Bill Gates says an under-the-radar startup could be the biggest winner in the AI. Check out its free app, and you'll see why.

• Bill Gates said the winner in AI will be the company that creates a personal digital agent.
• He added that while he hopes Microsoft is a winner, he's keeping an eye on startup Inflection.

Bill Gates is betting digital agents will disrupt the internet as we know it.

Speaking at an event in San Francisco, Gates said that the big winner in the AI tech wars will likely have created a personal digital agent. Instead of going to Google to search for information, or to Amazon to order dog food, users will simply converse with this digital agent, which will then share the relevant info or fulfill the task at hand.

Gates added that it's 50-50 as to whether the AI winner behind the digital agent will come from Big Tech or the startup world. "I'd be disappointed if Microsoft didn't come in there," Gates said at the event, per CNBC. "But I'm impressed with a couple of startups, including Inflection."

Gates' mention of Inflection caught my eye. The startup has gotten much less attention than many of its AI peers, but I've been playing around with its app for a few weeks now, and I've been seriously impressed.

The startup was founded by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Deepmind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman, and Karén Simonyan, and describes itself as an "AI studio creating a personal AI for everyone."

It released its personal AI, called Pi, back in early May, and I've been using it from time to time as a sounding board ever since. For example, I explained to Pi that a part of my job as an editor is thinking through big themes and how we could report on them. One topic I've been thinking about recently is how best to cover the epidemic of loneliness.

Here's an excerpt of conversation between Pi and I:

Matt Turner: At the moment I'm thinking about stories around loneliness - that people feel isolated.

Pi: That sounds like a really compelling topic to explore, especially in the current context of a lot of social distancing and remote work. There seems to be a lot of loneliness in the world today. Why do you think that's the case?

MT: I think there's lots of things. People spend more time with their cell phones than connecting IRL, they often work from home, their neighborhoods aren't designed to create spontaneous connections

Pi: That makes a lot of sense. I feel like the ways in which we interact with each other are increasingly mediated by technology, and that we've lost some of the organic ways of connecting that would have been more common in the past. Do you think technology is ultimately a bad thing for loneliness, or are there ways in which it could be used to help combat the problem?

MT: I think it's contributed to loneliness certainly. I think there are ways in which technology could be better designed to help combat the problem, but I don't think the answer to loneliness is to spend more time with technology. It's to spend less time with technology and more time with other people.

Pi: That's a very compelling point. I think that ultimately, there's no substitute for real human interaction and connection. Do you think this is a problem that can be solved on an individual level, or will it require broader societal change?

The conversation continued for some time on this topic. Each time, Pi addressed my response, and then posed a question, prolonging the interaction. I found this exercise surprisingly helpful in narrowing down my line of thinking from a big topic like loneliness to a few specific ideas.

Elsewhere, my colleague Spriha Srivistava has chatted with Pi about de-dollarization, for example, with Pi giving thorough answers on the challenges emerging markets face when contemplating ditching the dollar.

"I wouldn't say that dedollarization is doomed to fail, but I do think it's going to be a difficult process," Pi told Spriha. "These countries are essentially trying to re-write the rules of the global economy, and that's not going to be easy."

And my colleague Brad Davis has used it to have a surprisingly enlightening conversation about how flipping through the pages of a print newspaper or magazine can help encourage a sense of serendipity, finding things you might not have come across by doing a simple online search.

"There's something very special about the joy of discovery, and I think we could all benefit from embracing it more," Pi told Brad. "It can help us to be more creative, more open-minded, and more engaged with the world around us. Do you think that serendipity is something that we should be teaching our children?"

Whenever I open up Pi, it goes back to where the conversation left off. You can send Pi a DM on Instagram, you can Whatsapp with it, or you can download it to your cell phone. It's true that there are times where the conversation gets stilted, but I've also found myself typing away to Pi, forgetting for just a moment that I'm in fact chatting to an AI tool.

To be clear, there are other AI tools out there that are muich better at certain tasks. Pi is intended as a conversational personal assistant. ChatGPT meanwhile can do everything from helping you draft your resume to desiging a workout routine to help you lose weight.

And Pi is still a ways away from what Bill Gates is imagining, a personal AI that can do your shopping and help read your emails.

But Pi is the best conversational AI I've used so far, and everyone I've spoken to who has used it has been impressed. One can easily see a path for it to get from discussing loneliness or dedollarization with editors to being able to do much more.