The AI Friend Zone
Introducing Pi, Your Personal AI from Inflection AI.
Most discussions on AI’s human-augmenting capabilities focus on what the technology can do to make us more productive, efficient, and effective at work. But there is also an opportunity for AI to play an active role in an individual’s everyday personal life.
In fact, I believe that AI tools can even help us become better versions of ourselves.
Just as AI can be trained to amplify our technical and even creative abilities, it can also be trained to help us organize and work through the many emotions and thoughts we have on a daily basis. It can be a non-judgmental listener that gives thoughtful feedback, provides useful information that helps us navigate everyday tasks, and even just keeps us company.
That’s what we are working towards at Inflection AI with the launch of Pi, your personal AI, designed to be a smart, supportive, and always available companion. When Mustafa Suleyman, Karén Simonyan – both noted pioneers in the field of AI – and I co-founded Inflection AI in early 2022, our mission was to build a tool that is designed to understand the user, rather than the other way around. We wanted it to be more than an answerer of questions, but a participant in the dialogue that helps you along your life’s path – whether that be connecting with other human beings, making decisions, figuring out how to navigate a problem at work, or more.
Mustafa and Karen have assembled an incredible team to deliver on this mission. We just released Pi last week, and it can be accessed through multiple channels – through standard text messages and messaging platforms like WhatsApp or Messenger, on your desktop,or through an iOS app. As far as the field has come in just the past year, we think we are just at the beginning of this new paradigm, where interactions between humans and AI are commonplace and natural.
“Everything that you currently do with computers is going to increasingly feel like a conversation, a back and forth, a dialogic,” says Mustafa. “Your AI is going to ask you questions, is going to clarify, is going to try and sharpen your understanding. And through iterative back and forth, you’ll be able to convey your real intent.”
The conversational companion of Pi is just the beginning. In time, we aim to build more AI tools tuned for a variety of purposes, from organizing your schedule to aiding you in developing new skills and performing time-consuming tasks.
We certainly aren’t alone in our quest to bring more AI agents to the world. Even Pi, when asked, predicted that in the coming years, “We’ll see more and more AI companies like me being developed. Eventually, I think AI companions will become ubiquitous in our daily lives.”
Mustafa joined me on the Greymatter podcast to discuss what Inflection AI has built, the importance of building safeguards into Pi from the outset, why we chose to set up the company as a public benefit corporation, and our vision for the future. You can listen to the conversation at the link below or wherever you get your podcasts.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Heather Mack:
Hi everyone. Welcome to Greymatter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I’m Heather Mack, head of editorial at Greylock.
Today, my guests are two members of the Greylock investing team, Reid Hoffman, who’s been with us since 2009, and Mustafa Suleyman, who joined at the beginning of last year.
Mustafa and Reid are also the co-founders of the consumer AI company, Inflection. The company started last year and has been incubated at Greylock.
So, both of you, thanks so much for being here.
Reid Hoffman:
Always awesome.
Mustafa Suleyman:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
HM:
Now, Inflection has been quietly working on a product that we’ll get to hear a lot about today, but I want to first start with some context setting.
So obviously right now is an action-packed time in AI, to say the least. Both early stage startups and the biggest tech companies on earth are working on many different tools, and mainly designed for enterprise settings. Then we have things like chatGPT, GPT-4, and DALL-E, which have been instrumental in capturing the public’s attention and really driving it home just how advanced AI has become.
Both of you have been deeply involved in AI for some time. Mustafa, you’re widely recognized as a pioneer in the sector. In 2010, you co-founded DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014. You then served as head of applied AI at DeepMind until 2019 when you joined Google as VP of AI products and AI policy until you joined Greylock in January 2022.
Reid, you majored in symbolic systems at Stanford, and you’ve been investing in the sector for at least a decade, when you first funded OpenAI. You’re currently on the board of several AI focused companies, including Inflection AI and Tome, and you were on the board of OpenAI for several years.
And of course, let’s not forget the many Greymatter podcasts where you interviewed the AI chatbot, ChatGPT. And your recent book, Impromptu, which you co-wrote with GPT-4.
Now, with that as the backdrop. Give me a quick characterization of this moment. Mustafa, let’s start with you. How would you describe this moment in AI?
MS:
Surreal. I would say it’s most definitely the most exciting time in my living memory in technology. I mean, it is completely stunning. The pace of progress is surprising eventhose of us who have been at the cutting edge of developing systems like these for many, many years.
And it just feels like one of the most productive times in technology, feels like there is a kind of Cambrian explosion of different combinations of software and algorithms. Everybody is experimenting, everybody is trying new things, and I think it’s going to be one of the most productive moments for many, many years. It’s very exciting.
HM:
Reid?
RH:
Well, I think that exactly as Mustafa said, the world has begun to see this [moment], which is that we are at the crescendo of things: The internet was huge, mobile is huge, cloud computing is huge. And artificial intelligence – which in Impromptu I refer to as “amplification intelligence”, as it’s kind of a partner with us in various ways – is going to crescendo all of those things.
And I actually had language about the moment (which is in Impromptu) trying to argue for people to understand this is our “Aha” moment; our amplification of human ability, and [I argue] actually in fact, to seize on that.
One of the things I think is that so, often, so many people – even very smart people, even the creators of the technology – always start with their fears and uncertainties first versus the possibilities and the hopes about what they can get to.
And the way we get to those really great futures, the way… when the transformation of the steam engine, the transformation of the printing press, the transformation of electricity, all of these things is, “Ah, that’s the future we want to steer towards, row towards and that’s the thing that we need to be doing.” And I think that’s the moment that we’re in and I think that literally every professional activity within a small number of years – as a matter of fact, Motamedi and I wrote a piece on this last year – will be amplified by artificial intelligence.
And that’s just the beginning.
HM:
Right. Now, you announced a little over a year ago that you’d co-founded Inflection AI. At the time you described it simply as an AI-first consumer products company. There hasn’t been much else said since, except that Inflection’s attempting to flip roles for humans and computers – instead of us trying to understand how to talk to them, it’s the other way around.
Now, bring me up to speed on where you are on delivering on that goal. What has Inflection built? Mustafa, you want to start us off?
MS:
Sure. I guess one way of thinking about it is that for as long as we have been creating software, we have put the onus on us as humans to try to understand the language of machines. And we’ve had to learn their programming languages, their interfaces, and that’s been a huge constraint. And that is all about to change, because for the first time in history, computers are actually able to communicate with us in the same natural plain English language that we are using to communicate with one another now. And we think that that’s going to completely transform what it means to have a digital experience.
Everything that you currently do with computers is going to increasingly feel like a conversation, a back and forth, a dialogic. Your AI is going to ask you questions, is going to clarify, is going to try and sharpen your understanding. And through iterative back and forth, you’ll be able to convey your real intent. In fact, you’ll be able to share how it is you’re feeling, not just what it is you’re thinking, or what you need to find, but actually your emotional state. And that will create a very, very different experience to the kind of thing that software and technology has ever been able to do before.