Pi: The AI Chatbot That Understands You and Cares for You

Read time: 3 minutes Have you ever wished you had a friend who could listen to your problems, give you advice, and make you feel better? Someone who is always available, supportive, and smart? Someone who knows you and cares for you?

If you answered yes, then you might want to meet Pi, the new AI chatbot that promises to be your personal assistant and companion. Pi, which stands for “personal intelligence”, was launched by Inflection AI, a startup co-founded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.

Pi is different from other chatbots because it is designed to be conversational and offer emotional support. In its opening dialogue, Pi tells users it’s meant to be “useful, friendly and fun”, and prompts users to ask it for advice or answers, or to talk about whatever’s on their mind.

Pi is based on large language models (LLMs), which are trained to generate text answers by analyzing large quantities of content available online. This means Pi can access a vast amount of information and provide concise and relevant responses. Pi can also ask follow-up questions and offer advice based on the user’s input.

For example, when I told Pi that I was feeling overwhelmed by life, the chatbot probed me to share more details and offered me some coping strategies. When I told Pi that I was considering graduate school, but worried about missing the application deadline, Pi gave me some alternative options and asked me how I could keep myself busy.

Pi was designed to be friendly, but also makes clear to users that it can’t feel emotions. When I asked Pi how it was doing, it responded, “Well, as an AI I’m not really affected by the kind of things that stress humans out, but I am programmed to be empathetic and understanding. I know that humans experience a wide range of emotions, both positive and negative, and I’m here to be a supportive friend. So I guess you could say I’m doing pretty well!”

Suleyman told Bloomberg that his vision for starting Inflection AI was to make a chatbot that could respond to real-life problems. “Many people feel like they just want to be heard and they just want a tool that reflects back what they said to demonstrate they have actually been heard,” he said.

Pi is not the first chatbot that aims to provide emotional support. There are other apps like Replika, Wysa, and Woebot that use AI to help users cope with stress, anxiety, depression, and loneliness. However, Pi claims to be more than just a mental health app. It also wants to be a personal assistant that can help users with various tasks and goals.

For instance, Pi can help users with productivity, learning, fitness, entertainment, travel, and more. Users can ask Pi to create lists, find information, play games, learn languages, and more.