One and a half months of traditional SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) drew only 100 clicks a month. Then it clicked with Nirojan: he started using Machine Learning and AI to improve the SEO. Nirojan would write the first draft of an article, use AI to analyse the keywords and topics, and rewrite based on AI suggestions. Then he would resubmit this second draft to AI, and repeat the process. From 1,000 clicks a month, his site now (November 2024) gets 1,000 clicks a day with 30% returning visitors. At the time of writing this article (November 2024), he has 30,000 registered users since the April 2024 launch. This increased by 5,000 in the week I was drafting this article (November 2024), and will be higher by the time you read it.
Mind Maps have many uses. For this article I focus on one: planning a business.
Starting a business is a risky business. Many entrepreneurs who are new to a business or new to a territory not only don’t know the answers, they don’t know the questions. Before knowing the answers, you need to know the questions. As a mentor in Jaffna I meet so many who meet me for answers, and leave with more questions than answers. Questions they hadn’t thought of. I rarely spoon-feed answers. If they can’t come up with the answers they are perhaps in the wrong business.
One of my personal pipe-dreams is starting a comedy club here in Jaffna. So I asked the MindMap how to do this:
I encourage you to try it, https://mindmapai.app/. When I tried I was quite startled by its artificially intelligent outputs. I also asked the same question about the comedy club to ChatGPT, which provided 431 words of useful text. But in my opinion far less useable. Not least because “a picture is worth a thousand words”.
The world is changing. The route from idea to successful execution can be a very rocky road. AI has removed and moved some rocks on the road, and sometimes moved the road itself. Technology advances for hundreds of years have displaced those at the lower end of the human heap, those who did routine tasks. Now AI is eroding the strongholds of those at the top, those who use their intelligence. This applies if you run a country, a conglomerate, a campsite, or cooking dinner. An inexperienced CEO can go to an Artificial Intelligence engine, and ask it what the key questions and answers are. Even an experienced CEO should do this. Everyone’s experience is limited by what they have experienced, read, been taught, by the people around them, and by their personal prejudices. The AI engine is also limited by its LLM (Large Language Model), by the “Black Swan Event” (the highly unlikely) and by the “Human Stupidity Factor”. It struggles to deal well with the very stupid and the very unlikely. As Mike Tyson, former heavyweight boxing champion, famously said “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”. Tyson’s comment applies to AI too, it too can get punched in the face.
A capable human who climbs onto AI’s shoulders will see further than AI by itself. Currently publicly available AI apps (doubtless the Pentagon and Elon Musk have better) don’t see that far. For example, ChatGPT tells you what the information sources it used to get its output. In my tests this is sometimes as few as two. This is less than a moderately competent journalist or researcher would use.
AI still needs a good human head on top of the “robot”. To prosper into the future learn to use the AI. Make AI your tool. Stand on its shoulders and be that head.
( — The writer Jekhan Aruliah was born in Sri Lanka and moved with his family to the UK when he was two years of age. Brought up in London, he graduated from Cambridge University in 1986 with a degree in Natural Sciences. Jekhan then spent over two decades in the IT industry, for half of which he was managing offshore software development for British companies in Colombo and in Gurgaon (India). In 2015 Jekhan decided to move to Jaffna where he is now involved in social and economic projects. He can be contacted at jekhanaruliah@gmail.com — )