Do We All Really Need a Digital Chief of Staff? Grok Bot, Dot and Muse Say Yes (Duh)

Everyone, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare breathlessly announced this week, is about to be offered an AI personal assistant. Or, to put it in Silicon-Valley-speak, a digital chief of staff. OpenAI unveiled Dot at its developer day. Meta already has Muse, Musk has Grok Bot, and a British start-up called Instinct raised a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation while adding group chat, so that an entire team can share this same digital master of the universe. My instinct is that Instinct might be the Pets.com of this bubble. I would check with my digital chief-of-staff, if I had one. Which I don’t.

 

The novelty, Keith insists, is the virtual machine. It’s a computer in the cloud that your agent owns, where it can run a browser, read your email and write code on your behalf. So we have one interface instead of the fifty chat windows that I use on Claude. No keyboard, no mouse, no screen. As a particularly wealthy and busy man, Keith has given five of these assistants access to everything (and I mean everything) he has: multitudes of credit cards, bank accounts, brokerage logins. He confesses to spending a combined thousand dollars a month on AI subscriptions. But the fruit of all this — his argument for our agentic future — is that he recently asked one of them, by voice, to find him a sub $40 Hoya lens hood with the correct thread. $1000 to save $40? Even a human chief-of-staff might flag that raspberry.

 

What do we become when we talk to machines? I asked Sherry Turkle this week. Idiots, I suspect.

 

Discussed also this week:

 

•       Nicole Nguyen in the Wall Street Journal on whether she would let an AI agent run her life.

•       David Robinson in The Atlantic on why he quit OpenAI, and why frontier labs should be run like nuclear plants or busy airports.

•       Adam Tooze in the Financial Times on why AI is not the Manhattan Project — and Evgeny Morozov, in the same paper, on AI sovereign wealth funds as techno-imperialism.

•       Steve Rattner’s six charts on why we need AI, including the case that Democrats rarely make — with a sting in the tail about kill switches.

•       Richard Waters in the Financial Times and Alex Kantrowitz on why Anthropic’s IPO feels so weird.

•       The New York Times on the religious scholars who met Anthropic and came away stunned.

•       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter, with everything discussed here, and last week’s editorial.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Everyone Gets Offered One. The week’s actual news, in Keith’s reading, is not that everybody will have a personal agent but that everybody will be offered one. OpenAI announced Dot at its developer day, joining Meta’s Muse, Musk’s Grok Bot, OpenClaw and Hermes; the British startup Instinct raised a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation and added group chat, so that a whole team can bri