Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>As a serious engineer why would I want that?

Take off your "engineering" hat and put on your "normie" hat...

OpenAI's Dots, Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok Bot, etc are trying to target non-technical people and give them "24/7 AI personal assistants". Apple is also pursuing this angle by adding more features to the new Siri (partnership with Google-Gemini).

Perspective of product and market : we need our AI to be more deeply intertwined with customers lives instead of just being on-demand chatbot Q&A sessions. The "sticky" product to create this customer relationship is "AI personal assistants". Instead of just providing "answers" (chatbots) -- provide "completed tasks" (AI assistant).

Perspective of technical predecessors and concepts overlap : OpenClaw and Hermes self-hosted software on Mac minis and Linux boxes as "personal assistants" is geared for techies instead of normies. Instead, repackage those types of tools for normal people in cloud VMs to be hosts for "long-lived agents". Zero install required.

I’d disagree with this being targeted toward normies. Reread the release. The first demographic in their copy is toward developers:

“ Turn feedback into tested fixes You’re a developer working on an app. Your dot watches customer feedback for recurring requests, scopes smaller improvements and bugfixes, builds and tests them, and brings you complete PRs to review with attached videos showing the changes.”

>I’d disagree with this being targeted toward normies. Reread the release. The first demographic in their copy is toward developers

I'm using "normies" to describe people who are not developers and they would not install something like OpenClaw on a Mac mini.

E.g. the OpenAI's 2-minute marketing video for Dot trying to show non-developers using AI assistants to get tasks done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXspbC2srEQ

A man wants his website changed, and a woman wants her presentation slides updated. "Serious engineers" don't need cutesy re-incarnated mascots of Microsoft's Bob or MS Office Clippy paperclip assistants. OpenAI dots doesn't have to win over HN techies who are comfortable with CLI tools.

Thanks, great perspective and explanation.

Have you considered using a Telemetry Blocklist (free) to block these agents from phoning home?

You'd have to block the conversation itself for that to be meaningful. Which would lead to a not very useful conversation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com