Imagining an AI‐Native Social Network | Intent, 022

Intent is all about helping talent in tech become more intentional with their career by staying informed, fluent, and aware of what’s going on in and around the industry.

Hey there, Intent community — new rhythm drop:

• Tuesdays = news + analysis.

• Thursdays = essays straight from our CEO’s brain (no ghost‑writing, promise).

Consider these Thursday notes a quick coffee with Sherveen, our CEO — one big idea we want to talk about. And here’s the first…

What Could an AI-Native Social Network Actually Look Like?

Ever since it was rumored that OpenAI is working on a social network, people have been speculating on what it will look like. But most people’s guesses are “ChatGPT‑with‑a‑feed.”

That’s like predicting the iPhone would’ve just been a music-playing flip phone. If we unshackle our imagination a little bit, an AI‑first network could rewrite how we form groups, swap knowledge, even build identity.

Below are ten ideas of how it could look if we got creative with it – a mash‑up of my own brainstorming, plus nudges from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok. Pick your favorite; tell me what I missed.

1. Prompt Clubs

Think "book club" meets Midjourney prompt group. Small, curated rooms where users collaboratively riff on a central prompt or topic. The LLM acts as a facilitator, generating nudge-responses, relevant data, visualizations, and summaries, while users branch, remix, and build upon each other's ideas.

2. Personality Leasing

Imagine Midjourney's profile codes, but for LLM interaction styles. Users could borrow pre-defined or user-generated ChatGPT personalities – adopt a "skeptical investor" voice for analyzing a pitch, a "scientist” or “therapist” for exploring a particular problem, or even blend multiple voices for different use cases (work, research, fun).

3. LLM‑Driven Multiplayer Games

Go beyond simple chatbots into rich, interactive narrative experiences. Think improv theatre, complex choose-your-own-adventures, or Dungeons & Dragons campaigns where the LLM serves as a dynamic, responsive game master, crafting worlds, characters, and consequences in real-time based on player input.

4. GPT‑Fueled Debates

Picture Twitch meets the Oxford Union, moderated and augmented by AI. LLMs could structure debates, provide real-time fact-checking or context, generate summaries, and even allow participants to deploy personal AI agents to help formulate or counter-attack arguments. Viewers could get AI-generated TL;DRs, citation trails, and maybe even "logical clarity" scores.

5. Memory Graphs

Move beyond a literal post to visualize the mindset behind it. Imagine any post accompanied by a semantic map showing the poster’s related beliefs, intellectual influences, shifts in thinking over time, or core motivations. We often follow people for how they think more than what they say.

6. The Rabbit Hole

Each post has a branching portal, connecting you through LLM-infused meaning – not just by keywords – to adjacent ideas, older posts and Twitter moments, deep dives, and novel questions. And so a post can be a forever branch into the chronology or the deeper meaning of a thing, allowing for endless spelunking.

7. LLM‑Mediated Invites

Your AI can flag someone else as a potential valuable contributor to something you post (and negotiate with their AI to make sure it’s a good idea). A political tweet can get a scientist’s point of view. A fintech thread gets augmented by the CEO of a startup or a skeptical investor. Inclusion becomes AI-mediated and frequent.

8. Living Profile Pages

Your profile becomes a dynamic reflection of your current state of intellectual and practical being, not just a list of what you’ve posted. Based on your asks, your interactions with ChatGPT, content you’re consuming, and your outputs, it surfaces what you’re currently learning, consuming, expert in, or open to discussing — facilitating more relevant connections.

9. Prompt the Collective

Ask something vulnerable, get it crowdsourced, like “How should I deal with career change?” GPT distributes it across the network in disguised fragments. Some users will get a direct prompt to answer. Someone else will get a minigame or a story prompt. No one’s responding to you directly, but you get back an AI-fueled synthesis of the collective’s insights and experiences.

10. AI‑Encapsulated Artifacts

GPT doesn't just facilitate conversation; it canonizes significant moments. Imagine sprawling, multi-day discussions or viral threads automatically distilled by AI into enduring artifacts – a podcast episode summarizing the key arguments, an interactive timeline, a visual moodboard capturing the sentiment, or even a deeper interpretive piece expressed through generated music or imagery.

So what? If these resonate, it hints the winner in AI social will feel closer to software‑defined community than scrollable feed. The bigger shift: AI moves from content generator to context architect.

(related: my thoughts on how Midjourney's personalization feature should inspire everyone building an AI product)

A few short shares —

• VC in the ICU? Dan Gray (Head of Insights at Equidam, startup valuation platform) argues venture capital’s unit economics are fundamentally broken. Blog post here.

• In the Boston area? The Feedback Loop is live at Harvard tomorrow (4/25) — student founders pitch, they get unfiltered investor feedback, you eat popcorn. RSVP here!

• Free workshop: AI‑Enabled PM — Build Better, Faster with Just ChatGPT – Join me on Monday, Apr 28, 4pm ET/1pm PT. Free & virtual, RSVP!

Think a friend could use a dose of Intent? Forward this along and tell them Thursdays just got nerd‑ier.

Sent with Intent,
Sherveen Mashayekhi