Inflection is a new AI startup run by Mustafa Suleyman, Karén Simonyan, and Reid Hoffman. Their new language model, Pi, isn’t designed to be the most technically advanced AI on the market. The goal is, instead, to create the most friendly and conversational bot available—“more like a sounding board than a repackaged Wikipedia answer.”
Named Pi for “personal intelligence,” Inflection’s first widely released product — made available today… is supposed to play the active listener, helping users talk through questions or problems over back-and-forth dialog it then remembers, seemingly getting to know its user over time. While it can give fact-based answers, it’s more personal than OpenAI’s GPT-4… without the virtual companionship veering into unhealthy parasocial relationships reported by some users of Replika bots.
I tried the Pi iOS app. From my brief interactions so far, the AI seems fine. My biggest critique would be that it appears to be both a bit bland and quite repetitive at the moment—one of its first responses included the phrase “are you pulling my non-existent leg?” that was also present in the linked Forbes article.
I find the overall idea of a personable LLM fascinating, though. I was immediately reminded of a recent Stratechery interview where Daniel Gross made the case for a “funny” language model:
…The sad thing to me, and actually the really alarming thing to me, is not the capability of the models or whether it’s connected to the Internet or not. To me, it’s the fact that… no one has really spent time making them sort of wonderful and fun in a Pixar way. We don’t have a John Lasseter or a Walt Disney who’s really focused on the technology but also the enjoyment of the model.
[…]
I think we’re missing… people that can really think deeply about how to make a very funny LLM. I’ve been shouting at Nat and anyone else who will listen to me that we need to find someone making a really funny language model… there are many more papers about LLMs doing math than LLMs being funny. But I think actually being funny is much more important and I would argue, broadly, a very important direction, if you think about broader AI safety risk and all that sort of stuff, it should feel like as if we’re creating the world’s best pet, not the world’s smartest actuary.
I do not think Inflection has achieved Daniel’s goal yet but I am glad someone is out there trying.
After all, we rarely view our personal relationships as a meritocracy—we value kindness, empathy, and humor over raw intelligence. Going back to technology, Apple is one of the biggest companies in the world. Is it because they sell the most cutting edge technology or deliver the greatest price-performance ratio? Absolutely not—Apple is so successful because they understand design is more important than pure technical benchmarks.
The Pi app is wonderfully well designed, now they just need to continue working on the model.