AI veterans launch a new chatbot

Plus India in the Generative AI race

Author

The Alignment
May 03, 2023

India needs have a role in how AI is shaped given it’s soon to be the most populated country in the world with a very young population. Let’s see why AI news from the subcontinent has been relatively little.

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Here’s what we have lined up for you today -

  1. Google DeepMind and LinkedIn founders launch chatbot

  2. India in the generative AI race

  3. Sam Altman’s two cents on the arc of technology

There is no shortage of chatbots, in fact there is an excess. But when the founders of Deepmind and Linkedin launch one, we pay attention.

Pi is a personal assistant style chatbot launched by Inflection AI, the company launched by Reid Hoffman and Mustafa Suleyman. The founders’ shared that the chatbot takes on the persona of a sympathetic sounding board rather than being an information engine.

“There’s lots of things Pi cannot do. It doesn’t do lists, or coding, it doesn’t do travel plans, it won’t write your marketing strategy, or your essay for school…. It’s purely designed for relaxed, supportive, informative conversation.” The company shared with the Financial Times.

Pi is designed to support users’ own line of inquiry, performing significantly differently than ChatGPT which gives answers that are more accurate at face value. The eventual goal with Pi is to encourage dialogue and eventually help users perform online tasks.

Pi enters an immensely competitive field of consumer focused startups. The company has not exactly revealed its underlying technology and whether it has built its models from scratch. However, having been in discussions to raise up to $675 million its ambitions are pretty clear.

There is a lot of talk about AI and how the US and China are responding to it. Yet India has stayed relatively quiet despite it becoming the soon to be most populated country in the world with a very young demographic.

While India is home to some of the world's biggest startups that are using ML and AI solutions in their products, folks are yet to see a fundamentally AI first company emerge from the region.

Perhaps the biggest reason for this is that there is a very large portion of the Indian economy that is operated by low skilled labour. It is likely the disruption that AI might have to job automation would directly impact this sector of the economy.

TCS and Infosys are building up-skilling programs to train their employees across Gen AI technologies for resource optimisation and deliver better services to their clients.

Venture funds in the region are also looking out for young startups building in this space with AI being a key investing theme. Some are concerned that Indian startups need to be working on core technologies rather than being wrappers around other AI models, while others are confident that the region will produce some AI winners.

India has chosen not to regulate the AI industry, it continues to monitor developments and shared “AI is a kinetic enabler of the digital economy and innovation ecosystem. Government is harnessing the potential of AI to provide personalised and interactive citizen-centric services through digital public platforms,”

Around the industry -

Product Corner -

There are way too many cool products to showcase just one !

  • Byrdhouse : Byrdhouse is a multilingual video conferencing forl teams to communicate and collaborate across 100+ languages with AI-powered translation and meeting notes.

  • Jam : AI Debugging Assistant

  • Quadratic : The spreadsheet with Python, SQL, and Formulas.

  • Mojo : Mojo combines the usability of Python with the performance of C, unlocking unparalleled programmability of AI hardware and extensibility of AI models

Sam Altman’s arc of technology