In Episode 84 of Localogy’s This Week in Local podcast, my co-host Mike Boland and I use the example of AI startup Ario to discuss the feasibility of AI personal assistants and also what really counts as a legit AI startup this days.
Ario recently raised $16 million from Bain Capital and others to build an AI personal assitant that trains itself on your personal data. Think emails, calendar entries, and so on. The company positions its product as a personal large language model (LLM). This may be a little grandiose, but it did get our attention. And Bain’s as well apparently.
Mike notes, correctly, that AI personal assistants aren’t new. And if you include Siri among these, they are famously bad as well. Everyone who uses Siri, hates Siri.
“If this company were smart in their marketing, they would have a tagline that was something like, ‘It’s like Siri, but it actually works’,” Mike says on the episode.
We also talk about how Ario is an example of a few other things.
First was the notion of what makes for a truly interesting AI startup these days. Mike notes that it has to be a lot more involved than just a thin layer on top of ChatGPT. Ario at least presents itself as doing much more than that.
And I point out that companies like Ario are leading me to question a favorite saying (quoting myself) that the least interesting thing about a startup is the amount of money it raises.
AI is incredibly capital intensive. And investors are applying intense scrutiny to startups these days. And to AI startups in particular. So the size of each round an AI startup is able to raise is now interesting again. To me at least.
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