Ever wonder what’s going on at the club?

What do the club’s bylaws say about how many directors are needed to form a board? How does the FCCJ’s first-quarter revenue compare with the same period a year ago, and the five years before that? What board resolutions related to club restaurants were considered over the past 12 months?

Those are all fair questions to ask of the president. As it happens, I can answer any of those and many more in seconds. And that’s not because minute details of the club’s operations, board moves and bylaws are at the top of my mind and tip of my tongue.

It’s because I’ve built a set of AI-driven applications that can accurately answer an astonishing array of detailed questions about the club’s operations. One of these, the FCCJ Bylaws Expert, is already available for members to use. 

It's here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-KC28M4WPH-fccj-bylaws-expert

I’ll be the first to admit, bylaws can be boring. But when you need to know fast, this app is what you need. 

The FCCJ Minutes Cool 1.0 allows natural language queries of years’ worth of board minutes. It is awaiting board approval for distribution, as it would be based on text that is ostensibly available only to members who seek a court order. I’m of the view that the rule against disclosing minutes should be discarded immediately, but that’s something the board should take the time to look at carefully and vote on soon.

The third is FCCJ Show Me the Money.’ This one answers natural language questions about the club’s financial results. Want to know the club’s net cash position in May? Just ask and it will deliver in seconds. Want to see a chart comparing monthly net cash levels for the past five years? Quarterly year-on-year spending levels? Revenue vs spending ratios? Just ask. It’s all yours, fast and easy.

I’m guessing you’re thinking there must be some caveats. Indeed, there are. None of these offer answers that are 100% accurate 100% of the time. The best, so far, is FCCJ Bylaws Expert. But even that one sometimes returns a stinker.

That’s one reason I hope you’ll spend some time with it, asking questions and checking the answers for accuracy. If the answer’s wrong, smash the thumbs down button, or just type in WRONG! (kinda fun?) If just 20 members spend 20 minutes each doing this, the applications accuracy will soar. Within a few weeks, it should be fully accurate and ready for release to the general public.

FCCJ Show Me the Money is going to take a couple more weeks, before it’ll be ready for members to play around with. It runs on data from Excel worksheets, and the formatting of those has to be extremely logical and consistent. Making every worksheet consistent has been a significant amount of work, but I’m committed to making it happen all the way. Soon, anyone in the club can analyze the club’s financial figures quickly and easily, following their curiosity, or concerns, wherever it leads them. And the more it gets used, the more accurate and insightful it gets, in theory. To be sure, there have been cases of such models actually declining in accuracy. But the number of such incidents is falling fast. This technology is improving by the day.

Really, we’re just getting started with this at the club. Soon, we’ll be using the same technology – based on ChatGPT 4.0 – to create information chatbots using our vast trove of historical information now sitting in the library, largely unseen, unheard and unread. These applications can even “read” video data to locate specific images. Soon, members will be able to type in “Mohammad Ali talks about the Vietnam War’’ or “Jimmy Carter talks about trade with Japan” and get a link straight to the video of these historic appearances at our club decades ago. 

Yet another chatbot we’ll be building will let members and visitors query the calendar of events with natural language questions. Any events next month on Japan’s economy? Who’s appearing at press conferences next week? What’s the Correspondents’ Lunch special this month? 

The scope is wide for making club operations faster, better and more transparent using these amazingly powerful tools.

Onward

Dave McCombs
President, FCCJ