x.ai

» see x.ai as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

About seventy people in Manila spent their working day labeling email so that Amy Ingram could sound like a colleague. Amy was the assistant at the center of x.ai, a New York company Dennis Mortensen founded in 2014, and the product was one gesture: you CC [email protected] on a thread about meeting someone, and from there the robot handled the part where two adults compare their weeks. Her initials were the joke and the pitch at the same time.

It raised about 44 million dollars on that premise, including an early round that valued the company at 40 million and a 23 million dollar raise in 2016. By the end there were roughly fifty engineers in New York alongside the Manila operation, with trainers who confirmed what Amy predicted and checkers who stepped in on the messages she was not sure about. The assistant was real software with people standing underneath it, which in 2016 was what a lot of the industry meant by artificial intelligence without saying so.

Bizzabo, an events platform, announced on 3 June 2021 that it was buying x.ai. The thing it was paying for was the scheduling engine, to run inside its own product. The standalone tool stayed up for five more months. Its final day was 31 October 2021.

x.ai was built for one working life in particular, the American email-first kind, heavy enough on meetings that paying a subscription to skip the back and forth made sense. Mine was not it. By 2021 I had been an engineer in Ankara for years and the calendars I had to reconcile were being handled by phone and by message, not by CC.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the people behind amy ~

The Manila team is the part worth keeping. Amy read a message, guessed what it meant, and when the guess was weak a human checked it before anything went out to whoever was waiting on a reply, who generally had no idea a review step existed. Mortensen later put the effort at five years and 33 million data points. The intelligence was assembled by hand, and only a figure like that shows the scale of it.

That is also the cost structure that makes a company like this hard to own. Every meeting Amy booked carried a little human labor, so the better the product got at sounding effortless, the more expensive its reputation was to maintain.

~ the day the redirect changed ~

The archive dates this better than the announcement does. x.ai's homepage was last captured serving its own content on 8 September 2021, just under 12 KB. From late September the apex started answering with redirects instead. At 02:34 UTC on 1 November 2021, the morning after the published final day, it was pointing at bizzabo.com/blog/xai-sunset, a page whose own title said the scheduling tool would sunset.

~ who answers at x.ai today ~

x.ai resolves today to Elon Musk's xAI, founded in 2023, serving a quarter of a megabyte of copy about frontier models. Amy Ingram's email address is now the front door of a chatbot company.

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