Last month, OpenAI unveiled an ambitious new language model capable of solving challenging problems using a simulated form of step-by-step reasoning. OpenAI says the approach could be key to building more capable AI systems in the future.
In the meantime, perhaps a more modest version of this technology could help make AI girlfriends and boyfriends a little more spontaneous and engaging.
That's what Dippy is betting on, a startup that offers “uncensored” AI companions. The company recently launched a feature that allows users to see the reasoning behind their AI characters' responses.
Dippy runs its own large language model, an open source offering refined using role-playing data, which the company says allows it to better improvise when a user steers a conversation in a certain direction.
Akshat Jagga, CEO of Dippy, says adding an extra layer of simulated 'thinking' (using what's known as 'chain-of-thought prompting') can also elicit more interesting and surprising responses. “A lot of people use it,” says Jagga. “When you chat with an LLM, you usually get a knee-jerk reaction.”
Jagga adds that the new feature can, for example, reveal when one of the AI characters is being deceptive, which some users apparently like as part of their role-playing. “It's interesting when you can actually read the character's inner thoughts,” says Jagga. “We have a character who is sweet in the foreground, but manipulative in the background.”
I tried chatting with some of Dippy's default characters, with the PG settings turned on, because they're way too hot otherwise. The feature film adds a new dimension to the story, but the dialogue still seems quite predictable to me and like something out of a bad novel or an overwrought piece of fan fiction.
One Dippy character, described as “Test on the outside, warm on the inside,” revealed a soft side behind the gruff exterior when I clicked the “Read Thought Process” link below each post, but both the inner and outer dialogue lacked nuance or surprised and repeated themselves. For fun, I also tried asking some simple math problems to different characters, and their thinking sometimes showed how to break the puzzle down to get the right answer.
Despite the limitations, Dippy seems to show how popular and addictive AI companions are becoming. Jagga and his co-founder, Angad Arneja, previously co-founded Wombo, a company that uses AI to create memes, including singing photos. The pair set out in 2023 with the goal of building an AI-powered office productivity tool, but after experimenting with different personas for their assistant, they became fascinated by the potential of AI companionship.
