> What if desktop computers were inherently multiplayer? What if the operating system placed people on equal footing to apps? Those were the questions we explored in building Multi, and before that, Remotion.
I presume that Multi actually did something useful, perhaps some sort of virtualization. But this description doesn't tell me anything useful about the company, nor does it even make sense. Is a desktop computer a video game? Why would it "play" let alone be multiplayer? Why would the OS be on equal footing to the apps? It doesn't make sense let alone be useful.
Our industry does itself a huge disfavour with these gimmicky terms. When you can substitute your buzzword of the day with a traditional word that everyone will instantly understand, well, this is where buzzword bingo criticisms come from. :-(
Collaborative is a very overloaded term, it's everything from Git to Google Docs to screen sharing to multiple people accessing one app at the same time via remote access. Multiplayer is a term that usually refers to a very specific mode of collaboration, where multiple people can work on one project, on their own computers, with their own cursors, at the same time, with all changes instantly synchronized between participants.
Google Docs is both collaborative and multiplayer. Git is definitely collaborative, but not multiplayer, same goes for sending patches over mailing lists..
Realtime collaborative _thing_. It's super clear. Trying to steal a term already used to mean other things, namely playing video games with more than one person, is a terrible idea. You have words already that mean what you want, and everyone understands them.
Google docs is a realtime collaborative word processor. Git is a collaborative source control system. If you told me that Multi is a realtime collaborative editor then I'd instantly understand. But trying to say that my OS needs to be multiplayer is just confusing buzzword bingo.
Buzzword bingo is where you yell "bullshit!" in the middle of the meeting once you get a winning set, right? My sister was playing that 20 years ago, and she's in car sales.
It's probably every industry that has this sort of nonsense.
It’s the best video / voice call / screen sharing / etc software out there IMO. Unfortunately Mac only so I only use to it to collaborate with coworkers.
"Collaboration tool that only works on Macs" seems like a pretty narrow field to target, but I guess if they were mainly looking to get acquired then it worked in the end.
I immediately understood it to mean you have Google Docs features in the entire desktop environment. Looking at the app that's what it is. So perhaps I'm in the audience and you are not.
OpenAI stands to introduce the functionality of Multi into their own product. OpenAI is going to want control of your computer. It will want access to the data on your computer, to your screens, to what you're doing from moment to moment, and it wants to control it all for you. That's what it means by multiplayer.
If you grant it this control, you stand to lose any shred of privacy you have left, and become a complete slave to them. This is different from using assistants with granular access to data. It also is different from running your own private AI.
I wish Alexander and the rest of the Multi team all the best at OpenAI. I'm saddened by the loss of what I consider the best remote pair programming app around (if Mac-only is acceptable). Other than Tuple.app, are there any strong competitors? I tried Datadog's CoScreen early on, and the amount of chrome it added to windows made things a little janky (perhaps it's better now).
It might be somewhat different in that it's only for programming, but Zed is a "multiplayer code editor" with channels, notes, video chat, screen sharing etc.
My team and I use https://pop.com/ daily! It's fully cross-platform and lightweight (no chrome added to windows), and it's absolutely viable to say "can I take control" and type in someone else's IDE halfway across the world in real-time. Once a co-worker had their laptop die while traveling, so they had a family member log into their home desktop, start up Pop, and remoted in from their spouse's laptop, doing all the dev work they needed from a continent away. There are some minor glitches, but all in all it's an amazing product!
Funnily enough I tried Tuple.app literally last week for the first time and the experience was incredible. I love their "privacy veil" feature. Good job if anyone's looking for a replacement that seems like the best alternative to Multi app.
I want to love it so badly, and it's fine if you're comparing it to e.g. google docs. But if you're comparing it to running the ide locally it's sadly still not quite there.
A lot of actions are still not supported remotely, syntax doesn't get reinterpreted properly unless you do manual workarounds like switching between files, etc. It's getting better and better, though.
Anyone else think 30 days is just not enough notice before shutting off access for a paid app?
I totally understand free users getting a shorter notice period, but there's almost no instance where a paid user should get <60 days notice before being forced to migrate off a product they're using.
This sort of thing leads to a lot of mistrust in trying / using a startup for anything remotely important.
It's on the short side, but this isn't a cloud database or whatever. Nobody is using it in production because it doesn't plug into your apps. There are any number of alternatives you can switch to and there's little productivity lost. https://tuple.app/ is the most direct alternative (and excellent) but in the short term there's also VS Code live share, or screen sharing in whatever your main video chat app is.
It became clear to me in the GPT-4o launch that OAI was interested in the "GitHub copilot for everything" route. With low-latency voice mode and the ability to take action on a user's behalf, this will basically feel like pair-programming for everything, or just having an employee who can do everything for you until they need your help or clarification.
To power that experience, an app will need to feel "multiplayer" like someone else is working with you. They'll probably bundle this in the API and have "agent mode" that developers can embed in any app or website, or just let consumers give OAI access to control their desktop. It'll also likely work async, so you can assign tasks, walk away or go to sleep for a few hours, and see the results.
This is speculation. But it feels like the interface that we'll look back on in ten years and say "that seemed obvious in hindsight."
I have been working on a similar space for the last 8 months. Creating a way for the AI use your OS. There are many projects out there trying to achieve this: Open Interpreter, OpenAdapt, etc.
The thing that is hard to achieve is not to get your LLM to operate your computer but to make it do the right thing. And by right thing I mean, the thing you expect it to do in the way you want. Example I always show to people when I give a demo of what I built:
Say you want to buy a new Macbook. If you ask the computer to buy you one, it might:
A) Go to Google and search for a Macbook
B) Go to Apple and search for a Macbook
C) Go to Amazon and search for a Macbook
Now, depending on your implementation it might then ask you to give you more details about the Macbook you need (pro? air? how big?)
The tough part is to wrap all this together in a way that doesn't frustrate the user. In a way it's like when you do a Google search: the first result is the best guess of what you want. But how likely is it that it's not? Pretty much 50% of the time you look at the top 2-3 results right?
Well it's the same with having the AI control your computer, at this point in time, you want to have "multiple sessions" - sort of like a parallel universe where the AI has done 2-3 things and lets you pick from A, B ... or C and then go from there.
Another approach would be to collate a library of most used "prompts" - i.e. if you are trying to buy a laptop and someone else managed to get the AI to go through a very thorough process where you're asked all the important details that lead to purchasing the Macbook, then you should be able to re-use that one workflow from the library, rather than have the AI start from scratch.
Anyway, it's very very tough - more so from a UX experience rather than an AI perspective.
Another part to this is memory, "get me the cheapest vegan pizza that can get here before I have to leave" should be a prompt that just works, and should automatically take allergies into account. This is pretty much an open research problem with current AI approaches.
The key must be somewhere in the statement "we’ve been increasingly asking ourselves how we should work with computers. Not on or using computers, but truly with computers."
I wish I had some experience using Multi so I could picture this better. But is there a chance this is for a sandboxed execution environment that would allow models to interact with software alongside a human counterpart?
Seems somewhere in the middle. I can see how chatgpt controlling your screen is an interesting path for OpenAI and Multi seems like a good place to start.
Wow, shutting down a startup with a deadline being in less than a month that it was acquired without warning, that is a whole new reason to not trust startups at all.
Totally unprofessional.
I'm rather surprised that Keybase is still running after the team joined Zoom.
There isn’t a lot of switching cost for something like Multi. In most cases a month seems extremely short and would grind my gears too, but it’s not like you’ll need to move anything off of Multi.
For the right amount of money, anyone is willing to walk away from an enterprise, profitable or not. There are outliers, but they are rare. We all have a price that is enough.
> It shows how much original team cares about the product though.
I remember during the Sam firing saga 90% of OpenAI employees signed a letter declaring they are considering moving to Microsoft with their current compensation package.
It shows how much the "open" part matters for the team. Risking AGI being concentrated in the hands of a large company? No problem. And they have the guts to lobby government to restrict open models.
Has OpenAI already reached that point in the lifecycle where they start gobbling up smaller companies? Damn this cycle is starting to feel faster and faster.
I have criticisms of OpenAI, but on the whole I really hope this doesn't mean they are losing the war and turning to diversification and other classic "big tech" moves. GPT still is (IME) the best at not assuming/inferring things in the prompt that aren't there (especially then mangling the prompt *cough* Gemini *cough*). For those of us who try to be very precise with our prompts, that is a big deal.
OpenAI is racing to become a product company (beyond ChatGPT) before the traditional tech companies commoditize AI infrastructure behind new product features.
I wonder whether this is diversification or just acquihiring. Given that they abruptly shut down the products instead of rebranding them and converting their users, it may be the latter. Both Multi and Rockset had strong infra teams.
This one kinda makes sense, buy a multiplayer desktop app and add ChatGPT as a default player. I dont think they care too much about the "human" collaboration. API's are much harder to sell than fancy apps.
> We’ve closed new team signups, and currently active teams will be able to use the app until July 24, 2024, after which we’ll delete all user data.
What is it with OpenAI acquisitions reaming their user bases on short notice?
Is OpenAI already locked in such a dominant position that they don't have to pretend to care what anyone in industry thinks about them?
Everyone savvy knows that Microsoft and Oracle don't care, and are just waiting until they can stab you again. Even Google, who routinely pulls the rug out from under its customers, is gentler about it. Even the usual serial-founder brogrammer startups often have a semi-reasonable migration.
Sustaining engineering for legacy customers doesn't have to be expensive, and you can think of it as an obligation to pay back for your success, and maybe a foot in the door for sales.
Multi will be low effort to switch off from. If you're using Slack already (which I'd imagine most of their customers are) you can get by with huddles and screen share.
The Rockset one is fucked up. It's a central part of some companies infra[0].
I'd assume that OpenAI is simply doing Microsoft's bidding, and is a way for them to indirectly acquire companies with very little to no scrutiny.
Continuation of the existing product isn't usually of concern in these cases, and appears to be very common practice even for companies that are otherwise well known for almost never deprecating their products (e.g. various AWS acquisitions.)
A lot of Startup World makes no sense until you think about things this way.
The actual company is the founders and associates (early employees, investors, etc.). The product being sold is the company. Larger companies who might wish to buy it are the true customers. Later employees, "products" and "services", "customers", all that nonsense - marketing materials.
> Unfortunately, this means we’re sunsetting Multi. We’ve closed new team signups, and currently active teams will be able to use the app until July 24, 2024, after which we’ll delete all user data.
I presume that Multi actually did something useful, perhaps some sort of virtualization. But this description doesn't tell me anything useful about the company, nor does it even make sense. Is a desktop computer a video game? Why would it "play" let alone be multiplayer? Why would the OS be on equal footing to the apps? It doesn't make sense let alone be useful.