Bill Gates is betting digital agents will disrupt the internet as we know it.
Speaking at an event in San Francisco last week, Gates said that the big winner in the AI tech wars will likely have created a personal digital agent. Instead of going to Google to search for information, or to Amazon to order dog food, users will simply converse with this personal AI.
And while Gates is rooting for Microsoft (no surprise there), he said he’s been impressed by a startup called Inflection. I’ve been playing around with its app for a few weeks now, and I’ve been seriously impressed.
I recently told Pi that a part of my job is thinking through big themes and how we could report on them. One topic I’ve been thinking about is how to report on the epidemic of loneliness. Each time, Pi addressed my response, and then posed a question, prolonging the interaction.
At its best, the conversation felt like brainstorming with a colleague over Slack. I even found myself forgetting that I was in fact talking to an AI. |