Last month, OpenAI unveiled an ambitious new language model capable of working through challenging problems with a simulated kind of step-by-step reasoning. OpenAI says the approach could be critical 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 attractive.
That’s what Dippy, a startup that offers “uncensored” AI companions, is betting on. 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, which is open source, offering fine-tuning using role-playing data, which the company says makes it better at improvising when a user steers a conversation in a certain direction.
Akshat Jagga, Dippy’s CEO, says that 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,” Jaga says. “Usually when you’re talking to a LL.M., it kind of makes you tingle.”
Jagga adds that the new feature can reveal when one of its AI characters is being cheated, for example, which some users apparently like as part of their role-playing game. “It’s interesting when you can really read the character’s inner thoughts,” Jaga says. “We have this character who is sweet in the foreground but manipulative in the background.”
I tried talking to some of Dippy’s default characters, with PG settings on, because they’re too excited otherwise. The feature does add another dimension to the narrative, but the dialogue still feels pretty predictable to me, resembling something ripped out of a bad romance novel or a tired piece of fan fiction.
One Dippy character, described as “Bully 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 message, but both the internal and external dialogs lacked nuance or surprise and repeated themselves. For fun, I also tried to give a few characters some simple arithmetic problems and their thinking sometimes showed how to break the puzzle to get the correct answer.
Despite its limitations, Dippy seems to show just how popular and addictive AI companions are becoming. Jagga and his co-founder, Angad Arnedja, previously co-founded Wombo, a company that uses AI to create memes, including singing photos. The two left in 2023 to create an AI-based office productivity tool, but after experimenting with different personalities for their assistant, they became fascinated by the potential of partnering with AI.
