MS. PASSARIELLO: And so, tell me how you’re approaching this PI chatbot. What makes it different than, you know, ChatGPT, which, as we saw recently in a Pew survey, about a quarter of Americans have experimented with.
How is your approach different? What are you trying to deliver that’s different?
MR. SULEYMAN: Well, we believe that everyone in the world is going to end up having a personal intelligence. Just as we all had a personal computer, the future of computing is intelligence. And you’re going to want a personal AI that is accountable to you, controlled by you, on your side, you know, in your corner. And it’s going to get to know you pretty closely. You know, you’ll have really close conversations with it about your past and your history, about your work, about your plans for the weekend, about what you want to cook for dinner this evening. And it will help you to prioritize and plan and book things.
Washington Post Live
I listened to another podcast with Mustafa Suleyman as a guest speaking on this topic – apparently he engaged in a full-blown media blitz in September last year, to promote his latest book I assume.
In his excessively techno-optimistic discourse this part about personal chatbots felt the most implausible to me. We’ve had various forms of voice assistants for years, and they haven’t become essential in the same way as smartphones for a range of reasons. Some of their use cases are better handled by simpler, focused apps, like reminders. The inherent fragmentation of personal data and privacy issues are a constant hurdle for these conceptual all-knowing personal assistants. If you add multiple people into the mix, to plan a social event for example, there’s a whole new layer of complexity – what if some of them use Google, others Apple or Amazon? How are chatbots from competing platforms supposed to coordinate with each other? Advances in the underlying technology of AI assistants won’t solve most of these practical problems.
Then there’s the costs. We keep hearing about the high energy demands of training and operating large language models, how they require massive expansion of data centers, increasing emissions of greenhouse gases and water use. For businesses, Microsoft is charging a $30 monthly subscription for Copilot for Microsoft 365. Are individual people going to pay that much – or even $5 a month – for a personal chatbot of questionable utility? A statement such as everyone in the world is going to end up having a personal intelligence
strongly implies that the service is going to be free, otherwise I just don’t see how everyone will be adopting it.
Ironically, Mr. Suleyman himself seems to have been aware of these near-insurmountable challenges, as last month he abandoned ship and joined Microsoft as EVP and CEO, Microsoft AI. A good portion of the team at his startup Inflection AI have followed as well, leaving the fate of that startup in limbo. Yet another case of tech founders hyping up vaporware products, enabled by the tech media and influencers, only to cash in by getting acquihired by a tech giant at the first opportunity.
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