Nomi’s companion chatbots will now remember things like the colleague you don’t get along with

Unlike the broad generalist ChatGPT, which slows down to think through anything from math problems or historical research, Nomi niches down on a specific use case: AI companions. Now, Nomi’s already-sophisticated chatbots take additional time to formulate better responses to users’ messages, remember past interactions, and deliver more nuanced responses.

“For us, it’s like those same principles [as OpenAI], but much more for what our users actually care about, which is on the memory and EQ side of things,” Nomi AI CEO Alex Cardinell told TechCrunch. “Theirs is like, chain of thought, and ours is much more like chain of introspection, or chain of memory.”

These LLMs work by breaking down more complicated requests into smaller questions; for OpenAI’s o1, this could mean turning a complicated math problem into individual steps, allowing the model to work backwards to explain how it arrived at the correct answer. This means the AI is less likely to hallucinate and deliver an inaccurate response.

With Nomi, which built its LLM in-house and trains it for the purposes of providing companionship, the process is a bit different. If someone tells their Nomi that they had a rough day at work, the Nomi might recall that the user doesn’t work well with a certain teammate, and ask if that’s why they’re upset — then, the Nomi can remind the user how they’ve successfully mitigated interpersonal conflicts in the past and offer more practical advice.

“Nomis remember everything, but then a big part of AI is what memories they should actually use,” Cardinell said.

It makes sense that multiple companies are working on technology that give LLMs more time to process user requests. AI founders, whether they’re running $100 billion companies or not, are looking at similar research as they advance their products.

“Having that kind of explicit introspection step really helps when a Nomi goes to write their response, so they really have the full context of everything,” Cardinell said. “Humans have our working memory too when we’re talking. We’re not considering every single thing we’ve remembered all at once — we have some kind of way of picking and choosing.”