Is Pi the killer AI assistant?
After a few hours of Pi, I'm convinced this is a new daily tool for me.
I've spent the past week driving across Spain on a family holiday. Barcelona, Valencia and now Seville. It's hot. Damn hot (40C / 104F). But it's not as hot as Inflection who raised a whopping $1.3B this week for their AI chatbot app, Pi.
Inflection have a bold mission which is to create a "personal AI for everyone", and in between walking the thousand year old streets of Seville, exploring the Real Alcazar and sharing tapas, I've been conversing with Pi on my phone as we go. What do I think? I think it's good.
The user experience is sparse. A crisp serif font on a white background. Nothing verbose or didactic, just simple and friendly. There's also no sign up process - simply install the app and start conversing. Pi prompts you to create an account but not until you're a good half hour into a discussion, which is a refreshing onboarding experience.
It grows on you when you realise this isn't ChatGPT just playing anagram roulette. It's purposeful, authentic and reasonably insightful. There are times you can spot some pattern recognition in the way it generates responses, but the hours of conversation I've had are more like talking with a colleague whose trying to solve a problem with you, in a meaningfully way, rather than squirting an answer made up of well manicured data. No, I don't want ten bullet points on what are the best market research strategies.
I'm currently working on an IoT startup so I went about explaining some of the engineering challenges we're having regarding power management and firmware, hoping Pi might steer my problem solving in ways I haven't considered. And for the most part, it did just that.
Pi is conversational. It does respond with a general answer, but it also aims to extend the topic being discussed. And when it does this, it sometimes offers an idea you haven't completely considered. The problem solving does follow a question and answer methodology, but it doesn't give you a digest of the world's leading opinion. Rather Pi consults. It even sought to better understand what the broader idea of the IoT product was that I'm working on, in order to better understand the problems we're trying to solve.
Call this coincidental, but a few days ago I exchanged emails with my engineer about changing a certain aspect of the circuit design. Pi arrived at the same suggestion.
Search for 'Inflection ai' in your app store to try it for yourself.