Bill Gates-Backed Startup Launches AI Chatbot for Personalized Movie, Book Picks | Mint – Mint
Billionaire entrepreneur Bill Gates declared in March that “the Age of AI has begun.” At least one of his investments is betting on the ways AI will help people choose their entertainment.
Likewise, an early-stage startup backed by Gates’s private office, is launching a chatbot Thursday that offers users personalized recommendations for books, movies, TV shows and podcasts. The chatbot, called Pix, runs on OpenAI’s natural-language processing technology and will learn users’ preferences over time. It will be free to users.
The Gates-backed startup plans to use its 600 million consumer data points to distinguish its media-recommendation platform from the one-size-fits-all chatbots that are already available. Unlike the recommendation software available within streaming services, Pix will suggest content across platforms to users who text, email or ask it questions via its app.
“That personal agent aspect is going to be a big part of what we see people doing in the next couple years,” said Ian Morris, chief executive of Likewise. “That’s something we’re looking to really define.”
Since OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT almost a year ago, some of the biggest names in tech have joined the race to develop the technology. Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI to get early access to the startup’s generative artificial-intelligence technology, which can create text and images in response to prompts.
Likewise faces the tough task of gaining traction with consumers who have been inundated this year with talk of new AI tools. And it will have to show that its technology works.
Some chatbots have been known to make up answers or share facts that aren’t real, something that is called hallucinating. Morris said Pix will be subject to the same problems.
“We’re going to have those same challenges and I think that’s something that is going to be part of any of these AI services for a while,” Morris said.
Gates, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and left the board in 2020, has been a proponent of developing AI and has met with OpenAI since 2016. After watching ChatGPT ace a college-level biology exam last fall ahead of its launch, he said his interest skyrocketed.
“I knew I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface,” he wrote in the blog post in March.
In addition to efforts from Microsoft, Google and Meta to incorporate the technology into their product offerings, Elon Musk, an early investor in OpenAI, created a new startup called xAI. Bret Taylor, a former chairman at Twitter, announced earlier this year that he was working on an AI-related startup without sharing details. And big-time Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman recently scaled back his role at venture-capital firm Greylock to pursue AI efforts.
Pix users will receive detailed responses to their queries within minutes. The answers should get better and more personalized as Pix gets to know the user better, according to Morris.
Pix is updated in real time with the content that is currently available on streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Max.
Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com
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