Your Narrative Powers Genie
Building the Digital Fingerprint that makes AI think like you.
LLMs have an astonishing asymmetry built in: they know everything about the world, and yet they are fairly clueless about you. What makes AI feel impressive is when it responds to what you typed. But what makes AI feel truly magical is when its response is formed by what you didn’t have to type.
Every AI product promises personalization. The best can deliver, but the cold start problem persists: systems slowly, unevenly learn who you are through a mix of tedious explicit feedback and behavioral breadcrumbs.
Human beings are nothing if not impatient (consumers, doubly so) and products that don’t get you right off the bat are at risk of being disrupted by those that do. Genie solves this by not by watching how you stumble through enough misses to get to a win, but by looking to what you’ve already done to co-author your Narrative
It is the digital essence of who you are—a living representation of the path you’ve cut across the planet, and the curiosities, relationships, and obsessions you’ve picked up along the way. It’s how you see yourself and how you want to be seen. It's the throughline connecting your scattered interests into a coherent identity. It is also the missing link between you and AI.
At Genie, we realized that for any consumer AI product to be successful, it must have the capability to construct and use a detailed multimodal Narrative - and add to it based on continuous learning. We’ve devoted a substantial amount of our time to building the framework for Narrative, and this has proven time well spent to create the foundation for the experiences we are building on top of it.
How We Co-create Your Narrative
The standard technique for apps to create personalization is to ask users to spend a fair amount of time filling out forms about themselves - or spend even more time revealing their preferences through the trial and error of a recommendation engine.
Narrative starts with a fundamentally different approach that takes less time, less effort from a user and yet delivers better results. Instead of asking users to tell us about themselves, it asks that they show us.
Doing the math when a picture is worth a thousand words
Your phone’s photo library is the autobiography you take with you. The seventeen different ramen bowls you've photographed across three cities reveal an obsession with authentic tonkotsu. The consistent coffee shop shots show your neighborhood preferences. The sorts of pictures you take on a vacation reveal if you’re motivated by culture, or by people, or by nature, or by commerce. All these only scratch the surface of this signal. Weekend hiking photos, concert tickets, book spines, screenshots, restaurant plates—each image is a data point in your personal narrative.
For the first time, we can analyze this treasure trove entirely on-device with the supercomputer in your pocket. Using the iPhone's Neural Engine and GPU, Genie processes your photos locally, creating the building blocks of your Narrative without uploading a single image.
In addition to the obvious privacy-preservation benefits, on-device processing eliminates inference costs, reduces latency, and creates experiences that would be simply impractical if attempted entirely through cloud-based analysis. We're turning the supercomputer in your pocket into your personal intelligence engine—the co-author of your Narrative
The difference is profound. Instead of slowly training an algorithm to guess what you might like, Genie immediately recognizes who you are and what drives you: the very first time you use Genie, you will see the first chapter of your Lore - the snapshot of who you are which shows we’ve managed to learn more about you in 10 seconds than some other AI platforms have in 10 months.
With the Narrative in place, your first search feels like your hundredth because we already understand the contours of your own corner of the universe. And this is only the starting point. As the app has time to analyze more photos, your Narrative grows in depth and nuance. As you do new things and take more photos of them, new branches are added. With every Genie interaction you have, your Narrative (and the Genie experience it powers) gets even better.
The Complete Picture isn’t just Pictures
Photos are the beginning of your Narrative, but they are not the only thing. Your calendar reveals routines and priorities. Location data shows mobility patterns. Your X handle exposes more interests still. In-app behavior demonstrates real preferences versus stated ones. And of course, every question you ask Genie strengthens your Narrative.
Your Narrative makes every interaction more intelligent because it captures context no single platform can see. It connects your visual interests to your entertainment preferences, your travel patterns to your dining choices, your social connections to your cultural affinities. Every new dimension adds a layer of depth to our understanding, which helps us make an AI that simply gets you.
In the synthesis across these, we get breakthroughs and magic. Your ramen photos gain meaning when connected to that Japanese language class on your calendar and the izakaya you bookmarked. Your repeated followup questions asking if particular restaurants are quiet makes it clear how important a preference this is, and soon you don’t need to be asking about it anymore. These connections create something unprecedented: a digital essence of who you are and what you'll love next.
The Mirror Effect
Our early test users experience something profound when they see manifestations of their Narrative for the first time: they feel seen. Even when we get details wrong, users’ instinct isn't to reject the Narrative, but to correct it. Users want to refine our Narrative because they see we’ve captured something real about their identity - something that they value and seek to curate, and not merely as a utility to make AI work better.
Humans possess an irresistible urge to be understood, to have their complexity and uniqueness acknowledged. When Genie can reflect their interests back so quickly, so accurately, so beautifully, users start taking screenshots to share their Narrative with friends. It turns out that a byproduct of building a machine understanding of you is a new human understanding of you, too.
We're building on the fundamental human desire for recognition, the unstoppable force that drives viral growth. Your Narrative becomes a shareable artifact, a new way to say "this is who I am." Friends discover new facets of people they thought they knew. Conversations start around shared interests that never surfaced before. And for every time you're trying to discover something to fit your taste, you'll have a machine that gets you.
The Cross-Platform Intelligence Layer
Your Narrative becomes the bridge between every discovery vertical. Netflix sees your documentary preferences, but Genie knows you photograph art museums and follow architecture accounts—connecting your visual interests to film recommendations no single platform could make.
This intelligence travels with you. The ramen passion discovered through photos informs restaurant suggestions on OpenTable. Your hiking photography connects to weekend activity recommendations. Musical instrument photos influence Spotify discoveries. Each vertical feeds the Narrative, and the Narrative enriches every vertical.
This is the inventory-free thesis realized: pure intelligence that makes every platform more valuable while owning none of their content or inventory.
Beautiful, Modular, Unique
Great Narratives share three principles. They're Beautiful—compelling visual representations that feel more like art than data. They're Modular—different facets for different contexts, aesthetic preferences for entertainment, social interests for friend recommendations. You control which branches of your Narrative tree others see; Genie respects your privacy boundaries. They're Unique—no two people share the same combination of experiences, relationships, and obsessions.
Your Narrative isn't a user profile. It's not a preference graph. It's the digital essence of your curiosity, captured through the moments you chose to preserve and synthesized through AI that finally understands it all in context.
The Platform War That Isn't
Incumbents won't build this. They're too invested in existing data models, too risk-averse for true privacy innovation, too constrained by regulatory fears. They'll ship safe, incremental improvements while missing the fundamental shift toward narrative-driven intelligence.
We're not competing with Netflix or Spotify. We're making them more valuable by solving the one problem they can't: understanding who you are beyond their platform boundaries.
The future of discovery is understanding the story you're already telling, then helping you write the next chapter. Your Narrative powers Genie, and Genie amplifies your Narrative—creating a feedback loop that makes both more intelligent with every interaction.