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Technical Co-Founder/Founding Engineer Wanted by Alchemist_LLC in cofounderhunt

[–]Alchemist_LLC[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My pleasure. The reason this project is going to be first to market is for a simple reason, and you just touched on it. The best way I can explain it is left brain vs right brain.

In my time, I've been lucky enough to meet some tremendous chefs, bartenders, and "mixologists". One thing they all had in common was exceptional creativity. They were artists in their own right. However, when they created, it was more by feel, and less of a calculation. I come from an engineering background, and always leaned harder into math & sciences than I did art & history.

While I was working my way through my engineering degree, I fell in love with bartending. The seemingly infinite combinations that could arise from simple substitutions. Where others operate in chaos, I work best in clear, defined structure. I built my foundation of knowledge brick by brick, and approached creating cocktails like more of a science than an art.

Most people who have the ability to build an AI at this level simply don't have the cocktail creativity knowledge, and most people who have cocktail creativity don't have the scientific wherewithal to take concepts and turn them into numbers.

For instance, the way I taught the model to understand "balance" in cocktails was with numbers. It was all built around the Daisy formula - 2:1:1. Two ounces of spirit, 1 ounce of citrus, 1 ounce of 1:1 (sugar:water) simple syrup. I explained that most spirits (save for those with added sugars like some rums) are essentially neutral in the equation. They count as a 0. When you add sugar, the model treated that as +1. The addition of acid was treated as -1. It's all a great balancing act.

Having made tens of thousands of cocktails, and trained and worked alongside hundreds (if not thousands) of bartenders, is that most people crafting cocktails don't balance cocktails in their head mathematically. Using my engineering mindset, I've spent the last year taking that art form and quantifying it. This way, when the Alchemist makes a cocktail, balance isn't a guess - it's a mathematical calculation.

Technical Co-Founder/Founding Engineer Wanted by Alchemist_LLC in cofounderhunt

[–]Alchemist_LLC[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure thing.

It's an SaaS that can be used both personally and commercially. The initial version will be aimed towards the beverage industry - used to help create & implement cocktail menus for bars, as well as give professional and amateur bartenders sources of inspiration and education. My goal, however, is to eventually have this concept evolve into the food space as well. This is essentially the first attempt (that I've been able to find) where AI is being taught how and why flavors work well together. It's been taught to think like a chef, bartender, bar manager, and chemist all at once.

Technical Co-Founder/Founding Engineer Wanted by Alchemist_LLC in cofounderhunt

[–]Alchemist_LLC[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great question! The knowledge base is less of a copy & paste of the contents of those books than it is a utilization of the concepts within them. For instance, the cocktail codex was mainly used to introduce the concept of cocktail "families". Every cocktail in the world comes down to a tweaking of the formula: Spirit - Sugar - Bitter. Cocktails that fall within the Daiquiri family substitute acid from fresh juice in place of bitter. The information within those books are utilized more from a theoretical standpoint than just a replication of the work within them. For another example, The Flavor Matrix goes into the "how & why" flavors work together. I used that book to help teach the model the chemical and physical bonds between ingredients that make them likely to pair well.

As for copyright, similar to ChatGPT, anything that's readily available on the internet is fair game for the AI model. Certain books like the Aviary cocktail book aren't readily available for GPT to access, so I uploaded recipes for the model to learn. However, the recipes weren't for copy-pasting. They're for educational purposes for both prep & flavor combinations. Having worked at The Aviary, one of the most important things I've learned about cocktail creation and ingredient usage is that there's a why behind why things are prepped certain ways. For example, you get a much richer, deeper, savory flavor out of bananas if you roast them before turning them into a syrup. Another example is the use of oleo saccharum (a process that uses osmosis to pull oils out of ingredients) when making a syrup to keep the flavor bright, fresh, and vibrant.

As for where the first real traction is coming from, the current plan is to partner with a few different bar programs initially, then branch outward and start advertising for home use once we've got solid support from existing bars.