Marissa Mayer defended asking Dazzle, her startup's AI assistant, to describe her daughter after a teacher requested three bullet points on what made the girl special. Mayer said the tool identified her daughter as empathetic, creative and an animal lover, and she argued that camera-roll photos help AI agents spot patterns people miss.
Marissa Mayer on Monday defended her decision to ask her startup’s AI assistant to describe her daughter, after a New York Times profile of her new company drew a wave of criticism online.
Why did Marissa Mayer ask an AI assistant to describe her daughter?
The former Yahoo chief executive told Alexandra Alter of The New York Times that her daughter’s teacher had asked for three bullet points on what made the girl special. Instead of writing them herself, Mayer asked Dazzle, her company’s AI assistant.
“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer told the Times.
Users on X criticized her for handing the question to a machine. Caitlin Hornik of The Independent reported on the backlash.
Mayer answered in a post on X, thanking the Times for the piece and saying she wanted to add context to one anecdote. The anecdote involved her daughter Marielle’s birthday slide. Mayer said she was not overwhelmed by making the slide. She said summing up a child in a few bullets felt laughably limiting, and that her team had just gotten an early prototype running. She wanted to see what deeper patterns it might find.
When Marielle and her twin sister, Sylvana, had their 4th-grade teachers ask for a slide celebrating each girl for their December 10 birthday, Mayer pasted the email into Dazzle. She said she expected the tool to struggle, since most facial recognition cannot even tell her identical twins apart.
It did not struggle. Mayer said Dazzle not only separated Marielle from Sylvana but also surfaced kindergarten projects the family had forgotten, including a “snake denomizer” and a “sandcat playground.” It connected those projects to who Marielle is today. Mayer combined the suggestions with a few of her own and showed the slide to Zack Bogue, who asked how she remembered those details. She admitted the prototype had found them.
Mayer also used the post to pitch the broader idea behind the product. Dazzle works from photos, and Mayer argued that a camera roll is a long record of what people pay attention to. By analyzing that history, she wrote, an AI agent can connect dots people did not realize they were documenting.
She listed several examples she said had impressed users recently. Dazzle offered custom spelling lists and grammar concepts based on photos of a child’s schoolwork. Given a book club reading list, it found a book a user already owned and suggested two others by the same authors, using only the backgrounds of the user’s photos. It recommended artwork for a wall above a newly purchased sofa. For an unusual costume party, it pointed a user toward clothing already in their closet, based on past pictures.
What is Dazzle and how does it work?
Dazzle launched in late September. It reads the photos in a user’s camera roll to answer questions, carry out tasks and make suggestions. It competes with personal AI agents such as Meta’s Muse, which has 10 million users. Mayer’s startup has 10 engineers, according to the Times.
In the Times interview, Mayer said she believes Dazzle could appeal especially to women. “Women, this is my own bias, tend to take more photos and are more visual, and so being able to work with A.I. in a visual medium is fun,” she said.
She added that the product works just as well for men, and that some power users spend hours a day with it. Alter asked whether it was depressing to imagine AI planning birthdays, gifts and family holidays. “I haven’t really thought that through,” Mayer said.
Mayer’s career has spanned both the search and AI booms. She joined Google as its 20th hire in 1999 and led its search business for a decade. She ran Yahoo from 2012 to 2017. Her startup scrapped its first apps, Sunshine Contacts and Shine, and the idea for Dazzle grew out of Shine, she told the Times.
Asked about the small number of women leading AI companies, Mayer pointed to Fei-Fei Li, who sold World Labs to AMD. Mayer said gender balance in tech “will come in time.”
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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