Tinder wants to use artificial intelligence to set you up on dates. It begs the question, could AI do a better job at matching us up than ourselves or even our friends?
It sounds crazy but Tinder co-founder and chairman Sean Rad thinks within five years, Tinder could get to a point where you no longer have to do the work yourself of finding good matches in the app. While speaking at Startup Grind this week, Rad explained you could simply ask Siri what’s going on tonight and Tinder will come up with a date suggestion.
The Tinder voice might pop up and say ‘There’s someone down the street you might be attracted to. She’s also attracted to you. You guys have a lot of things in common and, guess what, she’s free tomorrow night. We know you both like this indie band, and it’s playing – would you like us to buy you tickets?’ And you have a match.
“It’s a little scary,” Rad said, according to BBC.
It’s unnerving to think a machine could have you skip over the filtering process altogether and just serve up its own choices for you. But, hey, it means no more wasting time pouring through profiles on your own. More than just saving your index finger some work, Rad described his goal as one where people can get out of their phones and spend more time out in the world meeting people.
The idea itself really isn’t so different from what other dating sites have already attempted with cruder tools and metrics. More traditional dating sites like Match and eHarmony both serve up suggestions based on their own algorithms. Whether Tinder can succeed in this endeavor will largely depend on how good their match suggestions will be. So they have a pretty decent shot at it if their AI can do a better job introducing you to cool people than your own human networks. If not, it becomes just another matchmaking gimmick.
Tinder is one of the largest dating apps in the world right now with an estimated 50 million registered users and 26 million matches per day. So there’s no shortage of data to play around with and a huge potential to completely change the way we do online dating.
