Your Future AI Will Have Multiple Personalities
Some of the most promising AI assistants are being primed in very different ways to help us in our work and personal lives.
A visitor watches an AI (Artificial Intelligence) sign on an animated screen at the Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry's biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona.
Photographer: Josep Lago/AFP via Getty Images
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.