alt Hacker NewsClaude Duet
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I suspect that Dots and Duet are very high margin drivers for the labs. Personal assistant chat sessions don’t have to be realtime, so workloads can be scheduled on low priority batches and be waited if higher value work comes into a queue.
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.
Powered by Opus 5.5 is incredible.
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.
Whilst I appreciate the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity as we know it, I am getting kinda tired of seeing so many AI-related headlines here on HN. Perhaps it's just me, but I feel like every day the front page is filled with mostly LLM-related announcements.
I found Dots to be both worse than I expected and better. Worse in every way when asking it to do anything coding related (just kept running into issue after issue) but very nice as a "Monitor my communication channels for me" tool.
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.
This thing apparently has an integration with 1Password. Am I hopelessly out of touch in this brave new AI world, or is giving an LLM access to your password manager the mother of all bad ideas?
These AI companies appear to be "shipping their org chart".
Shouldn't this just be native to Claude, not a separate app/UX, as well as using the latest model (not Opus)?
I don't really understand what this is. It seems like it's the same as all the other agents
I run an personal AI agent locally (hermes), and use a combination of local models and whatever model I can get for a reasonable price (usually deepseek). After using it for a couple months, I'm converted. They're so good, the more you use it, the more useful it is; you internalise more of what it could be used for. It runs so many boring parts of my life, leaving me with more time to spend with my family. I liken it to release of the first iPhone; it didn't invent any new technology, but packaged different bits of tech together in a way that was consumer friendly. I think we'll look back at OpenClaw/Hermes/Muse/Instinct in the same way. I do worry about using purely cloud based offerings like Muse, I reckon there is a market for someone to package an consumer AI agent that lives on your home network.
Can these things take any action you would in a browser without getting trivially blocked? I just bought a 128GB rtx spark to implement this in house for a family of 4. I have observed you don’t really need high tps to achieve things like “book a ticket for Dune 3 for 4 where the seats are together, preference for near the middle vertically and horizontally).
The rtx has decent prefill speed and enough memory for both context and using a dense model to prevent hallucinations resulting in poor browser calling.
Ironically the relatively low tps makes the real flow very akin to what I actually would do in terms of speed so I doubt it could be detected as chrome web driver isn’t used.
I suspect we'll see (or what I want to see) is like an independent personal datahub and browser MCP which the assistant uses to conduct business as yourself so you have full visibility and control how it accesses your data or when it can use your cookies/credentials.
Also the dots/muse/etc browsers all are seemingly getting blocked so federating it out would seem to solve that problem too.
I feel like the link to be used here should be https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-duet instead.
What I really want is a fully offline voice assistant that can do anything on an isolated Android or Linux OS, and costs just a shy $200 above the device's actual cost, but it must be fully capable of working offline. I'll pay for an offline-first model.
These "always on" agents seem popular but I have yet to find a use case for one.
Anyone care to give your top 5 use cases for which these are better than an on-demand agent?
I've been running most likely a proto version of this using Claude code and cron jobs to help me manage my online jewelry business. It's an idea that is pretty game changing, and really pay dividends if most of your business is handled online with APIs and web apps. Also, using the Claude in chrome extension greatly expands the possibilities of tasks you can hand off. I like my hacked together version, because Claude code uses locally stored memories, which I feel is important for me to remain in control of the situation and give me an easy ability to try other agents in the future.
You hear that? Sound of a few dozen venture backed companies dying instantly.
What is Instinct's future when its core product is commoditized and provided near-free-of-charge by OpenAI, Meta, and now Anthropic?
A notable distinction between Duet and Meta Muse/OpenAI Dots is the lack of quirky anthropomorphic branding. As a result, the use cases are more clear/more professionally-oriented as they don't rely on you creating a magic pet/BFF that does whatever you want.
That entire demo feels like it's serving a persona that would already have an exec assistant or other staff doing these things.
I wish it interfaced via iMessage. I don't want to train the family on yet another app.
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.
I’ve been trying vanilla Codex with remote control running on a MacBook 24/7. Computer use enabled, browser with logged in sites. Giving it tasks from my phone.
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!
Love LLMs, use them extensively, but they cannot intuit what actions they can take on my behalf that I will or will not approve of, and therefore I will never use one of these things.
dot, bot, and duet, all announced in a month. you couldn't make up this level of industry lockstep. now all we need is google bit and microsoft ditty.
It's an OpenAI Dot/Open Claw competitor. Doesn't really seem to differentiate itself meaningfully at first glance.
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.
My brain reading that thought it was called Claudette a couple times and now I can't not call it that.
Guess I know what I will name my Duet when it comes out, lol.
Are people really okay giving these agents access to all areas of their lives? And what do you even use it for?
I built a similar tool with an MCP server on the iPhone. It is really useful, , especially the morning check-in. I've am excited to see what Duet does, and hopefully smooths out.
These agent assistants are really appealing to the optimist within me, but I have a hard time making the trust leap. What are people using these "personal assistant" agents for?
These will be what replaces employees. One day you update the model from opus 5.5 to x.5, and it can just do a full job.
A full 3 weeks behind on launching their own persistent agent. Anthropic is losing its touch.
This is an OpenAI Dots, Grok Bot and Muse competitor. All four of them including Claude Duet have two out of three requirements to survive in this product sector in the long run:
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?
I need this so bad ;-;
I really have no interest in this if it's going to use my plan's regular limits. I have less control over the context window, if its going off task. I used dots and enjoyed it because I could supplement my codex usage with read heavy long horizon tasks like reading gh issues and making pr's. These PR's were typically pretty bad but gave some starting point. I have much better real world output with the Claude Code style human in the loop approach to task solving.
My honest feedback is that opus and fable have been the worst of the current generation. All Anthropic does is gaslighting people saying their PhD level model needs well formatted instructions and people are doing it wrong
When you start seeing these gimmicky features instead of “almost AGI!!” headlines, you know we almost hit the saturation point and the AI curve isn’t exponential anymore and more of a flat one.
Yet another indicator that the frontier labs functionality is being commoditized. This is AWS/GCP/Azure all over again.
Cool. One thing I've noticed with products like this, though, is that they tend to try to extract useful insights from whatever context the AI has access to through third-party integrations and such, sometimes forcing relevance where there isn't much.
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.
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I wrote this comment in a thread about Muse 3 h ago, and I think it applies here as well. Paraphrasing:
Muse (and Claude Duet, and Dots) are slippery slopes from which it will be very hard to climb back. Do not subcontract the managing of your life to Facebook, Anthropic or OpenAI (or to anyone else for that matter).
Intelligence has to become a commodity, the infrastructure via which the agents do useful work has to be open source, and the data and learnings and SOPs they produce have to be yours.
This is not the same deal you got when you subcontracted storing your documents and managing your email. This is foundational to who you (or your organization) are.
Man these big AI labs have such terrible UX and integration. Signing up for this waitlist should be something you can request from your Claude chat session. You already have all of my relevant information and I'm already signed in, why are you making me type in any information. It's bizarre we have companies claiming trillion dollar valuations but somehow nobody thought to do basic integration with the existing chat service? You have access to frontier coding agents that should make this trivial and somehow you're still expecting me to type in information I've already given you. What are the product people at Anthropic doing?
I tried asking Claude fron the android app if it could sign me up for the waitlist and it said that it couldn't. There's no technical reason this shouldn't be possible, it just shows a lack of care and attention to detail.