marissamayer

@marissamayer

Oct 29

Jason Del Rey

@DelRey

Oct 29

I was scheduled to interview @marissamayer
about her new AI assistant, Dazzle, this past Monday.

Then, over the weekend, that anecdote in a New York Times profile of Mayer went viral, sparking a wave of criticism that eventually reached even TMZ.

If you somehow didn't see ed Mayer using Dazzle to help describe one of her 10-year-old twin daughters for a school birthday celebration. By Wednesday, a post on this very app calling the use case “so bleak” had racked up more than 3 million views. I understood the immediate reaction. A quick reading could suggest that Mayer needed help from AI to identify three unique traits of her own daughter. The prevailing judgment online: How sad was that?

Still, I suspected there was more context. I've written enough profiles to know how much nuance can get lost when a single anecdote takes off like that. And while Silicon Valley's wealth bubble has surprised me plenty over the years, I had a hard time believing Mayer had simply asked an AI assistant to tell her what made her daughter special.

Plus, I'd wanted to interview Mayer well before the controversy. When she first announced Dazzle a few weeks earlier, we were smack in the middle of the Muse-Instinct craze. Mayer and Dazzle were taking a different approach, betting that screenshots and other photos in our phone camera rolls could provide an AI assistant with more useful context than connections to email or calendars.

I'd already spent some time testing Dazzle myself and had plenty of questions. How useful could an assistant built around our camera rolls really be? And how comfortable would people be giving it that kind of access?

So I was glad Mayer didn't cancel our interview Monday. We talked about the birthday slide controversy, of course, and the context she believes was missing.

Then we got into the questions about Dazzle that had made me want to interview her in the first place.

My full interview with Mayer, along with my own impressions from testing Dazzle, is in this week's edition of @ReadTheAisle: readtheaisle.com/p/marissa-maye…

I'd love to hear what you think...