My Interview with AI — About AI

// By Daniel Fell //

Editor’s Note: We’ve done a lot of Q&A’s over the years, but never with AI. Until now.

The following interview takes place with a conversational chatbot called Pi, recently released by the company Inflection AI, started by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman in 2022. Inflection AI is working on a variety machine learning and generative artificial intelligence hardware and software applications. Pi (which stands for “personal intelligence”) was released earlier this year and is available on most platforms including Google, Android, iOS, and Windows. The interview and Pi’s responses are unedited and reprinted in full, with permission from the editors.

Here are few things to keep in mind about the exercise. First, the specific company or technology is not the important thing. There are lots of powerful AI tools out there, some of which are being designed specifically for healthcare. I intentionally chose a chatbot that is a more general use application, but I could have used any number of different ones.

Second, while the answers are informative and educational, they aren’t terribly insightful. On the other hand, the questions I asked were general, and had I asked more thought-provoking or probing questions the responses may have been more nuanced. For me, this was less about the content and more about the power and realism of the conversation itself. But you can be the judge of that.

And finally, one feature of this app that is fairly novel and worth experimenting with is the voice option, where instead of texting, you can simply talk with it. While we don’t explore that in-depth here, it may be something we feature in a follow-up interview. I believe voice response technology is the future and what will eventually lead to this class of conversational virtual assistants becoming more ubiquitous – especially in healthcare for things like persistent health coaches and virtual caregivers.

Read on and see what kind of reaction you have to our exchange.

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