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.
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'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.
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 :)
People would hire fixers or agents to do the nitty gritty details of a transaction like this in the past.
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.
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"
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.
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
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.
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.
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'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.
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 build 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!
I would absolutely do this, but if you're not married to a Japanese person it's basically impossible right?
It doesn't remotely hit the same way.
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.
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.
Someday there will be other trends, but it's currently AI's turn.
That's just how it goes.
I joined HN around the time category theory was starting to take off so not sure what the topic du jour was before that.
There was a period where it felt like Hacker News was a front-end dev message board.
There are far more new opportunities after AI than before AI. Try to find the positive perspective.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If your issue is allowing agents to use your credentials and take actions on your behalf, then that is a separate question.
It also feels safer? But I'm not sure if that's truly the case.
Shouldn't this just be native to Claude, not a separate app/UX, as well as using the latest model (not Opus)?
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.
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.
Guess I know what I will name my Duet when it comes out, lol.
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!
Anyone care to give your top 5 use cases for which these are better than an on-demand agent?
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 guessing mostly because they subsidize a lot of the costs
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/meta-agent-muse-conc...
I got my dad instinct and he's maintaining websites with voice notes through whatsapp which is and insane UX comfort for him.
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.
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?
Hand it all to AI.
Be the best you can be - AI knows how to make you that better person - you do not.
Exactly why I created this:
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.