OpenAI Is Funding an App for Parents to Manage Kids' Lives

"You never hear someone talk about the power of these models to help families."

Modern Parenting

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says artificial intelligence has the potential to automate tedious tasks and free people to do more meaningful work, but so far it's mainly been generating headlines about how it's gobbling people's artwork and other intellectual property.

Now it turns out it's funding an AI-powered personal assistant app for parents called Milo, Insider reports, which is part of a wave of "parent tech" and — if you think about it — could maybe save a few marriages, since the burden of child management still largely falls on the shoulders of women.

Milo, built on GPT-4, enables parents to dump anything from screenshots to voice memos into the platform and have AI process this information into actionable text reminders, calendar invites and other alerts. Currently it's in beta mode.

"I know what it feels like to be a parent that has forgotten pajama day, pizza day, that disappointment," Milo CEO Avni Patel Thompson told Insider.

Lending Hand

Thompson received funding from Y Combinator in 2020 and has been steadily trying to build the product, according to Insider, but her company suffered software issues. Her funding was getting depleted last summerand she had to lay off employees.

Finally, as a last ditch effort, she reached out to Altman, who served as Y Combinator president previously. According to Insider, Altman hooked up Milo with more funding and access to OpenAI's technology.

"You never hear someone talk about the power of these models to help families," OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap to Insider."The idea that OpenAI's models could be powering that experience is what really sold us," he said.

Milo seems like the best use case for consumer AI. Though questions remain about data privacy — would you willingly surrender vital information about yourself and loved ones to AI companies when we don't know the contents of their black boxes — it will be interesting to see whether personal assistants could be the killer app for AI.

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