Tim Ferriss interviewed Elad Gil in the video: “The AI Frontier and How to Spot Billion-Dollar Companies Before Everyone Else"

Tim asked Elad about some of the more interesting things he was doing with AI. Almost as an aside, Elad said he uploads founder photos to AI to predict whether they'd succeed, and talked about how accurate those impressions were.

“The weird thing I've been doing is uploading pictures of founders and asking the models to predict if they'd be good founders. Because if you think about it, we do this all the time when we meet people, right? We quickly try to create an assessment of that person and their personality and what they're like. And there's all these micro features, like do you have crow's feet by your eyes which suggests that your smiles are genuine, and what does that imply about the sense of humor you have, or furrowed your brow over time and what does that mean? So there's all these like micro features and when you meet people you actually can get a pretty quick impression of them pretty fast. It doesn't mean it's correct, right, but we actually do this really fast as people so i have this whole like set of prompts that i've been messing around with just for fun around can you extrapolate a person's personality based off of a few images? And therefore can you be predictive about their behavior in any way?”

My first reaction: that's fascinating.

My second: wait, isn't that just profiling?

We've always read micro-expressions. AI didn't invent the judgment. But scaling a human bias doesn't sanitize it.

It’s a fascinating, wide-ranging interview, and this felt like a fairly innocent comment as part of a wider discussion, but I went from ‘wow that’s interesting’ to ‘oh, wait.’