Chatbots aren’t just useful for writing essays and emails. Those designed to show empathy and retain memories about their users are already acting as personal guides. A man who recently tried using a chatbot called Pi realized it could help him give up smoking if he went to it each time he had a craving. Whenever he did, it would remind him of all the reasons why quitting was a good idea, including being around in the future for his child.
Pi’s creator is a Silicon Valley startup called Inflection, which raised a remarkable $1.3 billion last week to build a “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, which has raised more than $11 billion to date. But the company behind ChatGPT is chasing a different sort of vision and reportedly working on a personal assistant that will be much more functional and work-oriented than the original ChatGPT or Pi, which are more like digital companions.
There’s a debate raging among industry executives about whether it makes better business sense to anthropomorphize artificial intelligence in the way OpenAI has done with ChatGPT or make it as neutral and functional as possible, like the operating system you use on your phone. When we settle into a reality where we’re regularly talking to computers, will we be interacting with something more like Microsoft’s discontinued virtual assistant Clippy or more like Microsoft Excel? What seems most probable is that we’ll be using both types of AI in the future to make us more productive on the one hand and navigate us through our personal lives on the other.
