AI with Multiple Personalities to be Developed in the Future
Chatbots have expanded their utility beyond writing essays and emails, as they now serve as personal guides by demonstrating empathy and storing information about their users. A man’s experience with a chatbot named Pi exemplifies this, as he discovered its potential to assist him in quitting smoking. By turning to the chatbot whenever he experienced cravings, it would remind him of the numerous benefits of quitting, such as ensuring his presence in his child’s future.
The creator of Pi 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 personal confidant. The funding round made Inflection the second most funded generative AI startup behind OpenAI, which has raised more than $11 billion to date. But the company behind ChatGPT is pursuing a different vision, reportedly working on a personal assistant that’s much more functional and work-oriented than the original ChatGPT or Pi, which are more like digital companions.
There is a debate among industry leaders as to whether it makes more business sense to anthropomorphize AI, as OpenAI has done with ChatGPT, or to make it as neutral and functional as possible, like the operating system you use on your phone. As we settle into a reality where we regularly converse with computers, are we interacting with more than the likes of Microsoft’s discontinued virtual assistant Clippy or Microsoft Excel? It seems most likely that we will use both types of AI in the future to make us more productive and on the one hand to navigate our personal lives.
It’s the latter use that takes some getting used to, but for the most part, we see partner-style AI manifesting through services aimed at ordinary people, not businesses. Inflection founder Mustafa Suleyman, who also co-founded Google DeepMind, says Pi is ultimately a consumer product. He envisions it working like a chief of staff who advises people on planning the weekend or buying clothes and who can talk to customer service representatives on their behalf.
“It’s tailored to your interests,” he says. “It gives you feedback and advice and sees what you see and is with you wherever you go. Silicon has a memory and is infinitely patient and supportive.” But Pi is also designed to remind people that it has no feelings and is not human. In other words, Suleyman says, it also has clear boundaries.
At first it may seem strange to deal with software on a personal level, but Suleyman and his co-founder, well-known venture capitalist and member of the PayPal Mafia Reid Hoffman, and many other AI builders say we are headed in that direction.
Part of the appeal of companion-style AI may be that many people remain more isolated than ever before the Covid-19 pandemic. A March 2022 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation 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 ability to show empathy is much more reliable. It’s no wonder that around 5 million people have signed up to use the Replika app, which offers AI-powered partners that many consider friends or even romantic partners.
Adept, a generative AI startup in San Francisco funded by Hoffman’s venture capital firm Greylock Partners, looks at human-AI interaction in a much more functional way, even when you talk to it. The company was founded by a former head of Google’s major language modeling projects and two researchers who co-wrote a seminal paper on “Transformers,” the key technology that enabled ChatGPT to be built. Instead of building a standalone chatbot, Adept creates a system that can process human conversational commands and use software.
“We want to build a natural language interface for your computers,” says David Luan, CEO of Adept. “We don’t want it to be a separate agent.”
The idea is that people using business software don’t have to scroll through a web page and click through seemingly endless menu options to complete a task—they just ask the website to do the work for them using a text dialog box. For example, you can ask the system to put a bunch of LinkedIn profiles into Salesforce or create a CAD model—things you might not know how to do yet—and Adept’s technology will do it for you. If successful, this approach to software navigation could render certain user interfaces obsolete, a kind of behind-the-scenes plumbing that humans no longer need to control. Why design a bunch of colorful menus and web pages when AI services handle most of them anyway?
OpenAI seems to work in both approaches; it’s built ChatGPT as an entity that people can talk to, but it’s also designing a more functional system that integrates into the everyday business as a kind of work tool, similar to what Adept is developing, and also comparable to Microsoft Copilot, which is a product. Microsoft is launching OpenAI as a result of using the technology, according to a recent report by The Information. This could put OpenAI in a difficult position with its lead investor, Microsoft.
