If I’d Just Ignored That Damn News Story…!!

So get this: two American high-school kids—two kids who supposedly didn’t even know how to code—built an app using basically OpenAI’s ChatGPT and sold it for 78 billion won... Wait. That’s actually possible? You’re telling me this GPT sitting in the black window I’m staring at right now can pull off stuff like that? Wow...

First I got hit by the money. Then I got hit again by the “high-schoolers who can’t code” part. And that was the day I discovered an app called Cal AI. Hold on... you just take a photo and AI casually figures out the calories in your food? Well, I’ll be damned. That is ridiculously cool.... Maybe that news story lodged itself a little too firmly in my head.

Living as a foreigner in Nha Trang, Vietnam, yours truly suddenly had a thought. Yeah... I don’t even have a Vietnamese keyboard installed on my phone. But what if I could just snap a picture of a shop sign and some nice, obedient AI would go, “This is this kind of restaurant, and here’s what you should know about the place~”?

So I threw the idea straight at GPT. “Hey. Can you actually do that?” And GPT basically went... DING-DONG!!! “Yep. Totally doable~~~~~~” ... I had no idea then. That one little answer... ...was the exact moment my first six-month-long adventure in spectacularly digging holes for myself began.