The seed for startup founder John Vincent Lee‘s latest endeavor was planted while scrolling on TikTok, where he saw a brief video about a couple in Brazil who planted 2 million trees over 18 years to restore a deforested region.
Inspired by their story, Lee, the founder and former CEO of Seattle-based peer-to-peer laundry startup Loopie, searched GoDaddy for the domain “ChatGPTree.ai.”
“As soon as it said it was available, I was like, “OK, I think I need to try to create this thing,” Lee said, just days after launching the beta of ChatGPTree, a generative AI tool that works just like the OpenAI juggernaut from which it borrows its clever name, but with an added eco-friendly twist.
ChatGPTree users pay $11 per month ($9 less than ChatGPT Pro) to access an AI bot that will help with email replies, cover letters, dating advice and more, and at the end of each month, the company plants a tree in the name of each subscriber.
The goal is to push back against the growing environmental costs of generative AI, driven by the massive water and energy demands of data centers that power the tech, and do some good for the planet via AI chats that millions of people are already having.
“People want to feel better about using AI,” Lee said. “Instead of just extracting value, let’s use AI to give something back to the planet, and build a system that makes that kind of goodness scalable. Be intentional about it, so it’s not artificial intelligence for the sake of speed and access to information. What we really need in this moment, I think, is intentional AI.”
ChatGPTree is the first initiative launched out of Lee’s new Compassion Ventures, a venture studio and fund aimed at high-growth “regenerative” startups. In a post on LinkedIn, Lee said such startups “heal and enrich the systems they touch: ecological, financial, technological, and human.”
Lee launched Loopie in 2018 in a bid to attract customers who hated doing laundry and washers who were OK with getting paid to do the chore. The startup raised $5 million and scaled to nine cities before selling off parts of the business to competitors last year and eventually winding down.
Lee has been working out of New York City for close to a year and said he’ll probably operate ChatGPTree out of Seattle this summer. He also has a strong network in Los Angeles and will continue to jump around.
ChatGPTree’s large language model is integrated with OpenAI’s GPT-4 API. Its answers are pretty similar to how ChatGPT would respond, but Lee said some tweaks enable ChatGPTree answers to be a bit more concise “to save as much energy as possible.”
As a test, I prompted both tools with the same question: “I’m thinking about starting an AI tech company. What concerns should I have about the tech’s environmental impact?”
ChatGPTree offered up a list of six concerns with short explanations for how to potentially offset those concerns. “Want to dive deeper into a specific area?” it asked.
ChatGPT replied similarly but at greater length, with seven categories highlighting areas of concern, with each area featuring two or three additional bullet points on what I could do to mitigate those concerns. It ended by asking, “Would you like help drafting a green AI policy or sustainability framework for your company?”
For the tree-planting aspect of the business, ChatGPTree has partnered with a European company called Evertreen. To start, trees will be planted in Oregon and Madagascar.
“I’ve enjoyed learning a little bit more about trees, which is something I didn’t expect to do, having been focused on building technology for the last few years,” Lee said, after rattling off how much CO2 a 50-year-old Douglas fir tree in Oregon sequesters per year.
Beyond the “Solo Sapling” plan for one user at $11/month, ChatGPTree will offer a “Starter Grove” plan for up to 10 team members and a “Lush Forest” plan for up to 50 members using the bot.
ChatGPTree employs about five people right now. Compassion Ventures has raised a small amount of cash from one family office, but is mostly self-funded.
Since the beta launch, Lee is spending some time doing outreach with potential customers, getting a better gauge of how people use AI and how they view its environmental impact. Some have told him they’ll use AI for everything no matter what, while others abstain from the tech on principal.
So he’s providing a platform that might appeal to both sides.
“We’re thinking of it from a really big, audacious goal standpoint,” Lee said. “If 100,000 people use ChatGPTree, we’ll plant over 1 million trees a year. That’s not a feature to me. That’s a future.”
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