😺 RIP Pi (the chatbot)

PLUS: one tip from OpenAI

Welcome, humans.

If you’ve got a fun reading spot, be sure to submit it here for a chance to be featured next Wednesday in Where do you #Neuron! Images with pets (you know which one) and/or coffee get bonus points…

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

The makers of chatbot Pi are ditching their brainchild.
Our updated ranking of chatbots (that are still alive).
What OpenAI’s COO says managers/execs should do.
7 AI companies that raised money in the last week.

RIP Pi. We hardly knew ya. 🫡

Is this what it feels like to see your favorite rock star retire?

We’re huge fans of Pi, the chatbot that’s an awesome personal confidante, coach and sounding board.

And we’ll be huge fans ‘til the very end, even though nearly all of Pi’s parent company, Inflection AI, decided to jump ship just 10 months after Pi’s launch.

What can we say? We’re the loyal type.

That includes the CEO, Chief Scientist and nearly all 70 employees. All are joining Microsoft to work on Microsoft Copilot and other AI products.

Good product doesn’t mean good business. After raising $1.5B(!), Pi really had to get as big as Facebook for the business math to work out. But it’s clear they couldn’t find enough people like us to fall in love with Pi, much less charge us a single dollar.

BTW, every AI startup faces that pressure, including our other fave Perplexity, which has to get as close to Google size as they can.

Which means if you like an AI tool, be ready to look for backups. They’re all startups and you’re all early adopters, after all!

Updated list of chatbots to use (in order):

Claude 3
ChatGPT-4
Google Gemini
Perplexity
Bing Chat
Pi (RIP)*

*Pi isn’t shutting down today, but let’s face it, it’s a matter of time

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OpenAI COO’s single best tip for AI at work.

Watch the session here

Raise your hand if you’re a business leader and still confused about how to make AI useful at work.

No judgment; it’s why we’re here.

You’re not alone. This stuff takes time and learning to be valuable.

And nobody understands that more than OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, who shared his one big tip about AI at work:

“90% of the value comes from giving people access to the tool and not thinking too much about it.”

In other words, your people will figure it out. We’ll take it further with some of our tips:

Pay for the good stuff. Use ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro ($20/user/month). The upgrade is like going from black & white to life in full color.
Give permission and time, not just access. Encourage people to take the space to experiment, learn and share findings.
Start small and iterate. Just try one little task at a time.

Around the Horn.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang estimated artificial general intelligence is <5 years away.
What Apple’s recent research releases says about its AI plans.
OpenAI is expected to launch GPT-5 over the summer. Early previews show it is “materially better” than GPT-4.
Saudi Arabia wants to invest $40B in AI.

Wednesday Wirings.

Together AI, which makes a popular cloud platform for AI, raised $106M.
Hippocratic AI, building a large language model for healthcare, raised $50M.
Adaptive, which helps enterprises customize AI models, raised $20M.
Xaver, which builds an AI platform for insurance companies and pensions, raised $5M.
Neural Earth raised $1.4M to build AI for property and casualty insurance.
Zephyr AI raised $111M to build AI for precision medicine.
Empathy raised $47M to build AI tools for the bereavement process.