On a recent morning at his Atlanta office, Bill Nguyen tore open a large package and lifted out a high-end desktop computer.
âThis thing weighs like 30 pounds!â said Nguyen, a serial entrepreneur whose boundless energy and wiry frame make his age â 55 â slightly difficult to fathom.
When he peered inside the box, he unearthed a top-of-the-line Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics card. âI suspect it is going to make me train something.â
Nguyen didnât order the machine, but he had a good idea of who did â his AI assistant. Itâs another component in his bid to build an AI system that can operate as his proxy â moving far beyond a chatbot to create a virtual body double that can absorb enough information about how he communicates and what he values, so that it can make decisions and take actions on his behalf.
Nguyen, who has made a small fortune selling multiple companies to Apple and recently launched a voice-recognition startup calledOlive, said his personal AI has all but taken over his life. Now when he wakes up most mornings, he consults the agenda his AI assistant has crafted for him, and then spends his days following its directions.
The AI has permission to email people on his behalf, and sometimes sets up in-person meetings with people he has never met. It listens to conversations he has with his three kids, and then suggests parenting advice, which he says has improved his relationship with them.
Nguyen is a portrait of an emerging class of token-maxxing power users who are plunging tens of thousands of dollars to MacGyver next-level AI assistants, not by waiting for the next big model release, but by orchestrating todayâs models in loops, with more computing power, more passes, and more automated checking â and a massive dose of risk tolerance. The idea is to give the system an unlimited amount of tokens and access to every conceivable piece of relevant data.
âI didnât ask it to help me,â Nguyen said. âI asked it to be me.â
If Nguyenâs account sounds out of reach for most people, thatâs because, for now, it is â at least financially. Nguyen declined to say publicly how much he is spending, but the higher levels of reliability and capability from the AI assistant come, in part, by spending gobs of money on more tokens, the small units of text that AI providers bill for when developers use their models through APIs.
While many people interact with AI through $20 to $200 per-month subscriptions, Nguyen said he pays per token and runs multiple models repeatedly, sometimes in parallel. At first, there was a sticker shock. âIâm like, oh my God, this is really expensive.â It would be unaffordable for most people, he said.
Source: Drudge Report
