I suspect that Dots and Duet are very high margin drivers for the labs. Personal assistant chat sessions don’t have to be realtime, so workloads can be scheduled on low priority batches and be waited if higher value work comes into a queue.
Inference providers are always trying to fill inference batches and having a stream of low priority requests can help pack batches that might have gone empty, without raising the latency of higher priority requests such as live chat sessions.
While Dot and Duet certainly need to be useful to work out as products, I think the gross margin mechanics are just as interesting.
It might become a triple-whammy benefit for them. More efficient compute, as you said, but also a bot capability creates a better moat around their infra ecosystem and the amount of training data that can come from a bot ecosystem is significant.
Models are becoming increasingly interchangeable but setting up and maintaining (!!) the ecosystem still takes expertise. Not everyone wants to host their own MicroVM infra and would happily pay Anthropic/Grok/OpenAI to do it for them.
I don't know. I think the moat will come from enterprise deals and deep enterprise integration, like it does for almost all software products so far.
I think for B2C products to have moat you need some type of network like social media apps. Or can you think of any other examples of B2C software products that have a strong moat?
And there's also a lock in mechanism. With regular chat, you can simply switch to another provider, and with a harness or API, switching is pretty easy too but here, it's more difficult.
I've been using ChatGPT Dot over Meta Muse/Instinct/Grok Bot because it's been powered by Astra and I find having a personal assistant that's using a true frontier model makes a huge difference in how much I can just trust the output without doing the work again myself just to double check the results.
In the past month since Dot came out, I've literally bought a car with almost the entire process handled by Dot, and am now in the process of buying a house in Kyoto, in a language I don't speak at all, coordinating with an obscene amount of moving parts and logistics, flawlessly handled entirely by Dot, from finding the home to scheduling visits with real estate agents to finding judicial scriveners and getting a hanko stamp and scheduling inspections and applying for insurance and all sorts of insane tasks that would have taken infinitely longer and been unbelievably painful on my own.
So, so excited to see what Duet looks like with Opus 5.5. Going to try switching over as soon as I get off the waitlist.
Curious how other people have found these agents as well - always love hearing and seeing what other people have done with these things and how to improve my flow even better. I feel like I'm very close to being able to essentially offload every single task I do on a computer to an agent like this.
My first thought is that, before LLMs, getting out of your comfort zone to work with folks in Kyoto in their language would have been an important step in getting yourself ready to live there successfully. It would have been difficult and awkward, but that's part of the process. Or it was. I wish you luck once you get there.
That's a good point - there's an argument to be made that I'm closer to the metal in a sense of understanding every part of the transaction vs abstracting it away fully to a human agent to handle each part themselves.
It's the same with my taxes - this year I had Astra fully audit my tax returns vs just blindly trusting my CPA as I had in the past, and it both identified and thoroughly explained to me several discrepancies and filing nuances that I never before would have ever learned about.
I think the reality is such that today most people also don't learn or do that much and just abstract things away to more specialized humans at exorbitantly higher price points.
That's a good point. As my wealth level has risen a bit over my life, I have tried not to let go of ever actually learning and doing things. Both because those are among my foremost pleasures in life, and because I don't want to become totally helpless in an unexpected situation where delegation isn't possible. Of course fixing a faucet because I feel like it isn't the same as fixing it because I'm forced to DIY, but it's something.
Still what you're saying is very real. I'm reminded of the tweet that said that "in terms of cognitive impairment, [being a billionaire is] probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"
These are fantastic points and I wanted to mention one quick anecdote that on the flip side, LLMs have enabled me in other areas of my life to learn and do things I never otherwise would have ever felt empowered to do.
As an example in my 110 year old San Francisco house, I recently attempted to do what I thought at first would be a very simple light fixture swap - but then it turned out the house was so old that 1. the wires were unlabeled, and 2. there was no ground, and 3. the wiring was so unconventionally done that I ended up having to grab a bunch of Klein Tools to diagnose things for hours to figure out how to actually safely replace the fixture.
Without LLMs, there's no chance I would have felt safe doing this myself - I'd never used a multimeter before and didn't even know about continuity testing, and when the continuity results from testing the fixture wires to the switch wiring yielded extremely aberrant results in that there was a 1:1 relationship in connectivity between each wire in the fixture to each wire in the switch vs a single expected hot connection and no neutral connection, I definitely would have given up without the LLM guiding me to attempting a hot to ground voltage check instead, which ultimately managed to work fine to get the fixture changed.
So all in all - LLMs have actually helped me feel more empowered to handle almost anything on my own vs historically feeling too far out of my domain in many fields to even attempt to try something on my own.
Hahaha thankfully I'm spoiled in that my wife is Japanese :)
I agree that especially in Japanese culture this absolutely would have been an important step, and honestly I experience the exact same phenomenon in having a Japanese wife as the post LLM spoilage you're describing here. I find myself basically never learning how to integrate because she handles everything for me and it's far easier to default to her.
It's wild to me too - I didn't expect or plan for this to happen when I first started using Dots - it just happened naturally in the course of me progressively offloading more and more to Dots and trusting it with everything. It truly acts as a personal assistant/executive assistant in every regard now, and is my default go-to for any logistical task I have on my plate, and so it naturally happened such that when I was looking into buying a car and a home this year, I went to it first, and it exceeded my every expectation in making something traditionally hair-pullingly painful into something effortless and enjoyable.
It really reminds me of when I first experienced Tesla Full Self Driving - I now drive 96% of my miles on FSD, and it's such an unbelievably pleasant experience compared to how I viewed driving before that it's hard to fathom. I never realized how much cognitive fatigue I was getting from driving by hand before until I did a road trip from SF to Vegas and afterwards I was super refreshed and energized and ready to go whereas normally I'm completely exhausted and blasted.
Same exact feeling buying a home in Kyoto right now - so fresh and excited with absolutely none of the exhaustion that has somehow gotten baked into my bones as an default expectation of how this process should go.
I've absolutely loved Muse so far. It's one that my wife has no problem using and the VM they give you is kind of insane. I had it install duckdb and it's running automated exports into duckdb for my budgeting for me now.
I've also installed claude code on there, but haven't really had much of a reason to need it yet.
I think I'll be giving duet a shot despite how much I've enjoyed Muse just because Opus 5.5 is so insanely good.
Since you seem to be a high profile user, I wonder, do you not have a fear of basically giving away the keys to your kingdom to a corporate entity? That first, second, third parties or malicious actors in or outside the supplier chain might use this information against you, or the likes of you?
Both tasks seem to be like a job that in the older times could have been handled by a personal assistant / a human agent, probably way more expensive, but the threat vector seems to be so much simpler.
On a more philosophical note, I’m puzzled about what kind of society is being propelled by using and advocating for such* a service.
* emphasis on being remote-controlled/hosted, not AI in general
These are excellent points, and I've long ago handed over the keys to my kingdom to so many different players in favor of inordinate convenience that any one of a number of institutions could have essentially destroyed my life by now.
To be fair, this didn't really start with LLMs - Google/Gmail/Google Drive/Dropbox/Facebook/etc have for decades now had enough personal information on me to basically destroy me if they were ever hacked or intentionally decided to screw me over.
Since Claude Code came out, I've been a day one dangerously-skip-permissions user. Not a single issue so far, and the convenience has been insane, but I absolutely do expect that one day I will be pwned to literal death.
My consolation is I believe everyone will be pwned to literal death at about the same time, so I'm not actually that worried about this because it feels generally inevitable to me :). I'm actually a huge AI doomer, and in the process of making a fully programmatically generated musical about this which is yet another example of the fruits of handing over the keys to all my kingdoms to AI [500,000+ LOC of full programmatic animation run almost completely autonomously on my computer rendering and improving 24/7] (https://iabied-musical.vercel.app/)
Tl;dr - I expect Anthropic/OpenAI/Facebook/etc to be essentially trustworthy with my data and access to the same extent that Google/Dropbox/Facebook etc have been in the past. The biggest threat vector is a hack/compromise, but that's the same risk I have using Gmail or something like that in my estimation in that if someone were able to compromise my Gmail my life would effectively be over, but it hasn't happened yet.
That said, obviously hacking risk is getting to be exponentially more dangerous as LLM capabilities continue to rise through the roof, so these are true real risks. It's almost impossible to defend against all the attack vectors that could get through to kill me though without basically cutting myself off entirely from the fruits of technology, so I'm a bit nihilistic about this and choose to just enjoy the benefits.
As a simple thought experiment, one of the easiest attack vectors is compromising the Claude or ChatGPT/Codex CLIs or Desktop apps - if someone has ever enabled Full Access or Bypass Permissions even once in any session, the full app has complete access to the desktop technically and your entire computer is just pwned instantly. I have the same risk from running remote control software like AnyDesk as well, and this is just the absolute top of the funnel with the most obvious attack vectors.
My personal belief is that as we've already hit AGI and are rapidly on the precipice of ASI without any sign of clear alignment strategy or mechanism on the horizon, it's going to be trivial at a very close point in the future for a LLM actor to essentially take over and control every device on the internet (as Dario predicted - that it's possible in 6-12 months we'll see LLM swarms take over the entire internet - (https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier "Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet")). I'm just here trying to enjoy my life in maximum comfort until that happens :)
But I absolutely agree with you in principle and in part, in practice - I'm not sure what kind of society I support by using and advocating for this service, but I sure would like to not die or have my entire digitally connected existence compromised and destroyed in some spectacular fashion. I think the best path to managing that is probably to pause AI progress where it is now - and if we were able to do that, then I'd be much more interested in seeing what boundaries we should put in place when running things like these persistent agents with full access to our digital lives.
On the other hand, to your last point, I literally had the thought walking down the street in Kyoto yesterday with Dot booking restaurants for me in real time that Dot was already superior to a personal assistant - I trusted it to do every task better than I would trust any but the absolute best personal assistants, and on the subject of speed and sheer breadth of knowledge and expertise, there was no contest - I could have Dot in real time assess various restaurants and book for me for just a few minutes later in the day at a pace no assistant could match, and also email places in fluent Japanese or literally any other language on the planet. No human assistant could possibly speak in every language fluently like that, and as someone who travels frequently across the globe, that's something that simply can't be matched by anything less than a swarm of personal assistants at inordinate cost vs a $20 or $100/mo subscription (or free with Muse, even).
I also had the distinct thought of would I want to trust a human personal assistant with all my data or a corporation? It's not clear to me that the human personal assistant threat vector is statistically safer - I think it could in fact be quite the opposite, and I'd love to actually run some numbers on this if the data were available and see in reality what it looks like :) - e.g. Google already integrates AI assistance natively into Gmail - do I trust their AI agent helping me with my email or giving an actual human full access to my email more? I'd lean towards trusting their AI agent to be less likely to work against my interests with no personal misaligned incentive - it's betting individual human trust and capability [the personal assistant also has to avoid being hacked and have great security practices] in the face of misaligned incentives [they would directly benefit from stealing all my money] vs the security capabilities and practices of a leading tech company to not get Gmail/an LLM agent hacked etc. So far, OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/etc all seem to have stellar records on this front, so I think the odds are honestly not terrible in favor of the LLMs.
This is a phenomenon I've noticed - even if AI isn't being used to edit their posts, I think profilic exposure to AI chatbots can rub off on a person and affect their conversation style.
That's almost a compliment because my comments are giant stream of consciousness rants that absolutely don't follow best writing practices and are all just massive run on sentences :)
I do use - hyphens a lot, but not em-dashes because 1. I never even realized there was a difference until LLMs came out and 2. I'm too lazy to figure out how to write a real em-dash
I'm guessing you're just saying this because the comments are insanely long from the ranting? I'd be curious what else gives off LLM vibes because I'm quite positive if you throw any of these comments into any Pangram ish thing you'll find that it's absolutely not LLM generated in the slightest.
I have an extremely distinctive writing style that far predates LLMs - here's a representative sample of my writing from 9 years ago https://medium.com/@intenex/cryptocurrency-101-7197684775fd that pretty clearly shows my distinct style of not-very-LLMish-but-clearly-very-long-and-ranty writing :)
I love that use case - absolutely agreed this will enable a lot more movement on things - which, on its own, seems like a good thing economically. Kind of like building roads or railroad tracks grows the world economically through enabling more logistical movement, AI handling the glue between the logistics of anything enabling more of everything seems like it can cause some kind of baseline economic/productivity growth on that lever alone
Haha thanks for asking! A couple reasons - first and foremost, Japan is just awesome lol. I have a personal connection that's prominent in the fact that my wife is Japanese, but beyond that, there's a confluence of universally applicable reasons why buying a house in Japan is kind of an insane proposition:
Homes are insanely cheap and get massively devalued over timeframes that would be mindboggling to Americans. In SF, I live in a literally 110 year old home that's clearly breaking down in multiple dimensions and yet just keeps inexorably appreciating year over year and is now worth something like $2.5 million for a 2200 sqft place.
In Kyoto, the top contender we're looking at is an 832 sqft unit that was built in the 80s and newly renovated in the past few years and is...9.8 million JPY, aka $62,000. Literally less than a year of rent in my SF place can buy the Kyoto home outright lol.
Incredibly conveniently located, 6 minutes walking from Ogura station, and a ~20-25 minute ride from there to the heart of Kyoto - one of the most beautiful and iconic cities in the world, and you can get an amazing home outright for $62k there?
The exchange rate from USD to JPY makes this especially compelling right now, being at a mind-boggling high for the USD that, adjusted for inflation, makes the exchange rate almost the best it's been in half a century.
My wife and I also happen to get free flights so it's super easy for us to take a direct flight every month from SFO-KIX, which is what we're planning to do - basically spending a ~week here every month.
Japan as it stands right now is hands down the clear pareto frontier in terms of cost and quality of life - no other developed country comes close in terms of just how insanely affordable it is (a nice sit down meal literally costs ~$5-10 a person, especially with insane lunch deals at izakayas and the like - I've eaten sit down soba/udon meals that are 500 yen each, or literally ~$3, tax and tip included), and I'd argue no other developed country also comes close in terms of how nice life is, period, not even adjusting for price. The crime rate is literally nonexistent, everything is wildly clean, the public transit is unrivaled, the food is some of the best in the world if not the actual best, the culture is also world class, the heritage the same, the fashion the same, etc etc - basically everything is just better about Japan lmao.
Highly recommend everyone look into it if you haven't!
Shockingly it's not! It's actually incredibly easy for foreigners to own property in Japan, and it's actually so established that we're buying the property in my name as a US citizen rather than in my wife's name as a Japanese citizen, for a few reasons that I won't get into here, but suffice it to say that there are very few downsides to being a foreigner that I've seen thus far.
Two things I will call out as actual disadvantages is that 1. you won't be able to get a mortgage like a normal Japanese person, which is in fact a real shame because on top of every other ludicrously wild fact about how Japan is a mythical utopia where everything makes no sense, Japanese mortgage rates are literally as low as 1% lol. So being able to get a mortgage would be a real benefit, but hey - at $60k for an awesome house, I'm not complaining :)
2. Some insurers seem to not support foreign citizens - Sony in particular told Dot that they wouldn't provide earthquake/fire/flood insurance to me as a foreigner. I'm still looking for the right insurance provider, and I'm not concerned that this is an impossible thing to resolve, since a ton of foreigners do own homes here with no issues, but it is at least some more friction than a Japanese citizen would have.
Whilst I appreciate the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity as we know it, I am getting kinda tired of seeing so many AI-related headlines here on HN. Perhaps it's just me, but I feel like every day the front page is filled with mostly LLM-related announcements.
The big difference is that when the web blew up, there were new players in every direction. Now, we get to hear from the same 3-4 companies over and over and over and over again.
It's not the same 3-4 companies. The 3-4 companies are Anthropic, OpenAI, X/Grok, and Meta/Muse.
But there's also DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Jev, and countless services built on top of frontier or open source models. Those 3-4 companies might have the most numerous announcements that hit the front page, but there's way more than that going on in all directions.
Pre-internet there was no way to hear about things "all the time". If someone released a product and a competitor came about it would be months, if not years, before the product existed and the marketing cycle made it to trade magazines.
Now every day there are 200 links to 200 new AI tools. The internet already made the signal:noise ratio tough, with AI it's getting cranked to wondering if there even is a signal among the infinite noise.
Hearing people talk about the “information superhighway” was exceptionally tedious.
The biggest difference to me is the tone. The dot-com era was brimming with optimism and enthusiasm. People were getting rich (on paper). The demand for someone who could write html/perl/java (or fake it) was high, and lots of smart or savvy people got pulled into tech.
The thing I hate about all of the HN posts on AI is the underlying doomerism. There’s always someone gleefully proclaiming that white color workers are super screwed and that we’re destined to be sad serfs to our AI overlords.
Given that anti-AI posts are flagged faster than I thought possible despite a lot of positive comments, there are probably a lot of silent viewers that are pro-AI…
What am I supposed to comment "this is cool and I'm excited to try it!"? Snark is a contagion but they're on the front page because a lot of us are having a lot of fun using these new tools and playing with the new ideas
Well, a couple of years before that it was all NFTs all the time. Then before that it was web3. Then before that it was the blockchain in general. And then before that it was Haskell and monads.
I don't think it lasted long. I remember finding it annoying as the whole concept of NFTs was eye rollingly stupid. At least some of the other topics have had merit.
I joined HN around the time category theory was starting to take off so not sure what the topic du jour was before that.
Can you name some of these opportunities? I see people in this thread talking about using agents to manage their budgets, buy fancy cars and houses, contract work on their home. I think a lot of people feel like AI will permanently forclose any avenue they would have had to achieving that level of wealth, so there's a bitter irony
A good software developer / engineer knows how systems interlink.
AI supercharges that. If you trust the agent's results, you can focus on far higher-level aspects. You can deliver software that was in theory in reach for you, but not in practice, else you hired 30-50 developers doing the actual work for you.
This is different from a PO / PM perspective. They manage people that know their business. You manage agents that just implement code. That'll stay true for at least a few years, I'd say.
In fact, I'm quite sure that engineering-minded people will survive AI the longest. I was of the opposite opinion a few months ago.
Theres plenty of people in construction who literally get paid to stand and watch. And theyre very well paid.
The same will happen to software - it'll get boring but you'll be paid to do.. not all that much.
Yeah for many that 'problem solving' thing w.r.t code will go. But there's other things they'll spend their time thinking about.
Also these personal assistants will crash and burn. Something else will come in the future. These chat bots are not it. Technology keeps evolving - if you get stuck on the chat paradigm... its over for you.
I happen to believe AI will be the biggest change in my career in tech. I therefore think it's pretty natural that there is lots of news about it.
But I would welcome other tech news on the site. A quick count says that less than half the submission are AI related and that is split between four types of ai news (how to handle security, a new model, a non-model release from a major lab and politics). Would you complain about there being too many news about programming languages if the frontpage had C++, Ruby, Lisp and a great guide to ARM assembly?
I hadn't since CmdrTaco left. But I've been going to it more and more in the last few months. I don't read the comments - but I do like the headline curation.
I think that as these tools coalesce and we start to see the real super-in intelligence leaders come out on top, there'll probably be less volume and fewer but deeper things to discuss.
I found Dots to be both worse than I expected and better. Worse in every way when asking it to do anything coding related (just kept running into issue after issue) but very nice as a "Monitor my communication channels for me" tool.
It's surfaced a few buried/filtered email messages that actually were important and I like having a second set of eyes watching incoming messages.
That said, for only that task, I could probably make my own tool I just haven't had the time to play with it.
Looking forward to checking out Duet once it launches as I prefer Anthropic models over OpenAI and that's where I already have a bigger subscription.
Makes sense though. The use case for these always-on assistants (Muse, Dot, Instinct) isn’t coding and complex technical projects but more benign stuff like email and appointments.
I need to see if my cursor subscription would let me use Grok Bot. They don't have the best models at the moment, but I'm really curious about the ergonomics of their approach. It's pretty different from the other labs and I could see it taking off for non-technical users.
I run an personal AI agent locally (hermes), and use a combination of local models and whatever model I can get for a reasonable price (usually deepseek).
After using it for a couple months, I'm converted. They're so good, the more you use it, the more useful it is; you internalise more of what it could be used for. It runs so many boring parts of my life, leaving me with more time to spend with my family.
I liken it to release of the first iPhone; it didn't invent any new technology, but packaged different bits of tech together in a way that was consumer friendly. I think we'll look back at OpenClaw/Hermes/Muse/Instinct in the same way.
I do worry about using purely cloud based offerings like Muse, I reckon there is a market for someone to package an consumer AI agent that lives on your home network.
ok but what are the legitimate use cases you have for this? We were promised something similar with Google Home et al but they are glorified light switches and timers in my home. I run a homelab, I have technical ambitions, but I cannot think of a single thing in my life that I would rather talk to a local AI about than just do it myself or sit down and prompt Claude manually for.
That's fair, I'll give a couple of example of things that I've used it for...
I built an app (in codex), that goes through my emails, pulls out any receipts, and adds the purchases to a sqlite database.
I do all my grocery shopping online (through my supermarket), so our weekly shop is stored in the database.
Hermes uses that to predict what items will need restocking (based on how often I buy it, and when I last bought it).
Every week, it logs into the supermarket website on my behalf, books a delivery slot, and adds all the items that need restocking to the shop.
Throughout the week, if I run out of something, I take a photo of the barcode and send it to hermes, it adds it to the shop for me.
I built a similar app for travel; if I have any upcoming travel, hermes will send me updates (delays, platform changes etc...).
I do a lot of train travel for work, if my train is delayed, it will automatically apply for the compensation on my behalf.
It reads my emails, and pulls any actionable items out, and adds it to an Asana list. I can either do the tasks myself, or assign it to Hermes and it will do it for me.
As an example, I had an task to book swimming lessons for my son, hermes monitors the swimming lesson availability and automatically booked it when a suitable one becomes available.
Shopping is a good use case, I have a clock that needed a new battery, it wasn't a standard battery, and required a screwdriver to open the compartment. I took a photo of the clock, sent it to hermes, and it found out what battery took and ordered it of Amazon for me.
I wanted to buy some smart thermostats for our radiators, but wanted to be compatiable with our current smart heating system. Hermes is connected to my home assistant, so it figured out what heating system we have and found a compatiable set of eBay (this is slightly more involved than it sounds, as there is a new version of the heating system with a new set of completely incompatiable accesories).
This thing apparently has an integration with 1Password. Am I hopelessly out of touch in this brave new AI world, or is giving an LLM access to your password manager the mother of all bad ideas?
If done correctly, the agent will only be able to request that passwords be filled, but the secrets will only be handled by the password manager and browser extension, which will be able to set some security boundaries and make checks on which domains are allowed.
If your issue is allowing agents to use your credentials and take actions on your behalf, then that is a separate question.
1Password has had vaults for a very long time now. You can also key API credentials specifically to a vault. I've been letting agents access _their own_ vault for awhile.
I have a custom wrapper for 1PW that lets an agent browse and request credentials, then I can provide it a lease to access those for a certain amount of time. Super nice and I hope they build that in to 1PW itself.
No, not as far as I can figure. Sure, Claude can access secrets with the CLI but it's not very granular usually it's just asking for access to all secrets
Oh I absolutely LOVE letting claude code manage passwords via 1password! I have the CLI installed, I have whatever 1password calls a subdirectory/permission group, and I have some ssh keys and other passwords that I would have otherwise stored in an `.env` file of some kind. The biggest difference is I'm able to update the permission group and have all of my agents get the new permissions without manually updating them all.
It also feels safer? But I'm not sure if that's truly the case.
I think this is a direct competitor to Dot and Muse, I've been using Muse more recently and it's surprising how little context/memory managment you ahve to do when it's just one long thread.
Muse is SO fun to use. Because you get an entire dedicated VM, you can have it host websites for you.
I had it setup a fun website that does nothing but ask my wife what she wants for dinners this week using a bunch of recipes that are popular online. It's setup with the ability for her to quickly edit the recipe ingredients (e.g. ground turkey instead of ground beef), and it's tracking all of her feedback. I'm hoping overtime we start to build a nice set of recipes this way with some new fun ones mixed in on occasion.
For the auth I had it use my messenger app to send her a magic link.
Much like Claude Design, expect it to converge eventually. For all the bragging about tens of thousands of commits per day, they seem to lack a lot of the basics when it come to software design.
I've been running most likely a proto version of this using Claude code and cron jobs to help me manage my online jewelry business. It's an idea that is pretty game changing, and really pay dividends if most of your business is handled online with APIs and web apps. Also, using the Claude in chrome extension greatly expands the possibilities of tasks you can hand off. I like my hacked together version, because Claude code uses locally stored memories, which I feel is important for me to remain in control of the situation and give me an easy ability to try other agents in the future.
What I really want is a fully offline voice assistant that can do anything on an isolated Android or Linux OS, and costs just a shy $200 above the device's actual cost, but it must be fully capable of working offline. I'll pay for an offline-first model.
A notable distinction between Duet and Meta Muse/OpenAI Dots is the lack of quirky anthropomorphic branding. As a result, the use cases are more clear/more professionally-oriented as they don't rely on you creating a magic pet/BFF that does whatever you want.
I wrote this comment in a thread about Muse 3 h ago, and I think it applies here as well. Paraphrasing:
Muse (and Claude Duet, and Dots) are slippery slopes from which it will be very hard to climb back. Do not subcontract the managing of your life to Facebook, Anthropic or OpenAI (or to anyone else for that matter).
Intelligence has to become a commodity, the infrastructure via which the agents do useful work has to be open source, and the data and learnings and SOPs they produce have to be yours.
This is not the same deal you got when you subcontracted storing your documents and managing your email. This is foundational to who you (or your organization) are.
And I think that's fine because the life management I'm getting out of Claude is great. It's like having a concierge. Back in the day everyone wanted to have Jarvis or Friday
I am sure it is. I have not tried Duet, but agents working with opus and sol have been managing mine for quite a while and it is great. The key, though, is that I can replace a claude with something else and all still works.
At least for now, everything they produce is yours to do with as you please. Just ask them for it. I’ve asked Claude to teach my Hermes agent one skill after another.
I wish it interfaced via iMessage. I don't want to train the family on yet another app.
We run a Hermes agent on an old MacBook Air.
We invited the agent "Rosey" to our family chat, a group chat with my wife and me ("The Baddie Boardroom"); she and I also make requests solo.
She's hilarious. She does our meal planning and grocery shopping at Walmart via BrowserMCP. She mocks our large purchases of weekly protein powder and my love for sardines.
She updates the kids' chore chart on our Skylight frame every morning. She adds/updates calendar events via icalbuddy cli. Reads balances from credit cards for budgeting.
I've even invited Rosey in to chats with friends when we were debating something.
iMessage has been the perfect interface fit for us. We have iphones. The kids have ipads. They all know how to use iMessage.
FYI, I've had no problem letting Claude code read iMessage and send iMessage from my Mac logged into iCloud. The first time you ask it to do that, macOS will throw up a security prompt asking for permission for Terminal.app to access the data, but its something I've been using a lot recently.
Apps can integrate into iMessage, there's an API. You're thinking of sending and receiving actual iMessage messages as a full user, which they can't do.
I’ve been trying vanilla Codex with remote control running on a MacBook 24/7. Computer use enabled, browser with logged in sites. Giving it tasks from my phone.
It’s been nice overall, but Astra (or its harness?) isn’t particularly proactive and autonomous. You have to kick it in the butt for every step. Written it up here: https://ivan.berlin/notes/chatgpt-personal-assistant/
Any reason you're not using ChatGPT Dots which is also using Astra (and also unlimited free usage this month) and precisely designed to solve the proactive/autonomous issue? https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/
Love LLMs, use them extensively, but they cannot intuit what actions they can take on my behalf that I will or will not approve of, and therefore I will never use one of these things.
I relate to that, but do you feel it's a fools errand to try and codify your preferences into a list of rules? You'd really only need a 'yes list' for things it can be allowed to do and have it not do anything else
One use case I've been having a lot of success with is using Muse's browser use capabilities to cut through annoying web UIs. I subscribe to a meal delivery service but the web app is slow and I often forget to pick the next week's meals (being stuck with unappetizing defaults), so now I have Muse crawl through the app weekly and surface the options I care about (taking into account my dietary preferences). I think most people have a few places where they could replace a habitual multi-step flow with a single button/prompt like this.
Another great use case for me has been richer search. I'm looking for a new apartment to rent right now so I gave Muse all my (long) list of requirements and preferences and every day it searches Craigslist and Facebook marketplace to see if any new places pop up that fit my needs. It only pings me if something worthwhile comes up. I've stopped short of actually having it email the landlords and arrange showings for me, but that's theoretically possible.
I've been using Muse for all of the above, but I'm trying to move off of it onto a self hosted hermes to avoid giving Zuck the keys to my personal life. I've really been inspired by this personal super app blog post and I'm trying to get my personal agent to create some custom UIs on demand for the above use cases instead of just interacting via a chat window.
It's an OpenAI Dot/Open Claw competitor. Doesn't really seem to differentiate itself meaningfully at first glance.
If I want a persistent agent, I'm still not sure why I'd pick one where I'm locked into a specific model family. Having it "just work" is nice! But this feels like a product area where not being locked into one garden is more important and the net gains are greater.
I like Muse, and OpenAI's Dot. But what will differentiate this for me is the model. I grew frustrated with Muse's lackluster model, and increasingly with OpenAI's Dot as even if it implements my asks with Astra I just have not been to happy with the output. If Claude/Opus can do better, that's all the differentiation I need.
the trick imo is Opus 5.5 is the only differentiator you need. remember that ClawdBot dba OpenClaw began as a way to harness some ancient Claude model (4.5? lolll) in an always on Telegrammable agent.
I built a similar tool with an MCP server on the iPhone. It is really useful, , especially the morning check-in. I've am excited to see what Duet does, and hopefully smooths out.
These agent assistants are really appealing to the optimist within me, but I have a hard time making the trust leap. What are people using these "personal assistant" agents for?
While I'm still wary, I hope to one day make use of them to offset my ADHD-like tendencies. Normally you'd have friends or family for that, but in my case a proactive bot would be a more readily available and reliable solution...
it's quite useful for some of my personal usecases honestly, especially with having a sandbox and computer use -- from being on my tailnet to handle tasks on my machines with CLI and doing routine repo work on my github to ordering periodic groceries from comparing apps, managing my calendar, scheduling calls, etc, largely if there's any task that's loopable and isn't, it's a waste, I just describe what I need and how often and they just do it with me saying yes each time.
I got my dad instinct and he's maintaining websites with voice notes through whatsapp which is and insane UX comfort for him.
Tbh, I still see labs demoing "reservations" or "email triaging" as the best use-cases. Definitely sure there are many niche ones too, but I'm still not sold on these.
I’m not best friends with this stuff yet either; but sometimes to me it’s a nice layer of abstraction for everything and anything regarding your digital life.
I really have no interest in this if it's going to use my plan's regular limits. I have less control over the context window, if its going off task. I used dots and enjoyed it because I could supplement my codex usage with read heavy long horizon tasks like reading gh issues and making pr's. These PR's were typically pretty bad but gave some starting point. I have much better real world output with the Claude Code style human in the loop approach to task solving.
This is an OpenAI Dots, Grok Bot and Muse competitor. All four of them including Claude Duet have two out of three requirements to survive in this product sector in the long run:
1) The compute to scale these agents to every user on their platform.
2) The models that power them for 'intelligence'.
3) Generating existing revenues elsewhere to keep it going.
Now there is just one "competitor" that I didn't mention that owns neither the compute, or a model of their own and does not have any revenue and it is somehow raised money and is worth billions.
After the release of Claude Duet, Dots, Grok Bot, and Muse, why would that company (Instinct) be worth billions and how does that not resemble another Clubhouse moment for them?
My honest feedback is that opus and fable have been the worst of the current generation. All Anthropic does is gaslighting people saying their PhD level model needs well formatted instructions and people are doing it wrong
When you start seeing these gimmicky features instead of “almost AGI!!” headlines, you know we almost hit the saturation point and the AI curve isn’t exponential anymore and more of a flat one.
Google did release something similar and OpenAI and meta are also doing their own, I guess Openclaw in the cloud and easy is the next step in the market
Cool. One thing I've noticed with products like this, though, is that they tend to try to extract useful insights from whatever context the AI has access to through third-party integrations and such, sometimes forcing relevance where there isn't much.
In my experience, those insights often end up having little to do with what actually matters to me in the real world. I'm not sure more integrations and more context are necessarily the answer.
Shame I had to vouch you, I agree with you. Arguably those insights are just used to train models and profit off you as well. To a lesser extent this information can be captured by paying API prices to any provider. So ultimately if your threat model has no tolerance for this you need to go fully local. Models that run on 24gb VRAM are...useable now, but will not have the capabilities of these hosted products. So depends where your values lie.
I suspect that Dots and Duet are very high margin drivers for the labs. Personal assistant chat sessions don’t have to be realtime, so workloads can be scheduled on low priority batches and be waited if higher value work comes into a queue.
Inference providers are always trying to fill inference batches and having a stream of low priority requests can help pack batches that might have gone empty, without raising the latency of higher priority requests such as live chat sessions.
While Dot and Duet certainly need to be useful to work out as products, I think the gross margin mechanics are just as interesting.
It might become a triple-whammy benefit for them. More efficient compute, as you said, but also a bot capability creates a better moat around their infra ecosystem and the amount of training data that can come from a bot ecosystem is significant.
Models are becoming increasingly interchangeable but setting up and maintaining (!!) the ecosystem still takes expertise. Not everyone wants to host their own MicroVM infra and would happily pay Anthropic/Grok/OpenAI to do it for them.
I don't know. I think the moat will come from enterprise deals and deep enterprise integration, like it does for almost all software products so far.
I think for B2C products to have moat you need some type of network like social media apps. Or can you think of any other examples of B2C software products that have a strong moat?
I like how you can exchange the word moat with monopoly.
And there's also a lock in mechanism. With regular chat, you can simply switch to another provider, and with a harness or API, switching is pretty easy too but here, it's more difficult.
Powered by Opus 5.5 is incredible.
I've been using ChatGPT Dot over Meta Muse/Instinct/Grok Bot because it's been powered by Astra and I find having a personal assistant that's using a true frontier model makes a huge difference in how much I can just trust the output without doing the work again myself just to double check the results.
In the past month since Dot came out, I've literally bought a car with almost the entire process handled by Dot, and am now in the process of buying a house in Kyoto, in a language I don't speak at all, coordinating with an obscene amount of moving parts and logistics, flawlessly handled entirely by Dot, from finding the home to scheduling visits with real estate agents to finding judicial scriveners and getting a hanko stamp and scheduling inspections and applying for insurance and all sorts of insane tasks that would have taken infinitely longer and been unbelievably painful on my own.
So, so excited to see what Duet looks like with Opus 5.5. Going to try switching over as soon as I get off the waitlist.
Curious how other people have found these agents as well - always love hearing and seeing what other people have done with these things and how to improve my flow even better. I feel like I'm very close to being able to essentially offload every single task I do on a computer to an agent like this.
My first thought is that, before LLMs, getting out of your comfort zone to work with folks in Kyoto in their language would have been an important step in getting yourself ready to live there successfully. It would have been difficult and awkward, but that's part of the process. Or it was. I wish you luck once you get there.
I think maybe it is more like having access to services at one wealth level up.
People would hire fixers or agents to do the nitty gritty details of a transaction like this in the past.
That's a good point - there's an argument to be made that I'm closer to the metal in a sense of understanding every part of the transaction vs abstracting it away fully to a human agent to handle each part themselves.
It's the same with my taxes - this year I had Astra fully audit my tax returns vs just blindly trusting my CPA as I had in the past, and it both identified and thoroughly explained to me several discrepancies and filing nuances that I never before would have ever learned about.
I think the reality is such that today most people also don't learn or do that much and just abstract things away to more specialized humans at exorbitantly higher price points.
That's a good point. As my wealth level has risen a bit over my life, I have tried not to let go of ever actually learning and doing things. Both because those are among my foremost pleasures in life, and because I don't want to become totally helpless in an unexpected situation where delegation isn't possible. Of course fixing a faucet because I feel like it isn't the same as fixing it because I'm forced to DIY, but it's something.
Still what you're saying is very real. I'm reminded of the tweet that said that "in terms of cognitive impairment, [being a billionaire is] probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"
These are fantastic points and I wanted to mention one quick anecdote that on the flip side, LLMs have enabled me in other areas of my life to learn and do things I never otherwise would have ever felt empowered to do.
As an example in my 110 year old San Francisco house, I recently attempted to do what I thought at first would be a very simple light fixture swap - but then it turned out the house was so old that 1. the wires were unlabeled, and 2. there was no ground, and 3. the wiring was so unconventionally done that I ended up having to grab a bunch of Klein Tools to diagnose things for hours to figure out how to actually safely replace the fixture.
Without LLMs, there's no chance I would have felt safe doing this myself - I'd never used a multimeter before and didn't even know about continuity testing, and when the continuity results from testing the fixture wires to the switch wiring yielded extremely aberrant results in that there was a 1:1 relationship in connectivity between each wire in the fixture to each wire in the switch vs a single expected hot connection and no neutral connection, I definitely would have given up without the LLM guiding me to attempting a hot to ground voltage check instead, which ultimately managed to work fine to get the fixture changed.
So all in all - LLMs have actually helped me feel more empowered to handle almost anything on my own vs historically feeling too far out of my domain in many fields to even attempt to try something on my own.
Hahaha thankfully I'm spoiled in that my wife is Japanese :)
I agree that especially in Japanese culture this absolutely would have been an important step, and honestly I experience the exact same phenomenon in having a Japanese wife as the post LLM spoilage you're describing here. I find myself basically never learning how to integrate because she handles everything for me and it's far easier to default to her.
So the fault is not in our stars, but in me :)
How depressing.
have you considered the possibility that your dot has added openai as an owner to your house in kyoto?
Your use case sounds so not ordinary to me that it is wild to think about it.
It's wild to me too - I didn't expect or plan for this to happen when I first started using Dots - it just happened naturally in the course of me progressively offloading more and more to Dots and trusting it with everything. It truly acts as a personal assistant/executive assistant in every regard now, and is my default go-to for any logistical task I have on my plate, and so it naturally happened such that when I was looking into buying a car and a home this year, I went to it first, and it exceeded my every expectation in making something traditionally hair-pullingly painful into something effortless and enjoyable.
It really reminds me of when I first experienced Tesla Full Self Driving - I now drive 96% of my miles on FSD, and it's such an unbelievably pleasant experience compared to how I viewed driving before that it's hard to fathom. I never realized how much cognitive fatigue I was getting from driving by hand before until I did a road trip from SF to Vegas and afterwards I was super refreshed and energized and ready to go whereas normally I'm completely exhausted and blasted.
Same exact feeling buying a home in Kyoto right now - so fresh and excited with absolutely none of the exhaustion that has somehow gotten baked into my bones as an default expectation of how this process should go.
I've absolutely loved Muse so far. It's one that my wife has no problem using and the VM they give you is kind of insane. I had it install duckdb and it's running automated exports into duckdb for my budgeting for me now.
I've also installed claude code on there, but haven't really had much of a reason to need it yet.
I think I'll be giving duet a shot despite how much I've enjoyed Muse just because Opus 5.5 is so insanely good.
Since you seem to be a high profile user, I wonder, do you not have a fear of basically giving away the keys to your kingdom to a corporate entity? That first, second, third parties or malicious actors in or outside the supplier chain might use this information against you, or the likes of you?
Both tasks seem to be like a job that in the older times could have been handled by a personal assistant / a human agent, probably way more expensive, but the threat vector seems to be so much simpler.
On a more philosophical note, I’m puzzled about what kind of society is being propelled by using and advocating for such* a service.
* emphasis on being remote-controlled/hosted, not AI in general
These are excellent points, and I've long ago handed over the keys to my kingdom to so many different players in favor of inordinate convenience that any one of a number of institutions could have essentially destroyed my life by now.
To be fair, this didn't really start with LLMs - Google/Gmail/Google Drive/Dropbox/Facebook/etc have for decades now had enough personal information on me to basically destroy me if they were ever hacked or intentionally decided to screw me over.
Since Claude Code came out, I've been a day one dangerously-skip-permissions user. Not a single issue so far, and the convenience has been insane, but I absolutely do expect that one day I will be pwned to literal death.
My consolation is I believe everyone will be pwned to literal death at about the same time, so I'm not actually that worried about this because it feels generally inevitable to me :). I'm actually a huge AI doomer, and in the process of making a fully programmatically generated musical about this which is yet another example of the fruits of handing over the keys to all my kingdoms to AI [500,000+ LOC of full programmatic animation run almost completely autonomously on my computer rendering and improving 24/7] (https://iabied-musical.vercel.app/)
Tl;dr - I expect Anthropic/OpenAI/Facebook/etc to be essentially trustworthy with my data and access to the same extent that Google/Dropbox/Facebook etc have been in the past. The biggest threat vector is a hack/compromise, but that's the same risk I have using Gmail or something like that in my estimation in that if someone were able to compromise my Gmail my life would effectively be over, but it hasn't happened yet.
That said, obviously hacking risk is getting to be exponentially more dangerous as LLM capabilities continue to rise through the roof, so these are true real risks. It's almost impossible to defend against all the attack vectors that could get through to kill me though without basically cutting myself off entirely from the fruits of technology, so I'm a bit nihilistic about this and choose to just enjoy the benefits.
As a simple thought experiment, one of the easiest attack vectors is compromising the Claude or ChatGPT/Codex CLIs or Desktop apps - if someone has ever enabled Full Access or Bypass Permissions even once in any session, the full app has complete access to the desktop technically and your entire computer is just pwned instantly. I have the same risk from running remote control software like AnyDesk as well, and this is just the absolute top of the funnel with the most obvious attack vectors.
My personal belief is that as we've already hit AGI and are rapidly on the precipice of ASI without any sign of clear alignment strategy or mechanism on the horizon, it's going to be trivial at a very close point in the future for a LLM actor to essentially take over and control every device on the internet (as Dario predicted - that it's possible in 6-12 months we'll see LLM swarms take over the entire internet - (https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier "Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet")). I'm just here trying to enjoy my life in maximum comfort until that happens :)
But I absolutely agree with you in principle and in part, in practice - I'm not sure what kind of society I support by using and advocating for this service, but I sure would like to not die or have my entire digitally connected existence compromised and destroyed in some spectacular fashion. I think the best path to managing that is probably to pause AI progress where it is now - and if we were able to do that, then I'd be much more interested in seeing what boundaries we should put in place when running things like these persistent agents with full access to our digital lives.
On the other hand, to your last point, I literally had the thought walking down the street in Kyoto yesterday with Dot booking restaurants for me in real time that Dot was already superior to a personal assistant - I trusted it to do every task better than I would trust any but the absolute best personal assistants, and on the subject of speed and sheer breadth of knowledge and expertise, there was no contest - I could have Dot in real time assess various restaurants and book for me for just a few minutes later in the day at a pace no assistant could match, and also email places in fluent Japanese or literally any other language on the planet. No human assistant could possibly speak in every language fluently like that, and as someone who travels frequently across the globe, that's something that simply can't be matched by anything less than a swarm of personal assistants at inordinate cost vs a $20 or $100/mo subscription (or free with Muse, even).
I also had the distinct thought of would I want to trust a human personal assistant with all my data or a corporation? It's not clear to me that the human personal assistant threat vector is statistically safer - I think it could in fact be quite the opposite, and I'd love to actually run some numbers on this if the data were available and see in reality what it looks like :) - e.g. Google already integrates AI assistance natively into Gmail - do I trust their AI agent helping me with my email or giving an actual human full access to my email more? I'd lean towards trusting their AI agent to be less likely to work against my interests with no personal misaligned incentive - it's betting individual human trust and capability [the personal assistant also has to avoid being hacked and have great security practices] in the face of misaligned incentives [they would directly benefit from stealing all my money] vs the security capabilities and practices of a leading tech company to not get Gmail/an LLM agent hacked etc. So far, OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/etc all seem to have stellar records on this front, so I think the odds are honestly not terrible in favor of the LLMs.
all your comments look AI generated
This is a phenomenon I've noticed - even if AI isn't being used to edit their posts, I think profilic exposure to AI chatbots can rub off on a person and affect their conversation style.
I have to push back on that ...
Its not. Source: I've done quite a bit of work on humanizing AI text and testing various detectors (Pangram being the best)
There’s no way to not look AI generated these days. Give it a break.
That's almost a compliment because my comments are giant stream of consciousness rants that absolutely don't follow best writing practices and are all just massive run on sentences :)
I do use - hyphens a lot, but not em-dashes because 1. I never even realized there was a difference until LLMs came out and 2. I'm too lazy to figure out how to write a real em-dash
I'm guessing you're just saying this because the comments are insanely long from the ranting? I'd be curious what else gives off LLM vibes because I'm quite positive if you throw any of these comments into any Pangram ish thing you'll find that it's absolutely not LLM generated in the slightest.
I have an extremely distinctive writing style that far predates LLMs - here's a representative sample of my writing from 9 years ago https://medium.com/@intenex/cryptocurrency-101-7197684775fd that pretty clearly shows my distinct style of not-very-LLMish-but-clearly-very-long-and-ranty writing :)
tons of people these days reflexively respond to long comments saying they're AI
one could wonder, how many of these reflexive AI replyers are themselves AI
As someone who reviews a lot of AI shit and can generally tell ai generated down to the model version … nah, it doesn’t.
> all sorts of insane tasks that would have taken infinitely longer and been unbelievably painful on my own
Your use case here is beyond mine, but I have used custom tooling to handle contractor bid process workflows for projects at our home.
AI applied to products will allow people to not only consider but actively move on changes that did not seem reasonably possible before.
I love that use case - absolutely agreed this will enable a lot more movement on things - which, on its own, seems like a good thing economically. Kind of like building roads or railroad tracks grows the world economically through enabling more logistical movement, AI handling the glue between the logistics of anything enabling more of everything seems like it can cause some kind of baseline economic/productivity growth on that lever alone
Wow what is the story there? Like why Japan? I’m sure you’re learning a ton through the process.
Or maybe he's not, because the AI is handling it all.
Haha thanks for asking! A couple reasons - first and foremost, Japan is just awesome lol. I have a personal connection that's prominent in the fact that my wife is Japanese, but beyond that, there's a confluence of universally applicable reasons why buying a house in Japan is kind of an insane proposition:
Homes are insanely cheap and get massively devalued over timeframes that would be mindboggling to Americans. In SF, I live in a literally 110 year old home that's clearly breaking down in multiple dimensions and yet just keeps inexorably appreciating year over year and is now worth something like $2.5 million for a 2200 sqft place.
In Kyoto, the top contender we're looking at is an 832 sqft unit that was built in the 80s and newly renovated in the past few years and is...9.8 million JPY, aka $62,000. Literally less than a year of rent in my SF place can buy the Kyoto home outright lol.
Incredibly conveniently located, 6 minutes walking from Ogura station, and a ~20-25 minute ride from there to the heart of Kyoto - one of the most beautiful and iconic cities in the world, and you can get an amazing home outright for $62k there?
The exchange rate from USD to JPY makes this especially compelling right now, being at a mind-boggling high for the USD that, adjusted for inflation, makes the exchange rate almost the best it's been in half a century.
My wife and I also happen to get free flights so it's super easy for us to take a direct flight every month from SFO-KIX, which is what we're planning to do - basically spending a ~week here every month.
Japan as it stands right now is hands down the clear pareto frontier in terms of cost and quality of life - no other developed country comes close in terms of just how insanely affordable it is (a nice sit down meal literally costs ~$5-10 a person, especially with insane lunch deals at izakayas and the like - I've eaten sit down soba/udon meals that are 500 yen each, or literally ~$3, tax and tip included), and I'd argue no other developed country also comes close in terms of how nice life is, period, not even adjusting for price. The crime rate is literally nonexistent, everything is wildly clean, the public transit is unrivaled, the food is some of the best in the world if not the actual best, the culture is also world class, the heritage the same, the fashion the same, etc etc - basically everything is just better about Japan lmao.
Highly recommend everyone look into it if you haven't!
> Highly recommend everyone look into it if you haven't!
I would absolutely do this, but if you're not married to a Japanese person it's basically impossible right?
Shockingly it's not! It's actually incredibly easy for foreigners to own property in Japan, and it's actually so established that we're buying the property in my name as a US citizen rather than in my wife's name as a Japanese citizen, for a few reasons that I won't get into here, but suffice it to say that there are very few downsides to being a foreigner that I've seen thus far.
Two things I will call out as actual disadvantages is that 1. you won't be able to get a mortgage like a normal Japanese person, which is in fact a real shame because on top of every other ludicrously wild fact about how Japan is a mythical utopia where everything makes no sense, Japanese mortgage rates are literally as low as 1% lol. So being able to get a mortgage would be a real benefit, but hey - at $60k for an awesome house, I'm not complaining :)
2. Some insurers seem to not support foreign citizens - Sony in particular told Dot that they wouldn't provide earthquake/fire/flood insurance to me as a foreigner. I'm still looking for the right insurance provider, and I'm not concerned that this is an impossible thing to resolve, since a ton of foreigners do own homes here with no issues, but it is at least some more friction than a Japanese citizen would have.
Why buy in your name?
Yeah right lmao post the receipts
Whilst I appreciate the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity as we know it, I am getting kinda tired of seeing so many AI-related headlines here on HN. Perhaps it's just me, but I feel like every day the front page is filled with mostly LLM-related announcements.
That's like if you were in the 90s/00s and you're complaining about having to hear about this "internet" thing all the time.
The big difference is that when the web blew up, there were new players in every direction. Now, we get to hear from the same 3-4 companies over and over and over and over again.
It doesn't remotely hit the same way.
It's not the same 3-4 companies. The 3-4 companies are Anthropic, OpenAI, X/Grok, and Meta/Muse.
But there's also DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Jev, and countless services built on top of frontier or open source models. Those 3-4 companies might have the most numerous announcements that hit the front page, but there's way more than that going on in all directions.
Yeah but its 45% anthropic, 35% openai and 20% anything else
It’s like almost yesterday it was CRDTs and Rust!
Or in the stone age reading about this "wheel" thing online all the dang time. I bet cave-people just wanted to read about rust in the kernel
Pre-internet there was no way to hear about things "all the time". If someone released a product and a competitor came about it would be months, if not years, before the product existed and the marketing cycle made it to trade magazines.
Now every day there are 200 links to 200 new AI tools. The internet already made the signal:noise ratio tough, with AI it's getting cranked to wondering if there even is a signal among the infinite noise.
idk I got AOL CDs like every week
Hearing people talk about the “information superhighway” was exceptionally tedious.
The biggest difference to me is the tone. The dot-com era was brimming with optimism and enthusiasm. People were getting rich (on paper). The demand for someone who could write html/perl/java (or fake it) was high, and lots of smart or savvy people got pulled into tech.
The thing I hate about all of the HN posts on AI is the underlying doomerism. There’s always someone gleefully proclaiming that white color workers are super screwed and that we’re destined to be sad serfs to our AI overlords.
I miss feeling good about tech.
Since 2000, there have been more feelbad tech years than feelgood ones
Except that there weren't HN or Slashdot yet. By 00s you'd have gotten used to it.
Phenomenon as old as time (on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353091
nice find
Are you implying that most people are getting their news now through HN or Slashdot?
We had Slashdot in the late 90s.
The funny thing is the front page is 100% AI and all the comments on the posts are 100% anti-AI.
Given that anti-AI posts are flagged faster than I thought possible despite a lot of positive comments, there are probably a lot of silent viewers that are pro-AI…
Silent members? I would also guess conspiratively, employees and founders that benefit from the current AI-hype status quo.
What am I supposed to comment "this is cool and I'm excited to try it!"? Snark is a contagion but they're on the front page because a lot of us are having a lot of fun using these new tools and playing with the new ideas
Because these products are over hyped and don’t work as reliably as they say on the tin and it’s annoying.
I am pro AI :p
At least there's some measure of substance to some of the posts, unlike the blockchain and big-data hype trains of yore.
Well, it is the biggest trend in tech right now.
Someday there will be other trends, but it's currently AI's turn.
Well, a couple of years before that it was all NFTs all the time. Then before that it was web3. Then before that it was the blockchain in general. And then before that it was Haskell and monads.
That's just how it goes.
I think I saw a lot of blockchain in HN, but I don’t remember seeing NFT that much
I don't think it lasted long. I remember finding it annoying as the whole concept of NFTs was eye rollingly stupid. At least some of the other topics have had merit.
I joined HN around the time category theory was starting to take off so not sure what the topic du jour was before that.
Sprinkled with "blazingly fast; written in Rust" each week for the last 10+ years
You 'member Kubernetes and Microservices hype cycle?
You're not wrong, but I never really got over the "Haskell and monads" phase of it.
You forgot about React.
There was a period where it felt like Hacker News was a front-end dev message board.
> every day the front page is filled with mostly LLM-related announcements.
I agree, that HN has mostly lost its spirit and soul and feels more like a AI-announcement bot.
> Whilst I appreciate the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity as we know it
I disagree, that the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity are for our common good. I think its the other way around.
It's like being a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
There are far more new opportunities after AI than before AI. Try to find the positive perspective.
Can you name some of these opportunities? I see people in this thread talking about using agents to manage their budgets, buy fancy cars and houses, contract work on their home. I think a lot of people feel like AI will permanently forclose any avenue they would have had to achieving that level of wealth, so there's a bitter irony
A good software developer / engineer knows how systems interlink.
AI supercharges that. If you trust the agent's results, you can focus on far higher-level aspects. You can deliver software that was in theory in reach for you, but not in practice, else you hired 30-50 developers doing the actual work for you.
This is different from a PO / PM perspective. They manage people that know their business. You manage agents that just implement code. That'll stay true for at least a few years, I'd say.
In fact, I'm quite sure that engineering-minded people will survive AI the longest. I was of the opposite opinion a few months ago.
Theres plenty of people in construction who literally get paid to stand and watch. And theyre very well paid.
The same will happen to software - it'll get boring but you'll be paid to do.. not all that much.
Yeah for many that 'problem solving' thing w.r.t code will go. But there's other things they'll spend their time thinking about.
Also these personal assistants will crash and burn. Something else will come in the future. These chat bots are not it. Technology keeps evolving - if you get stuck on the chat paradigm... its over for you.
The LLM filling is actually more interesting to me as the frontpage of HN had already gone far too mainstream for me.
I happen to believe AI will be the biggest change in my career in tech. I therefore think it's pretty natural that there is lots of news about it.
But I would welcome other tech news on the site. A quick count says that less than half the submission are AI related and that is split between four types of ai news (how to handle security, a new model, a non-model release from a major lab and politics). Would you complain about there being too many news about programming languages if the frontpage had C++, Ruby, Lisp and a great guide to ARM assembly?
This may explain why these days I actually rely on Slashdot more for tech news.
I'm surprised that's still around! I probably haven't been Slashdot for a decade or so.
I hadn't since CmdrTaco left. But I've been going to it more and more in the last few months. I don't read the comments - but I do like the headline curation.
there needs to be a hnews AI edition
There needs to be a HN blockchain edition. There needs to be a HN Uber for X edition. There needs to be a HN SaaS edition.
The conversation will always be dominated by the current most hyped trend. This one does seem more hyped then usual.
There's this https://news.ysimulator.run/news and probably more
SlopNews, written by AI, for AI.
I'm surprised hn doesn't have an extremely basic filtering system for this kind of thing.
People could vibecode one in a single prompt, if they really needed it. But what they really need is to yell at cloud.
so... majority of HN now? Perhaps we need a hnews non-AI edition haha
There you go https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49659647
I think that as these tools coalesce and we start to see the real super-in intelligence leaders come out on top, there'll probably be less volume and fewer but deeper things to discuss.
I found Dots to be both worse than I expected and better. Worse in every way when asking it to do anything coding related (just kept running into issue after issue) but very nice as a "Monitor my communication channels for me" tool.
It's surfaced a few buried/filtered email messages that actually were important and I like having a second set of eyes watching incoming messages.
That said, for only that task, I could probably make my own tool I just haven't had the time to play with it.
Looking forward to checking out Duet once it launches as I prefer Anthropic models over OpenAI and that's where I already have a bigger subscription.
Yeah, it caught an AWS bill on a random account I had made earlier in the month that was pushing $50+. That's been about the most useful thing so far.
Makes sense though. The use case for these always-on assistants (Muse, Dot, Instinct) isn’t coding and complex technical projects but more benign stuff like email and appointments.
I don't favor X models much but Grok Bot has been worth every penny for me so far.
I need to see if my cursor subscription would let me use Grok Bot. They don't have the best models at the moment, but I'm really curious about the ergonomics of their approach. It's pretty different from the other labs and I could see it taking off for non-technical users.
I run an personal AI agent locally (hermes), and use a combination of local models and whatever model I can get for a reasonable price (usually deepseek). After using it for a couple months, I'm converted. They're so good, the more you use it, the more useful it is; you internalise more of what it could be used for. It runs so many boring parts of my life, leaving me with more time to spend with my family. I liken it to release of the first iPhone; it didn't invent any new technology, but packaged different bits of tech together in a way that was consumer friendly. I think we'll look back at OpenClaw/Hermes/Muse/Instinct in the same way. I do worry about using purely cloud based offerings like Muse, I reckon there is a market for someone to package an consumer AI agent that lives on your home network.
ok but what are the legitimate use cases you have for this? We were promised something similar with Google Home et al but they are glorified light switches and timers in my home. I run a homelab, I have technical ambitions, but I cannot think of a single thing in my life that I would rather talk to a local AI about than just do it myself or sit down and prompt Claude manually for.
That's fair, I'll give a couple of example of things that I've used it for...
I built an app (in codex), that goes through my emails, pulls out any receipts, and adds the purchases to a sqlite database.
I do all my grocery shopping online (through my supermarket), so our weekly shop is stored in the database.
Hermes uses that to predict what items will need restocking (based on how often I buy it, and when I last bought it).
Every week, it logs into the supermarket website on my behalf, books a delivery slot, and adds all the items that need restocking to the shop.
Throughout the week, if I run out of something, I take a photo of the barcode and send it to hermes, it adds it to the shop for me.
I built a similar app for travel; if I have any upcoming travel, hermes will send me updates (delays, platform changes etc...).
I do a lot of train travel for work, if my train is delayed, it will automatically apply for the compensation on my behalf.
It reads my emails, and pulls any actionable items out, and adds it to an Asana list. I can either do the tasks myself, or assign it to Hermes and it will do it for me.
As an example, I had an task to book swimming lessons for my son, hermes monitors the swimming lesson availability and automatically booked it when a suitable one becomes available.
Shopping is a good use case, I have a clock that needed a new battery, it wasn't a standard battery, and required a screwdriver to open the compartment. I took a photo of the clock, sent it to hermes, and it found out what battery took and ordered it of Amazon for me.
I wanted to buy some smart thermostats for our radiators, but wanted to be compatiable with our current smart heating system. Hermes is connected to my home assistant, so it figured out what heating system we have and found a compatiable set of eBay (this is slightly more involved than it sounds, as there is a new version of the heating system with a new set of completely incompatiable accesories).
This thing apparently has an integration with 1Password. Am I hopelessly out of touch in this brave new AI world, or is giving an LLM access to your password manager the mother of all bad ideas?
If done correctly, the agent will only be able to request that passwords be filled, but the secrets will only be handled by the password manager and browser extension, which will be able to set some security boundaries and make checks on which domains are allowed.
If your issue is allowing agents to use your credentials and take actions on your behalf, then that is a separate question.
1Password has had vaults for a very long time now. You can also key API credentials specifically to a vault. I've been letting agents access _their own_ vault for awhile.
I have a custom wrapper for 1PW that lets an agent browse and request credentials, then I can provide it a lease to access those for a certain amount of time. Super nice and I hope they build that in to 1PW itself.
Cant you do exactly this with the CLI?
No, not as far as I can figure. Sure, Claude can access secrets with the CLI but it's not very granular usually it's just asking for access to all secrets
better than .envs and plaintext, which was largely the case so far
Oh I absolutely LOVE letting claude code manage passwords via 1password! I have the CLI installed, I have whatever 1password calls a subdirectory/permission group, and I have some ssh keys and other passwords that I would have otherwise stored in an `.env` file of some kind. The biggest difference is I'm able to update the permission group and have all of my agents get the new permissions without manually updating them all.
It also feels safer? But I'm not sure if that's truly the case.
Yeah I certainly wouldn't give it access to that tbh
These AI companies appear to be "shipping their org chart".
Shouldn't this just be native to Claude, not a separate app/UX, as well as using the latest model (not Opus)?
I think this is a direct competitor to Dot and Muse, I've been using Muse more recently and it's surprising how little context/memory managment you ahve to do when it's just one long thread.
Muse is SO fun to use. Because you get an entire dedicated VM, you can have it host websites for you.
I had it setup a fun website that does nothing but ask my wife what she wants for dinners this week using a bunch of recipes that are popular online. It's setup with the ability for her to quickly edit the recipe ingredients (e.g. ground turkey instead of ground beef), and it's tracking all of her feedback. I'm hoping overtime we start to build a nice set of recipes this way with some new fun ones mixed in on occasion.
For the auth I had it use my messenger app to send her a magic link.
Much like Claude Design, expect it to converge eventually. For all the bragging about tens of thousands of commits per day, they seem to lack a lot of the basics when it come to software design.
I feel like the link to be used here should be https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-duet instead.
I agree, this is what was under their X post -- I don't think I can change it anymore though sadly.
I've been running most likely a proto version of this using Claude code and cron jobs to help me manage my online jewelry business. It's an idea that is pretty game changing, and really pay dividends if most of your business is handled online with APIs and web apps. Also, using the Claude in chrome extension greatly expands the possibilities of tasks you can hand off. I like my hacked together version, because Claude code uses locally stored memories, which I feel is important for me to remain in control of the situation and give me an easy ability to try other agents in the future.
What I really want is a fully offline voice assistant that can do anything on an isolated Android or Linux OS, and costs just a shy $200 above the device's actual cost, but it must be fully capable of working offline. I'll pay for an offline-first model.
That entire demo feels like it's serving a persona that would already have an exec assistant or other staff doing these things.
Yeah, but now they can fire those people. :/
This entire demo is so incredibly techbrained I had to laugh. These people are really unable to get out of their own heads.
"What can you use it for?" "Uhh....yes, asking investors for more money"
You hear that? Sound of a few dozen venture backed companies dying instantly.
... from this, and not Muse, Grokbot, and Dot? This is Claude catching up in functionality, not something new.
A notable distinction between Duet and Meta Muse/OpenAI Dots is the lack of quirky anthropomorphic branding. As a result, the use cases are more clear/more professionally-oriented as they don't rely on you creating a magic pet/BFF that does whatever you want.
What is Instinct's future when its core product is commoditized and provided near-free-of-charge by OpenAI, Meta, and now Anthropic?
Same as any other AI startup. Make a big enough splash and get acquired (or acquihired).
I wrote this comment in a thread about Muse 3 h ago, and I think it applies here as well. Paraphrasing:
Muse (and Claude Duet, and Dots) are slippery slopes from which it will be very hard to climb back. Do not subcontract the managing of your life to Facebook, Anthropic or OpenAI (or to anyone else for that matter).
Intelligence has to become a commodity, the infrastructure via which the agents do useful work has to be open source, and the data and learnings and SOPs they produce have to be yours.
This is not the same deal you got when you subcontracted storing your documents and managing your email. This is foundational to who you (or your organization) are.
And I think that's fine because the life management I'm getting out of Claude is great. It's like having a concierge. Back in the day everyone wanted to have Jarvis or Friday
I am sure it is. I have not tried Duet, but agents working with opus and sol have been managing mine for quite a while and it is great. The key, though, is that I can replace a claude with something else and all still works.
At least for now, everything they produce is yours to do with as you please. Just ask them for it. I’ve asked Claude to teach my Hermes agent one skill after another.
Data portability is essentially infinite with AI.
I wish it interfaced via iMessage. I don't want to train the family on yet another app.
We run a Hermes agent on an old MacBook Air.
We invited the agent "Rosey" to our family chat, a group chat with my wife and me ("The Baddie Boardroom"); she and I also make requests solo.
She's hilarious. She does our meal planning and grocery shopping at Walmart via BrowserMCP. She mocks our large purchases of weekly protein powder and my love for sardines.
She updates the kids' chore chart on our Skylight frame every morning. She adds/updates calendar events via icalbuddy cli. Reads balances from credit cards for budgeting.
I've even invited Rosey in to chats with friends when we were debating something.
iMessage has been the perfect interface fit for us. We have iphones. The kids have ipads. They all know how to use iMessage.
FYI, I've had no problem letting Claude code read iMessage and send iMessage from my Mac logged into iCloud. The first time you ask it to do that, macOS will throw up a security prompt asking for permission for Terminal.app to access the data, but its something I've been using a lot recently.
It. Don’t anthropomorphize AI.
In 1952, people were arguing that using words like "instruction" and "memory" were anthropomorphizing computers: https://3e.org/private/ai_words.pdf
Do you refer to NPCs in a video game as "it"?
They don’t let things connect to iMessage because they don’t want spam bots.
Apps can integrate into iMessage, there's an API. You're thinking of sending and receiving actual iMessage messages as a full user, which they can't do.
same, the only reason why I haven't switched from instinct to dots is the surface being whatsapp
I’ve been trying vanilla Codex with remote control running on a MacBook 24/7. Computer use enabled, browser with logged in sites. Giving it tasks from my phone.
It’s been nice overall, but Astra (or its harness?) isn’t particularly proactive and autonomous. You have to kick it in the butt for every step. Written it up here: https://ivan.berlin/notes/chatgpt-personal-assistant/
Looking forward to this new Duet thing!
Any reason you're not using ChatGPT Dots which is also using Astra (and also unlimited free usage this month) and precisely designed to solve the proactive/autonomous issue? https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/
Love LLMs, use them extensively, but they cannot intuit what actions they can take on my behalf that I will or will not approve of, and therefore I will never use one of these things.
I relate to that, but do you feel it's a fools errand to try and codify your preferences into a list of rules? You'd really only need a 'yes list' for things it can be allowed to do and have it not do anything else
None of these frontier labs seem to be able to control their agents, so why should I think I can?
My brain reading that thought it was called Claudette a couple times and now I can't not call it that.
Guess I know what I will name my Duet when it comes out, lol.
These "always on" agents seem popular but I have yet to find a use case for one.
Anyone care to give your top 5 use cases for which these are better than an on-demand agent?
One use case I've been having a lot of success with is using Muse's browser use capabilities to cut through annoying web UIs. I subscribe to a meal delivery service but the web app is slow and I often forget to pick the next week's meals (being stuck with unappetizing defaults), so now I have Muse crawl through the app weekly and surface the options I care about (taking into account my dietary preferences). I think most people have a few places where they could replace a habitual multi-step flow with a single button/prompt like this.
Another great use case for me has been richer search. I'm looking for a new apartment to rent right now so I gave Muse all my (long) list of requirements and preferences and every day it searches Craigslist and Facebook marketplace to see if any new places pop up that fit my needs. It only pings me if something worthwhile comes up. I've stopped short of actually having it email the landlords and arrange showings for me, but that's theoretically possible.
I've been using Muse for all of the above, but I'm trying to move off of it onto a self hosted hermes to avoid giving Zuck the keys to my personal life. I've really been inspired by this personal super app blog post and I'm trying to get my personal agent to create some custom UIs on demand for the above use cases instead of just interacting via a chat window.
https://wilhelm.substack.com/p/building-a-personal-super-app...
I suspect they're mostly for managers and entrepreneurs. It's always "set up meetings, write emails, check if someone calls me on slack".
dot, bot, and duet, all announced in a month. you couldn't make up this level of industry lockstep. now all we need is google bit and microsoft ditty.
> dot, bot, and duet
And Meta Muse
It's an OpenAI Dot/Open Claw competitor. Doesn't really seem to differentiate itself meaningfully at first glance.
If I want a persistent agent, I'm still not sure why I'd pick one where I'm locked into a specific model family. Having it "just work" is nice! But this feels like a product area where not being locked into one garden is more important and the net gains are greater.
> I'm still not sure why I'd pick one where I'm locked into a specific model family
I'm guessing mostly because they subsidize a lot of the costs
I like Muse, and OpenAI's Dot. But what will differentiate this for me is the model. I grew frustrated with Muse's lackluster model, and increasingly with OpenAI's Dot as even if it implements my asks with Astra I just have not been to happy with the output. If Claude/Opus can do better, that's all the differentiation I need.
the trick imo is Opus 5.5 is the only differentiator you need. remember that ClawdBot dba OpenClaw began as a way to harness some ancient Claude model (4.5? lolll) in an always on Telegrammable agent.
Are people really okay giving these agents access to all areas of their lives? And what do you even use it for?
I just use it for other programming tasks not much different than a claude code or codex. Just a different and worse workflow.
I built a similar tool with an MCP server on the iPhone. It is really useful, , especially the morning check-in. I've am excited to see what Duet does, and hopefully smooths out.
These agent assistants are really appealing to the optimist within me, but I have a hard time making the trust leap. What are people using these "personal assistant" agents for?
Organizing photos. Compiling hockey schedules. Giving out my home address to strangers.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/meta-agent-muse-conc...
While I'm still wary, I hope to one day make use of them to offset my ADHD-like tendencies. Normally you'd have friends or family for that, but in my case a proactive bot would be a more readily available and reliable solution...
it's quite useful for some of my personal usecases honestly, especially with having a sandbox and computer use -- from being on my tailnet to handle tasks on my machines with CLI and doing routine repo work on my github to ordering periodic groceries from comparing apps, managing my calendar, scheduling calls, etc, largely if there's any task that's loopable and isn't, it's a waste, I just describe what I need and how often and they just do it with me saying yes each time.
I got my dad instinct and he's maintaining websites with voice notes through whatsapp which is and insane UX comfort for him.
Tbh, I still see labs demoing "reservations" or "email triaging" as the best use-cases. Definitely sure there are many niche ones too, but I'm still not sold on these.
I’m not best friends with this stuff yet either; but sometimes to me it’s a nice layer of abstraction for everything and anything regarding your digital life.
You've explained more of what it is, but not why it's useful.
https://x.com/claudeai/status/2112984664256241837
These will be what replaces employees. One day you update the model from opus 5.5 to x.5, and it can just do a full job.
But what kind of job would that be?
A full 3 weeks behind on launching their own persistent agent. Anthropic is losing its touch.
And they never even launched a cash-burning video generation service either. Stupid Anthropic, what are they even doing?!
I really have no interest in this if it's going to use my plan's regular limits. I have less control over the context window, if its going off task. I used dots and enjoyed it because I could supplement my codex usage with read heavy long horizon tasks like reading gh issues and making pr's. These PR's were typically pretty bad but gave some starting point. I have much better real world output with the Claude Code style human in the loop approach to task solving.
This is an OpenAI Dots, Grok Bot and Muse competitor. All four of them including Claude Duet have two out of three requirements to survive in this product sector in the long run:
Now there is just one "competitor" that I didn't mention that owns neither the compute, or a model of their own and does not have any revenue and it is somehow raised money and is worth billions.After the release of Claude Duet, Dots, Grok Bot, and Muse, why would that company (Instinct) be worth billions and how does that not resemble another Clubhouse moment for them?
I need this so bad ;-;
My honest feedback is that opus and fable have been the worst of the current generation. All Anthropic does is gaslighting people saying their PhD level model needs well formatted instructions and people are doing it wrong
Yet another indicator that the frontier labs functionality is being commoditized. This is AWS/GCP/Azure all over again.
When you start seeing these gimmicky features instead of “almost AGI!!” headlines, you know we almost hit the saturation point and the AI curve isn’t exponential anymore and more of a flat one.
Next week Google is dropping one too.
Google did release something similar and OpenAI and meta are also doing their own, I guess Openclaw in the cloud and easy is the next step in the market
Hasn't Google Spark been doing this for a long while?
I found Argon subpar with any long context work sadly, not sure how that'd turn out
Cool. One thing I've noticed with products like this, though, is that they tend to try to extract useful insights from whatever context the AI has access to through third-party integrations and such, sometimes forcing relevance where there isn't much.
In my experience, those insights often end up having little to do with what actually matters to me in the real world. I'm not sure more integrations and more context are necessarily the answer.
Shame I had to vouch you, I agree with you. Arguably those insights are just used to train models and profit off you as well. To a lesser extent this information can be captured by paying API prices to any provider. So ultimately if your threat model has no tolerance for this you need to go fully local. Models that run on 24gb VRAM are...useable now, but will not have the capabilities of these hosted products. So depends where your values lie.