[HN Gopher] Dot by New Computer
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Dot by New Computer
Author : _kush
Score : 141 points
Date : 2023-11-01 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (new.computer)
(TXT) w3m dump (new.computer)
| FeroTheFox wrote:
| Interesting. I just signed up for the waitlist. It seems similar
| to Pi (https://pi.ai) in terms of audience and general use case
| though.
| azinman2 wrote:
| The UX was quite different as it seemed the ambition. Pi.ai
| just seems like a fine tuned chatgpt that's aimed at being
| "supportive," no?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Like ChatGPT, sure, but Pi uses internally developed, novel
| language models, not OpenAI's.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Not clear to me what their main differentiating factor is
| there. Seems a lot like chatgpt but without any name brand
| recognition.
|
| Experience wasn't particularly helpful at helping me with
| problems.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Who owns the copyright on mei's grandma's flatbread recipe now?
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Recipes cannot be copyrighted.
| whalesalad wrote:
| what if I prefix the recipe with a long rambling anecdote
| about my grandpappy's old farm and the smell of fresh
| potatoes in the cellar
| JohnFen wrote:
| The recipe is still not copyrightable. The color commentary
| is, but anyone can just strip that out and republish the
| recipe in any way they see fit.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| Can they be patented though? I was having this thought the
| other day and didn't really check. I guess not, but it's kind
| of ironic as a patent is basically a recipe.
| kevindamm wrote:
| Not typically. The mere combination of known ingredients
| does not result in a new and non-obvious invention that can
| be patented. A patent typically covers a unique or non-
| obvious process. There are exceptions, say, if there is a
| process that results in a foodstuff having a longer shelf
| life, or a novel way of reproducing a flavor (but not the
| recipe of the flavoring, per se). Cooking something with
| heat is not a unique or non-obvious process.
|
| You could copyright the exact wording but that wouldn't
| protect the recipe itself and simply substituting a
| measurement unit may be enough to get around that. You
| could make it a trade secret but since the onus is on the
| owner to protect it and keep it confidential, that probably
| doesn't include publishing it or even sharing it with your
| AI assistant. Might involve courtside arguments about
| "reasonable expectations of privacy" .. I wouldn't want to
| test it.
|
| It's not like there's specific wording saying that recipes
| cannot be patented, but if you can describe it in the
| traditional ingredients + preparation steps then it does
| not meet patentable criteria.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| I'm really intrigued by the idea of something like this as a
| desktop OS. I tend to dump files into one location and use search
| to pull up what I need, rather than a predetermined structure,
| and this seems like a good fit for me.
| christiangenco wrote:
| Something like this is most certainly going to become the
| mainstream interface for computing. I think the most likely thing
| that will hit mass market adoption will look much more like the
| voice interface in Her than a chat app. I couldn't imagine my mom
| getting much utility out of an app like this but if the AI is
| good enough I could certainly see her chatting with her phone as
| if it was a person.
| javawizard wrote:
| > will look much more like the voice interface in Her
|
| What's Her?
| frud wrote:
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/
| leodriesch wrote:
| It's a movie about a humanlike personal AI companion.
|
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/
| fikama wrote:
| I see a great opportunity for chat interfaces like this one
| among younger audience. Every one knows how chat works, they
| are everywhere. And file systems or even tags are not so
| ubiquitously understood.
| ge96 wrote:
| Would be curious if a study was done on this form of
| interaction after Siri/Alexa became big.
| theK wrote:
| I worked on a project like this. The biggest challenge we had was
| finding ux patterns that keep returning the user to interact with
| the app and fill context gaps as it becomes convenient.
|
| I wish those guys lots of luck but I'm not signing up.
| Excessively logging my life on somebody else's computer is not on
| my key interests any more.
| gizajob wrote:
| "Eventually, Mei decides she's had enough of Dot interfering in
| every aspect of her life, uninstalls Dot, and goes about her
| business as usual, determined to interact with reality in a more
| wholehearted way."
| morelisp wrote:
| If you get 'em while they're young, they won't even know
| there's an alternative.
| hoosieree wrote:
| see: Jexi
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9354944/
| ge96 wrote:
| Her 2013
|
| "Do you mind if I look through your hard drive?"
|
| "Umm... okay"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV01B5kVsC0 (3:35)
|
| I do like this part a lot, as a loner guy but I cannot trust
| something I didn't make (tinfoil hat guy digs silica by hand)
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| It could work well for business use cases. Basically a junior
| PM in software form.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| "A year later, Mei is notified that new.computer was hacked and
| all of Mei's very personal data has been dumped on pastebin."
| leodriesch wrote:
| Their privacy policy lists OpenAI as one of their partners for
| data processing, which indicates that this is happening not on
| your device, and data is also shared with third parties.
|
| For me this is the main counterargument against apps like these.
| I want to feel free to post any information into this without
| thinking about who may read or use it.
|
| Local is the only way to go for software like this in my opinion.
| thomashop wrote:
| They say in their about page:
|
| "We will never monetize your data. We will never monetize your
| attention. And we believe that the only way we can build
| towards the future we envision is through the continuous
| reinforcement of mutual trust and respect. Currently, we
| leverage best-in-class cloud-hosted models, including ones from
| OpenAI, Anthropic, and a selection of open-source options. Over
| time, we plan to reduce external dependence and localize
| computing to run on-device."
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Sounds like reverse-engineering to me
| Veserv wrote:
| Great, then they should just put their promise into a legally
| binding irrevocable clause in their terms of service and also
| legally guarantee that their entire business will shut down
| if they violate it. They are never going to do it anyways, so
| no harm in enforcing what they are never going to do.
| JohnFen wrote:
| And what reason does anyone have to put any faith in that?
| And their service providers (OpenAI, etc.) may not be on the
| same page as them.
| thomashop wrote:
| I'm not saying I would put any faith in it. The company
| could start genuinely believing those values but the values
| of a company change over time with more people investing.
| sillywalk wrote:
| How _do_ they intend to make money?
| notpachet wrote:
| "After the untimely passing of her oil tycoon father, Mei
| finds herself with more money than she knows what to do
| with. Dot helpfully suggests transferring a few hundred
| thousand dollars to New Computer as a thank you for Dot's
| continued existence."
| sillywalk wrote:
| "... or else."
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Yeah reading this web page I just keep thinking "Mei has
| trusted a cloud based service to be her personal confidant for
| all aspects of her life including text and documents. This will
| end poorly for Mei."
| crooked-v wrote:
| That also means it's useless for interacting with your life if
| your life happens to include anything above a PG-13 rating,
| what with how cloyingly pearl-clutching the OpenAI offerings
| are about sex or violence.
| colesantiago wrote:
| So is this another GPT-4 wrapper?
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Yes
| benatkin wrote:
| It's GPT-4 meets rewind.ai
| sillywalk wrote:
| "Dot is, at its most simple, an app you chat with on iOS. You can
| send it words, voice memos, pictures, PDFs, and it's thrilled to
| search the web for you, too. Communicating through written text
| (Dot's voice is coming next year)" [0].
|
| It looks quite "ambitious"[1]:
|
| - Automated File Management: Dot creates, organizes, and
| retrieves both structured and unstructured information.
|
| - Adaptive Intelligence: It learns from patterns in your
| behavior, plus any guidance you decide to share with it
|
| - Internet Browsing: It has access to up-to-date information (and
| eventually, tools and services)
|
| - Contextual Multimodal Understanding: It interprets text, audio,
| visuals, and links, informed by the context it already has on you
|
| - Self-Programming: Dot proactively writes and stores routines,
| anticipating your future needs
|
| - Personalized Display and Retrieval: It transforms information
| into the most compelling format for each user
|
| - Conceptual Synthesis: It doesn't just store information -- it
| connects the dots between topics, ideas, and themes in your life
|
| - Theory of Mind: Dot synthesizes a deeper understanding of your
| motivations and goals, while reflecting on how it can best help
| you to achieve them.
|
| [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/90975882/meet-dot-an-ai-
| companio...
|
| [1] https://new.computer/about
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'm a bit perturbed by the, uh, inflation here. Looks like a
| product manager wishlist for a team of 1000 over 7 years
| floren wrote:
| Most of those bullets are "we are using a LLM with some basic
| LLM-interfacing techniques"
| og_kalu wrote:
| Not really. Putting this all together is ambitious but
| individually, they're all things that have been realized to
| some degree.
| sillywalk wrote:
| Or a VC pitch.
| cabirum wrote:
| In a year, Dot app is discontinued and you lose everything.
| azinman2 wrote:
| If new technology and products don't have a chance for optimism
| on HN, where do they?
| mrkeen wrote:
| The kind of tech that underpins this gets a pretty good
| reception here.
|
| But this page looks slick to a fault. The user story approach
| feels pandering and I lose interest fairly quickly. Is this
| closed source? IOS only? I see a waitlist - Why don't they
| want a general audience to see it?
| karaterobot wrote:
| What can I do with this app that I couldn't do without it? It's
| just weird to me to turn over such mundane tasks as saving a
| recipe or looking at my school's listing of singing clubs over to
| an AI assistant. There may (or, historically, may _not_ ) be
| efficiencies to keeping my entire life in an app, but what's the
| new thing I can do as a result of this? Keep in mind that it has
| to be cooler than the lifetime cost of the app plus the loss of
| privacy (which may be variable, granted).
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| > It's just weird to me to turn over such mundane tasks as
| saving a recipe or looking at my school's listing of singing
| clubs over to an AI assistant.
|
| I understood that the app will deeply profile you and advertise
| to you. Ads, now from whatever AI 'thinks' about your life!
| asadm wrote:
| I wonder how does it perform on things long-before (outside gpt
| context). Do they just do the normal tricks like vector db?
| kmoser wrote:
| I'm guessing it'll hallucinate things about you that it doesn't
| know. This might be a mixed blessing: it could introduce you to
| things you weren't aware of, but it could also be annoyingly
| inaccurate.
| asadm wrote:
| well humans also hallucinate or assume things they dont know
| or on how they remember it so that's alright.
| jamesmcintyre wrote:
| I immediately recognized this as either inspired from or actually
| from the same creators of the mercuryos concept
| https://www.mercuryos.com/. Turns out it's the latter.
|
| I love the Mercury OS concept and think it's design both
| elegantly and sort of subversively packs a myriad of potentially
| breakthrough ideas.
|
| I have been stewing with ideas around the same vision for years.
| The idea of a new type of UI where the UI seams to dematerialize,
| where you directly manipulate the object in your current context
| (like multi-touch's direct manipulation but at a higher layer of
| abstraction powered by deep api integrations, intelligent self-
| assembling relational graphs, and of course ai). For over a
| decade I've had this thought "the data becomes the UI" like an
| emergent UI from whatever given data, task or context you are
| currently in. When I came across the mercuryos concept I
| immediately smiled.
|
| Conceptually, strategically and technically there are so many
| challenges to introducing such a new ux paradigm but I'm very
| happy to see the mercuryos concept has seemed to evolve to New
| Computer's Dot and I wish them the best!
|
| For those immediately turning to negative sentiment based on
| privacy or "it's just a gpt4 wrapper" I can see why that could be
| the knee-jerk reaction but I wouldn't underestimate a sturdy
| design-philosophy approach like this one. I'd go as far as to
| make comparisons to Next Computer's NextStepOS. NextStep
| introduced so many groundbreaking UX concepts and to a large
| extent I think their personal computing contemporaries
| underestimated what potential it packed. And, yes, I know the
| business model and many other factors played into an inevitable
| doom for Next Computer but there's belief that Steve Jobs may
| have never intended for Next to become a dominant computing
| player and instead knew it'd be an irresistible acquisition
| target in a latent space of UX innovation. It's possible he saw
| the next evolution of personal computing UX and hedged his bet on
| not compromising on it. Yet another comparison could be that
| NextStepOS needed more cpu, graphics and connectivity power to
| truly display it's heightened level of UX much in the same way
| something like Dot or mercuryOS would inherently need to leverage
| cutting-edge computing to truly enable it's vision (obviously
| LLM's, Vector DB's, etc).
|
| Ok, I'm done, lol.
| nix0n wrote:
| This could be the first ten minutes of a Black Mirror episode.
| gary_0 wrote:
| We're living the first ten minutes of a Black Mirror episode.
| kashunstva wrote:
| > Dot remembers Mei's interest in singing and proactively sends
| her suggestions for music clubs at school.
|
| Imagine having so little agency and motivation within your own
| existence on this earth that you need an app to remind of what
| you once found life--affirming.
| chalsprhebaodu wrote:
| Yeah, imagine how they feel.
| IanCal wrote:
| That's not what that says though, it's not reminding them of
| loving singing, it's finding clubs. It's a proactive search.
|
| It'd be like a friend saying "oh hey I know you like singing, I
| spotted these clubs you might like".
| brandonmenc wrote:
| Looks great!
|
| Too bad I will never ever ever use something like this if I can't
| local host.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| "Mei, I need you to come to where I am" <cue dystopian Ai-invites
| you over ending>
| angoragoats wrote:
| This is the most likely-to-be-Sherlocked[1] thing I've seen in a
| while.
|
| And when Apple does it, the processing will be done on-device.
|
| [1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sherlocked
| sillywalk wrote:
| I remember Sherlock...
|
| Looks like Apple already has already been working on it with
| their Journal App (in Beta now). [0]
|
| [0] https://beebom.com/journal-app-iphone/
| aroman wrote:
| Same could have been said of Workflow -- which Apple acquired
| and rebranded as a first-party app.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| acquisition doesn't really count as sherlocking, it's usually
| implementing an idea from an existing app without any money
| being exchanged
|
| a more recent example this was F.lux, which Apple implemented
| as "Night Shift"
| og_kalu wrote:
| This is the kind of thing where adoption and user mass matters
| a great deal. If thois is successful and apple are too slow to
| roll out something like this, don't expect a lot of users to
| "just switch" out of what they've invested a great deal of
| personal data and routine into. It'd have to be something even
| deeper, like OS level integration.
| sofaygo wrote:
| Their UI is incredibly elegant
| wargames wrote:
| FYI to the website designer: on desktop, this website does not
| have a scrollbar. In addition to that being an accessibility
| issue, I closed the website after I got tired of paging and/or
| using the scroll wheel.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Are they Chinese?
| jmrm wrote:
| This is really interesting not just as an app per se, but as a
| new human-machine interface.
|
| This should be great as a team working tool, where you can ask if
| something is done, how were done, what parts are missing,
| retrieve what is done, etc.
|
| Integrating this in a ecosystem like Google Apps, Office 365, or
| similar would be great in order to being able to access that
| information inserted in other ways, with the pluses of email,
| calendar, and sync services.
| al_borland wrote:
| I'm not sure why someone would want to trust an AI chat startup
| with holding onto grandma's special recipe. 95% of these AI
| startups are not going to exist in 5 years as the market sorts
| out how AI is used and which companies win and lose. None of the
| offerings coming out right now should be used for data archival
| of any kind. Anything put into these AI chat bots should be
| considered throw away.
| tnolet wrote:
| "2,5 years later, Mei receives an email from Dot's CEO that Dot
| will be 'joining forces' with Salesforce as their 'incredible
| journey' comes to an end."
| tnolet wrote:
| "Mei ask for a full dump of her data. Dot responds 'Sorry, I
| can't do that Dave, I mean Mei'".
| romwell wrote:
| _" Mei asks where has the scrollbar gone on the desktop version
| of the website. Dot responds, `What scrollbar?`. Mei promptly
| closes the page and never returns"._
| shanelleroman wrote:
| Looks cool! I've been using & contributing to Lightrail
| (https://github.com/lightrail-ai/lightrail). It's more dev-
| focused but hopefully, it's developing in a similar direction
| (long-term memory/context, integrations, etc) while still being
| local-first / OSS. I definitely think we're heading for a future
| where persistent AI assistants play a big role, and I'm really
| hoping the ones that win out are more open & private!
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| It kind of reminds me of https://mymind.com/
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