Adjunct was conceived to amplify human expertise.  We set out to build a company that increases the amount of high-quality work in the world.  Simultaneously we wanted to make work less mundane & laborious and allow for more creative expression.

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The word Adjunct is defined as something added as a supplementary rather than a central piece. This distilled our view on how AI tools should be designed and used. They should be secondary & compounding. The human should be the architect, primary contributor and the final judge of every workflow. The AI should make things easier & faster; it should fill in the gaps, but the work should maintain the texture of the human creator. All while being a joy to use.

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We think design is as important as the underlying technology. By design we mean how it works as much as we mean how it looks. In important ways, design and technology are inseparable. How smooth is it to get what you want done? Design is about removing blockers for productive interactions between the user and the tools.  We build tools that give professionals access to frontier technology in clean and familiar interfaces.

"Our products are design to be essential, complementary and informed."

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Essential:

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We believe that simple, frictionless interfaces are the ideal environment to produce work. Simplicity should mask the complexity and capabilities of advanced technology. Knowledge work is typically characterised by a deluge of information. Our products are intended to alleviate rather than add to the cognitive load.

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Complementary:

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Our products promote engaged interactions between the user & the AI solution. AI interactions where the user requests some information & lazily uses the returned output without inspection or feedback leads to lower quality work and often reputational damage. Part of the responsibility is on the user, but a significant part is how the product is designed. The user should always be driving the workflow with the AI solution assisting in a rapid and tireless manner. It should feel like you have an energetic, aligned intern who works 24/7.

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Informed:

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AI solutions should have awareness of the context in which the user is operating in. It should have access to the appropriate data (both public & private) and operational context to inform this. The user should never feel like it is onboarding an intern.

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The world is in the early stages of breathless AI progress which may feel overwhelming and difficult to understand. We view ourselves as a portal where advanced technology gets translated into practical productivity – a place where professionals can leverage technology without having to learn new skills. They can simply use our products to get their work done.

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There is an ongoing AI arms race between some of the largest tech companies & AI labs. It is unclear who will win; however, the immediate beneficiaries are startups and ultimately consumers. We are excited by the dynamism in the AI industry and the ever-improving foundational ingredients available to build useful products.

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By example, OpenAI's current frontier model costs ten times less & can assist with a vastly more complex set of problems than its comparable model from two years ago. This “industry dividend” seems unlikely to stop unless fundamental limits are hit in AI research.

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More interesting than the business model improvements are the kind of AI applications that will transition from conceivable to tractable with more fundamental progress.

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Current AI solutions are analogous to asking a person to answer a very technical, nuanced, question off the top of their head without any preparation or time to think it through. Additional AI capabilities will allow us to build AI solutions that can perform more structured work with planning, background reading, iteration, soliciting & integrating feedback from the human expert and ultimately outputs that are more refined. We look forward to pushing the frontier on this and building solutions that truly amplify the abilities of knowledge workers.

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We have begun our journey at home in South Africa by building the best AI suite for South African legal practitioners. This will be our sole focus for the immediate future; however long term we look forward to delivering useful tools for knowledge workers around the globe.