Inflection AI, a startup founded by ex-DeepMind leaders, has launched Pi, a chatbot that aims to be a true AI-based personal assistant. Pi is designed to converse colloquially, but never forgets its role as a respectful, helpful bot. It 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 is more personal than OpenAI’s GPT-4, Microsoft’s Bing built on top of it or Google’s Bard, without the virtual companionship veering into unhealthy parasocial relationships reported by some users of Replika bots. Inflection will offer Pi for free for now, with no token restrictions. Pi remembers 100 turns of conversation with logged-in users across platforms, supporting a web browser, phone app, WhatsApp and SMS messages, Facebook messages and Instagram DMs. Inflection plans to update its models with real-time, fresh content in the near future, share links, sources and summaries and eventually ingest a user’s calendar, email and other documents to better manage their time.
