Last month, OpenAI unveiled an ambitious fresh language model for solving hard problems using step-by-step simulated reasoning. OpenAI says this approach could be key to building more effective artificial intelligence systems in the future.
In the meantime, perhaps a more modest version of this technology could make AI girls and guys more unplanned and seductive.
That’s it Dippya startup offering “uncensored” AI companions is a bet. The company recently launched a feature that allows users to see the reasoning behind their AI character’s reactions.
Dippy uses its own vast language model, which is open source and offers fine-tuned role-playing data, which the company says allows for better improvisation when the user steers the conversation in a specific direction.
Akshat Jagga, Dippy’s CEO, says adding an extra layer of simulated “thinking” — using so-called “chain-of-thought prompting” — can also trigger more compelling and surprising responses. “A lot of people use it,” Jagga says. “Usually talking to an LLM triggers a knee-jerk reaction.”
Jagga adds that the fresh feature can, for example, detect when one of the AI characters is cheating, which some users apparently enjoy when roleplaying. “It’s interesting when you can actually read the character’s inner thoughts,” Jagga says. “We have this character who is sweet in the foreground but manipulative in the background.”
I tried talking to some of Dippy’s default characters, with the PG settings on, because otherwise they would be too horny. This feature adds another dimension to the narrative, but I still found the dialogue rather predictable, resembling something taken from a bad romance novel or tired piece of fanfiction.
One of Dippy’s characters, described as “A tyrant on the outside, warm on the inside,” revealed the supple side behind the coarse exterior when I clicked the “Read Thought Process” link under each message, but both the inner and outer dialogue boxes lacked nuance or be surprising and repetitive. For fun, I also tried giving some of the characters some basic arithmetic problems, and their thinking sometimes showed me how to break down the puzzle to get the correct answer.
Despite its limitations, Dippy seems to show how popular and addictive AI companions are becoming. Jagga and his co-founder Angad Arneja were previously co-founders Womboa company that uses artificial intelligence to create memes, incl singing photos. The pair left the company in 2023, having started building an AI-powered office tool, but after experimenting with different people for their assistant, they became fascinated with the potential of AI companionship.