This tech founder used ChatGPT to mourn the death of his grandfather. It helped him uncover a Bible verse he'd spent years trying to find.

• Ian Panchèvre spent years searching for his grandfather's favorite Bible verse.
• He tried Google numerous times and even searched through the Bible to no avail.

Out of his four grandparents, Ian Panchèvre said he was closest to his father's father, Lionel Panchèvre.

Panchèvre said his grandfather settled in San Antonio, Texas in the 1980s, after emigrating from France by way of Canada. He was a professional chef and eventually opened up a few French-inspired restaurants in San Antonio.

While Panchèvre said his grandfather was neither religious nor classically educated, he describes him as a "ferocious reader" and an intellectual.

"Even though he wasn't a practicing Christian himself, I think he understood the faith quite well," said Panchèvre.

Once Panchèvre learned to drive, at 16, he began meeting his grandfather once a month for dinner. Aside from the "fabulous food" Panchèvre said his grandfather made him, the two would also have long conversations that often veered into religion or philosophy.

During one of those conversations, Panchèvre said his grandfather shared his favorite Bible verse with him. Panchèvre, so struck by the poetry of the verse, wrote it down.

"I just wanted to hold on to that," he said.

But Panchèvre guesses that he threw the paper with the verse away when he was "aggressively" cleaning his room at some point.

A failed Google search

Over the years he said the verse — or the fact that he couldn't remember it— would float into his mind. Yet he wasn't the type to call up his grandfather and just ask for it, he said.

On several occasions, he tried Google, scrolling through numerous web pages but could never find it.

At one point, Panchèvre said he even digitally searched through the entire text of the Bible for the word "grass" remembering one of the keywords in the verse. There were thousands of matches, so he said he eventually gave up.

Panchèvre's grandfather died of prostate cancer in February 2020. Just two weeks prior, Panchèvre had come back from business school at Stanford to see him. His last memory is them sharing a cigarette, but even then, Panchèvre said he didn't ask his grandfather about the verse.

A winning encounter with ChatGPT

Due to the pandemic, the memorial service for Panchèvre's grandfather didn't take place until this past February.

Panchèvre said that as he and his family were driving to place his grandfather's ashes at the mausoleum the memory of the verse struck him like a "bolt of lightning."

"I'm like, I need to ask ChatGPT," Panchèvre said.

Panchèvre remembered it as a metaphor on aging and mortality and framed his initial prompt along those lines. The first attempt returned the wrong verse, but by his second try, the chatbot offered up the lines he had long been searching for. He knew the minute he read them, he said.

"I almost felt like ChatGPT had gifted me this back," he said.

The final takeaway

Panchèvre said he treated ChatGPT like "a toy" when it was first released, testing it through philosophical conversations to see if it had a "slight sense of sentience." Over the past few months, he said the bot has crept into his work as a serial tech entrepreneur who founded Amplified Software, a professional outsource software development agency.

Still, he said asking ChatGPT to recall a piece of "esoteric knowledge" didn't seem like a salient use case for the technology.

Over time though, he believes it'll become more common for people to just think: Let me ask ChatGPT and see what happens?