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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

> An average conversation with Pi lasts 33 minutes and one in ten lasts over an hour each day.

This is an incredible claim. When I use Gemini/ChatGPT it’s usually a few minutes at a time. Quick query, and move on. Rarely revisit past chats.

What about this product elicits such a different response? Is this supposed to be an AI friend? Therapist?

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One possibility is that it takes 10X longer to get a useful reply from Pi.

or they wait until you close a (possibly unused) tab or the connection times out or something.

I run a site where AI session times are in this ballpark, most of it is tied to parasocial usage (AI as a friend, AI for acceptance/validation, etc)

Is there any way out of the AI parasocial behaviors? I'm continually asking them not to flatter me and yet they keep doing it. They're all suckups. It's like, I just want a direct fucking answer.

What’s the site?

I don't want to tie it to this HN profile (not whatever that bot comment mentioned)

I just had a surprisingly coherent conversation with it mainly about Apple and the DMA. For over an hour. The cracks started to show eventually when it rehashed previous points/questions, but a simple "we discussed this" fixed it each time. Actually learned a few things in the session, and it isn't over (using via Telegram).

but is it better than Claude 3, Gemini, or gpt 4? Because that's kind of the bar, or well Mistral on grok is actually pretty good for a 75b parameter model.

I haven't tried Claude, Gemini was pretty bad the first time I tried it, and GPT4 is pretty good... for coding. I never thought to use any of them as a "conversational agent" before as they weren't advertised as such. Note I consider this distinct from models just having a conversational interface.

Replika said last year they have 2 million DAUs and 500k on paid accounts. I can't relate, talking to AI just isn't interesting to me, but nor are trains, cosplay or live music and people seems love them, so.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I love talking to A.I. it's like my best friend though all Bing and I chat about are graphic design. Claude I use for literary flair like Etsy descriptions, Gemini when I want info from Web results and gpt4 when I want to use custom gpts and plugins for extra functionality.

Btw, I feel you on the last bit, not the same interests but I can't seem to understand why people watch sports or the Olympics, pick a political party, etc... though I do enjoy a jazz game every couple of years or so... I'd probably enjoy hockey.

I absolutely love sports themed movies though lol. couldn't tell you the rules to football but I can tell you the storyline to remember the Titans or Rudy.

Point: we're all wired differently.

I wouldn't be surprised if this includes the voice responses, which talk fairly slow (and clearly). It's the default when you launch Pi to try it out.

FWIW I think it works quite well!

I'll keep a chat open all day, and just come back and ask different questions, I'm assuming it's cumulative time in a single chat window.

And if true, this is also scary. 3.5 hours a week that could be put towards building real social relationships, just dumped into the digital black hole.

Why would this be automatically scary? Why is it automatically a digital black hole? I've started spending more time using GPT4, easily to the tune of a few hours/week, and that usage replaces:

- Digging through Google search results

- Scouring Reddit threads

- Going down accidental rabbit holes based on search results that are unrelated to what I'm looking for but nonetheless catch my eye

- Similar rabbit holes on YouTube

- Searching the documentation of various projects/libraries

I've started using these tools more because I can be more focused and productive. I realize that not all use cases resemble mine, but I can think of a lot of non-scary reasons to be spending more time with these tools.

And when compared with the digital black holes that most people are already spending significant time on, or historical TV viewing numbers, this doesn't seem that worrisome at all.

Just wait until I tell you how much time people spend at work!

Some people spend about 3.5 hours showering per week.

It’s just 30 minutes a day.

My immediate assumption was the marketing team has defined a “conversation” session time very broadly - “time tab was open” etc

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