ChatGPT helps 19-year-old Ram Pillai turn recipes into meals for his family, especially when an ingredient is missing or a dish does not taste right.
The results are not always what Ramâs family expects. Once, when he told his little sister he was cooking, she lit up because he had made cookies before. She thought he meant something sweet. Instead, he handed her a Mediterranean bowl, and her disappointment was so profound that the family ended up going to McDonaldâs.
Ram began teaching himself to cook two years ago, when he was 17 and going to high school in Frisco, Texas. He grew up eating the South Indian food his family made at homeâdosa, rice, curries and parathaâbut a friendâs cookbook of restaurant recipes made him curious about what he could make himself. His first experiments included baking a Crumbl-style cookie that did not turn out well. Since then, he has learned to make burrito bowls like Chipotleâs and Mediterranean bowls inspired by Cava.
Now 19 and studying aerospace engineering at Texas A&M, Ram cooks at home for his family with his 14-year-old brother, Raj. Raj loves cooking, helps Ram in the kitchen and keeps him motivated. Their next target is a homemade burger.
ChatGPT was already part of Ramâs life before it reached the kitchen. He began coding at 11 and started using ChatGPT in tenth grade, building tools and attending hackathons with friends. For a high-school capstone, he prototyped an AI STEM tutor after teaching CAD to children in rural India showed him how hard it could be to find affordable, skilled instruction. At Texas A&M, he gives ChatGPT course materials and asks it questions as a personalized tutor; it also makes review sheets before exams. On the side, he helps his father develop and explain an AI-agent product for oil-and-gas risk analysis.
In the kitchen, Ram uses ChatGPT for problems a written recipe cannot solve. If an ingredient is missing or a sauce tastes wrong and his parents are not nearby, he describes the problem to ChatGPT. For one Mediterranean sauce, he told it what the family had on hand; it proposed a mixture using their Indian spices, soy sauce and other ingredients, and he says the improvised sauce worked.
He has also learned how quickly a cluttered kitchen can become dangerous. While Ram was making sâmores cookies, paper towels beside the stove caught fire. He looked away for two seconds and turned back to flames, which he stamped out as smoke filled the kitchen and the fire alarms blared.
Ram is still learning how much seasoning to add, how to balance flavors and how to rescue a dish that is too salty. Meal by meal, with Raj beside him and ChatGPT available when the recipe falls short, he is learning to walk into the kitchen, work with what is there and feed the people around him.
