Kin vs Pi: AI Comparison
Looking for a personal AI? Not sure which is best for you? Compare and contrast Kin and Pi in this article, and see why Kin may be best for you.
The market for personal AI is growing, and competitors are always emerging. Still, Kin is unique in its power and potential—and that’s not a baseless statement. Let’s dive into why, by taking a look at one of Kin’s main competitors, Inflection AI’s Pi AI.
Kin vs Pi: A Quick Glance
Why Compare with Pi? What is it?
Pi is a competing, growing personal AI, created by Inflection AI. It runs on their own proprietary LLM, Inflection 2.5 (more on what LLMs are here) and, like Kin, seeks to support its users by providing emotionally-sensitive, engaging and useful conversation.
This makes both AI chatbots markedly different from the less empathetic discussions of OpenAi’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini (formerly Google Bard), Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude, and X’s Grok.
However, Pi is designed to be supportive in a personal capacity over a wide range of topics, whether that’s helping with work, listening to and helping with worries, killing time with games, or just casual conversation. It’s a much more generalised AI than Kin, with less of a professional and self-improvement focus, and more of an emphasis on companionship.
We’re comparing with Pi not just because it’s a successful competitor, but because that’s the best way to demonstrate Kin’s advantages and innovations. When blogs like these say we’re on the cutting edge of personal AI, we want to prove it—we don’t want you to take our word for it.
So, let’s get into properly comparing and contrasting, so you can make an informed choice.
Where Pi Rivals Kin
Given their similar use cases as supportive, personal AIs, Kin and Pi have a few common overlaps, even if they may differ slightly. These include:
Emotional Support: Both Kin and Pi have been designed to create open, pressure- and judgement-free spaces during chats, so users feel more comfortable discussing anything they’d like. Both AIs will also ask questions to help expand the conversation, and then allow them to provide personalised and empathetic responses and suggestions to the situation.
Web browsing: Each AI is also capable of searching the web to inform its responses with up-to-date news and information, with Pi using proprietary tech and Kin using Tavily.AI.
However, an added feature of Kin here is it will show its users when it’s performing a search, and what terms it is using. When it provides the response, Kin also automatically includes links to its sources when it can.
Chat recommendations: Pi and Kin both have built-in prompts to help their users get more engaged with their services, and have better conversations. These are things like telling Kin about your professional goals, or writing a short story with Pi. While both things can be done with either AI, the prompts help users become more accustomed to what exactly each AI can do.
While Pi’s “Discover” tab currency feels more numerous than Kin’s, we are working on building a library of example prompts and use-cases on our blog, which Kin will be able to directly access to better guide users through its capabilities.
Outside of these, there are places where Kin is pioneering…
What Does Kin Do Better than Pi?
Perhaps the most important thing Kin is doing differently is its approach to transparent privacy. Kin and its interface has been designed to safely store what it learns about its users, show these users exactly what it’s learned, and only use this information in the long-term to provide more value to its users.
But how does that break down into tangible points? Well, like this:
Advanced memory: Kin’s biggest feature is more than likely its semantic episodic memory. Unlike Pi, and most other chatbots, this system allows Kin to extract information from conversations with its users, and store it safely and securely for future reference, strictly in conversations with that user.
What that means is, when you tell Kin something, Kin remembers it. Until it is told not to. And what that means is, someone could be asking Kin to help them get along with someone new at work, and Kin could remind them of how they made friends with Priya on their first day of their previous job three years ago.
This feature makes Kin immensely powerful in its role as personal and professional aid, as it can draw on all the situations, hopes and issues users have discussed with it to pick up on patterns and offer massively personalised suggestions based on their actual experiences.
In comparison, while Pi can exchange information between individual chat threads, it is not able to remember everything it has learnt about users, and what it does remember depends on the complexity and frequency of the chats its users have with it
User-centric Privacy: An AI with the ability to remember so much so well could, in theory, be worrying. This is why Kin’s other most important feature is, as mentioned, its user-centric privacy. This is more thoroughly discussed here, though in short, Kin takes a ‘local-first’ approach. This means that Kin stores and processes as much data as possible on its users’ devices—and when data has to be transferred, it’s done securely, and only ever to our custom instances of the open-source LLMs we use.
More relevantly, Kin makes a point of keeping this data transparent. Everything Kin knows about a user can be seen on its “Memory” tab, and Kin can either be asked to forget particular things at will, or fully wiped with the tap of a (virtual) button.
In comparison, Pi’s ability to show users the data it has on them is still in development, and all of that data is stored on their servers. Pi users can still wipe the information Pi has on them, but unlike Kin, they can’t do this on a piece-by-piece basis as of yet.
Reminders: Users can also use Kin’s memory to set themselves reminders, which Kin can bring up during conversation. Need to remember to rehearse that interview one more time before it happens next week? Done. Want to update Kin on how the upskilling suggestions it made ended up working in a month? A reminder’s set.
It sounds like a small feature, but it isn’t something Pi can do, and being reminded by Kin to keep on top of things with Kin not only helps users stay on track—it boosts their interactions with Kin, which will only make its future suggestions more powerful.Tone Customisation: Unlike Pi, Kin’s tone of voice is also fully user-customizable, so users can ask Kin to talk to them in whatever way they find most helpful. Whether that’s making more suggestions, being more complimentary, or speaking like a 1920s gangster, Kin’s custom tone-prompting allows it to do almost anything. It’s all about fitting the user.
Dedication to the modern worker: All of this means that Kin is more dedicated to the modern worker than any other personal AI. Rather than acting as a generalised personal chatbot, like Pi, Kin is equipped to focus on its role as a career coach, mentor, and supportive colleague. Its advanced memory helps it recognise actual patterns in its users’ professional and personal lives, and provide suggestions based on their current desires, their previous experiences, and what’s worked before.
The best part being, of course, that Kin does all of this while prioritising the secure and transparent use of its users’ data. Though Pi is working on something similar, Kin can already show its users exactly what it knows about them, and give them complete control over what Kin can keep and what it should delete.
With all that in mind, who would benefit the most from each AI?
Who is Pi for?
Pi is best for those looking for a personal AI companion who can do a bit of everything.
Pi is designed to be virtual company in all situations, from supporting those who need to vent, to helping someone explore the day’s news, to playing a game to kill some time.
It’s emotionally-intelligent and friendly to speak to, but its relatively simple memory means detailed, long-term support may be difficult to receive from it.
Who is Kin for?
Kin is for people looking to grow as people and as professionals.
Kin’s conversational approach, semantic episodic memory, and other features allow it to excel as a pocket-sized career coach, mentor, and supportive colleague. While Kin can also support those in need of venting and exploring news, its real power lies in memory.
Kin can work with its users over long timescales to recognize personal patterns, build personalised action plans, and track their efficacy—which all makes Kin a powerful tool for users looking to be the best versions of themselves.
How Kin Will Stay Unique
We don’t just want to be the most private, most user-centric, and most transparent personal AI on the market—we want to keep that title.
So, it’s something we’re demonstrably working towards, with examples like our move to fully open-source LLMs, which enable us to control and show exactly what Kin is doing with user data.
Of course, we’re not saying that Pi isn’t also dedicated to data security—but rather, that we’re making what Kin knows about its users, and what it’s doing with that data, clearer than any other personal AI service on the market.
This is a philosophy that we’re carrying into our development, too. Our closed beta features a public roadmap, where anyone can see what features are planned, being worked on, and already added based on user feedback—feedback which anyone can add by becoming a beta tester through our website.
In that spirit, we’re always exploring new data protection methods, and have had our proverbial eye on emerging technology like Fully Homogeneous Encryption for a while. As soon as it’s feasible, we’d like to be using it, so that you can be even more sure that whatever you tell Kin stays between just you and Kin
Really, what we want to stress is Kin is being made with its users at the centre, not its developers. Our users are in complete control of what data they’re providing to Kin, and how Kin uses it—not us. We see Kin as something that adapts to fit its users’ needs and desires, always learning and growing to best support the modern worker in the AI age.