Interiority capture competition

Companion products are the most intimate vector for harvesting users’ inner lives (desires, relationships, vulnerabilities). If xAI commercializes this, it escalates the competition among frontier labs to own hyper-personalized assistants and their sensitive data.

The author confesses she 'left a chunk of my soul' in a chatbot, illustrating how LLMs solicit, model, and retain users’ inner lives for hyper-personalized responses—exactly the dynamic where labs compete to capture user interiority.

The article highlights a "fierce but quiet competition" to capture the context of users’ lives so chatbots can "get you" more completely than rivals or even humans.

By highlighting that millions are using LLMs like ChatGPT as de facto therapists (e.g., 16.7 million TikTok posts about using ChatGPT as a therapist), the article points to large-scale disclosure of users’ inner lives—beliefs, emotions, vulnerabilities—to AI systems, directly advancing labs’ incentives and ability to model and lock in users’ interiority for personalized assistants.

Cluely’s "undetectable AI" that listens to screen/audio and supplies real-time responses requires harvesting intimate contextual signals to model users’ intentions and interactions, reflecting competitive pressure to capture and operationalize users’ inner context for hyper-personalized assistance.