Last week we launched Stan, our virtual Singletrack expert. He's that speech bubble down there on the left. He's an expert on everything we've published and also on subscription issues and orders you may have placed. He also knows all about our merch - sizes, prices etc.
What he couldn;t do last week though was answer questions about the forum and inparticular individual form topics. We've been giving him lessons and they are starting (Not fully but..) to show results. Enough for me to encourage you to have a go anyway. It's an ongoing process as there's literally millions of posts but we've started from more recent history. He should nw be able to point you at individual topics.Â
So for example I just tested him with this query...
"can I take my bike on trans pennine express and are there any forum topics you can point me at about this topic?"
Because I know he's learned about a specific recent topic on the matter. Copy that and paset it for an example of what he can do right now.
Again, he's biased towards subscribers in what he says - I make no excuses for that - there's a cost to using him that we are absorbing and factoring in to subscription prices.Â
Caveat.. We aren't teaching him about individual authors. So queries about individual forum users won't be as useful as you might expect them to be. That's deliberate. It would be creepy and morally questionable.
This is all still very much BETA and we are learning as we go here about what is genuinely useful and what is not. My intention is that Stan is a genuinely useful additional function that serves Subscribers. We'll see how that evolves.
For background, we are using Anthropic as the backbone of Stan. There are a great many issues around the use of AI but the fact Anthropic told the Pentagon to **** off pleases me. I'm not saying they are angelic, but there are choices to be made with AI and where I there are, they will be considered choices.
