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Chatbots are not only suitable for writing essays and emails. Those designed to show empathy and preserve memories of their users already act as personal guides. A man who recently tried using a chatbot called Pi realized that using it every time he felt cravings could help him quit smoking. Whenever he did, it reminded him of all the reasons why quitting was a good idea, including the fact that he should be there for his child going forward.
Pi’s creator is a Silicon Valley startup called Inflection, which last week raised a whopping $1.3 billion to build “personal AI for everyone,” a chatbot that can act as a confidante for personal matters. The funding round made Inflection the second-highest funded generative AI startup after OpenAI, having raised more than $11 billion to date. But the company behind ChatGPT has a different vision and is reportedly working on a personal assistant that will be much more functional and work-oriented than the original ChatGPT or Pi, which are more digital companions.
A debate rages among industry executives as to whether it makes more business sense to humanize artificial intelligence, as OpenAI did with ChatGPT, or to make it as neutral and functional as possible, like the operating system you use on your phone. If we settle into a reality where we regularly talk to computers, will we be more likely to interact with something more akin to Microsoft’s discontinued virtual assistant Clippy, or more akin to Microsoft Excel? It seems most likely that in the future we will use both types of AI to become more productive on the one hand and to navigate our personal lives on the other.
While it takes a bit of getting used to the latter usage, for the most part we’ll see the companion-style AI manifest itself in services aimed at regular people rather than businesses. Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Inflection, who also co-founded Google DeepMind, says Pi is ultimately a consumer product. He envisions it acting like a chief of staff who can advise people on planning their weekend or shopping for clothes and can chat with customer service representatives on their behalf.
“It will be tailored to your interests,” he says. “It will give you feedback and advice, and it will see what you see and it will go with you wherever you go.” Pi has a memory and is infinitely patient and supportive.” But Pi is also meant to remind people that it has no feelings and is not human. In other words, says Suleyman, there are also clear boundaries.
It might seem odd at first to get involved with software on a personal level, but Suleyman and his co-founder, famed venture capitalist and PayPal Mafia member Reid Hoffman, and many other AI developers say we’re headed in this direction.
Part of the appeal of companion-style AI may be that many people remain more isolated than at any time prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. A survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in March 2022 found that 59% of respondents had not returned to their pre-pandemic activities and many office workers continue to work remotely. And while chatbots like ChatGPT often make factual errors, their abilities to show empathy are far more reliable. It’s no wonder around 5 million people have signed up to use an app called Replica, which offers AI-powered companions that many consider friends or even love partners.
Adept, a San Francisco-based generative AI startup funded by Hoffman’s venture capital firm Greylock Partners, looks at the interaction between humans and AI in a much more functional way, even if you’re essentially talking to it. The company was founded by a former leader of Google’s major language model projects and two scientists who co-authored a groundbreaking paper on “Transformers,” a key technology that enabled the development of ChatGPT. Instead of building a standalone chatbot, Adept builds a system that can process conversational commands from a human and use software.
“We want to create a natural language interface to your computers,” said David Luan, CEO of Adept. “We don’t want it to be a separate agent.”
The idea behind this is that, in the long run, enterprise software users will no longer have to scroll a webpage and click on seemingly endless menu options to complete a task – they simply ask the website to do the work for them in a text dialog box. For example, you could ask the system to populate a batch of LinkedIn profiles into Salesforce or create a CAD model. If successful, this approach to navigating software could potentially eliminate the need for certain user interfaces, a kind of “behind-the-scenes installation” that no longer needs human control. Why design a bunch of colorful menus and web pages when AI services will do most of the browsing of those menus anyway?
OpenAI seems to be working on both approaches; It built ChatGPT as an entity that people can talk to, but it is also designing a more functional system that integrates into everyday business life as a kind of work tool, similar to what Adept is developing and also comparable to Microsoft Copilot, a product According to a recent report in The Information, Microsoft is rolling out OpenAI technology. That could put OpenAI in a tight spot vis-à-vis Microsoft, its main investor.
The push into functional AI – and at the risk of angering Microsoft – says a lot about how Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, sees so-called conversational AI in the future: as a separate entity that we converse with, and as something built into our infrastructure. And it seems that we’re definitely going to be talking to computers a lot more than we’ve been up to now.
More from the Bloomberg Opinion:
• Big Tech has a worrying stranglehold on AI: Parmy Olson
• Forget AI. Dumbing Down Markets Is Risk: Aaron Brown
• In “The Material World” the elements are the tenderness of life: Paul J. Davies
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editors or of Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Parmy Olson is a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion covering technology. A former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is the author of We Are Anonymous.
For more stories like this, visit Bloomberg.com/opinion
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