Dot

Project by new.computer from Jason Yuan and Sam Whitmore, an entrant into AI-centric personal computing paradigm. Mostly an elaborated virtual assistant, an augmented ChatGPT.

Core elements

Relative to ChatGPT, Dot adds:

• “Memory”: supplies context for conversation through information from previous conversations, presumably through Retrieval-augmented generation.
  • This appears to include both explicit and implicit elements. For instance, the marketing material suggests that you could snap a photo of a recipe, and ask Dot to remember it; the recipe would be represented as a “recipe card” with structured data. But also, you can just mention your interests in conversation, and it’ll pick up on those and reference them later.
  • Taylor Rogalski points out (2023-11-10) that one significant element of Dot’s explicit memory design is that it gives consistent identity and consistent representation to information—it’s not all just fuzzy text; that recipe lives on a “card” and that “card” is used to represent it when it appears later.
  • The system is designed to overtly use these memories to help you make connections. “Dot can recall moments from the past in surprising & serendipitous ways, tying it with the present to give old memories renewed life.” (see also Spaced everything)
• System context: Dot also augments generation with context from information available on your device, like your location, your calendar, etc.
• Inline ad-hoc UI types: besides plain messages, the conversation stream can include cards containing context-appropriate interfaces, like task lists, quizzes, or collages.
• Proactivity: Dot acts as something like a lightweight coach; it can send you messages from time to time with suggestions or questions about advancing your interests.
• Automation: you can ask Dot to send messages to accomplish particular tasks at particular times (like walk you through a weekly review)
• Personality: relative to standard ChatGPT, Dot has been groomed with an opinionated conversational “voice” and personality. It’s trying to be friendly, approachable, coach-like, and attuned to emotional vibe.
• And, of course, this being Jason, it’s executed at a much higher level of aesthetic craft than ChatGPT.

Impressions

• The emphasis on memory strikes me as the right one. The logical conclusion of the conversational assistant modality seems surely to be an assistant which has panoptic information about you and your life. Probably we’ll end up letting these agents see everything we see, Rewind-style.
• I find myself most excited about and interested in what it means for a system like this to be proactive. Can we actually give it enough context that it can intercede in big, meaningful ways, helping me identify and live by my values? Or is its potential more mundane—helping me maintain my calendar, etc? There are some crucial signal-to-noise design issues here, too: after a handful of weak suggestions, I imagine I’d rapidly start ignoring proactive messages.
• The aesthetic execution is a joy, as is typical for Jason. Just lovely work. And a very sensitive voice in the copy, too: contrast the emotional, human beats of Mei’s story to the technocentric emphasis of most AI marketing.
• I’m worried that there isn’t enough differentiation here to be defensible vs. OpenAI. I think it’s pretty likely that they’ll launch memory-like features in the coming months; and the ChatGPT app is in a strong position to provide the same system context that Dot can provide. And it seems pretty likely that they’ll do some of the rest of it, too. I wouldn’t want to be in these founders’ shoes.
  • Dot’s marketing materials emphasize the way that conversation becomes personalized. I’m a bit skeptical of the specialness of these claims: ChatGPT already aggressively matches your tone and picks up on your interests and background when provided. If you ask it to do this explicitly (e.g. in Custom Instructions), it does so to almost a sycophantic degree. The devil’s in the details, maybe, but I’m not sure what Dot is doing differently here.

See also Humane.

References

https://new.computer/

Meet Dot, an AI companion designed by an Apple alum, here to help you live your best life