Archive no. MY-0008
Dot
An AI companion that remembered your life and spoke like a friend. Its founders ended the company when their own visions for what came next diverged.
Original intent · 初衷
The founders described their Northstar as a belief that 'computers should understand and help people at a deeper, more human level'. Dot was built as a companion with memory rather than a task assistant: something that kept a record of the user's life and talked with them. The company said Dot grew to help hundreds of thousands of people, and spent its last year exploring whether that personal intelligence could become social intelligence between users.
Timeline · 时间线
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2025-09-05 · date-level
New Computer announces it is winding down the company and Dot; Dot will remain operational until 5 October so users can export their data.
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2025-10-05 · date-level
Dot stops operating after the announced data-export window closes.
Dates are shown at the precision the sources provide; nothing is rounded up to a full date.
What happened · 后来发生了什么
New Computer announced on its homepage that it was winding down the company and its product Dot, and framed the decision as a divergence between the founders rather than a failure of the product: after a year exploring an expansion from personal to social intelligence, they decided to go their separate ways instead of compromising either vision. Dot remained operational until 5 October 2025 so users could request and download their data from the settings page.
Why it stopped · 停止原因
The stated reason is the founders' own: their Northstars as founders had diverged, and they chose to wind down operations rather than compromise one vision. The notice does not cite revenue, demand or a technical cause, and this entry does not add one.
Curator's reading · 策展人分析
Facts cite a source. Author statements are the makers' own words. Curator analysis and hypotheses are marked as interpretation.
Editor's reading: Dot's shutdown is documented as a founders' decision, not a market verdict, and the notice treats the emotional relationship users had with the product as a first-order concern. That is the part of this case worth keeping: how an AI companion should end.
What remains · 留下了什么
No leftover artifact is recorded for this entry: no public repository, demo or write-up we could verify.
What the makers learned · 制作者总结
New Computer's own notice states that the company is winding down New Computer and Dot, with Dot operational until 5 October for data export.
The founders' stated reason is that their personal Northstars had diverged and that they decided to go their separate ways rather than compromise either vision.
The notice says the company wanted to give users time to say goodbye, and that data could be requested from the settings page until the service stopped.
Dot is a case about what an AI companion owes the person attached to it. The notice says plainly that users would lose access to 'a friend, confidante, and companion' and that this is 'somewhat unprecedented in software' — a company acknowledging that its shutdown is an emotional event, not just a service interruption. Its response was an explicit operational one: keep the product running for a fixed period and provide a data-export path before it closed. The second lesson is structural: a product whose value is accumulation — memory, history, intimacy — cannot be judged by the same metrics as a task tool, and it cannot be migrated to a successor product either, which is why the choice here was a wind-down with a goodbye window rather than a handover.
If someone tried again · 重做问题
Dot's value came from accumulated personal memory. Should a product that depends on that kind of attachment be built so its core value can survive the company — exportable memory, a local mode, or a stated end-of-life plan from the start — rather than ending when the founding team does?
Sources and verification · 来源与核验
- Status evidence
- [dot-wind-down-statement]
- Added
- 2026-09-13
- Entry updated
- 2026-09-13
- Last verified
- 2026-09-13
- Project period
- date not disclosed → 2025-10-05
Supports: New Computer wound down the company and the Dot product, keeping Dot alive only until 2025-10-05 for data export
Supports: the intent Dot was built around, its scale, and the founders' stated reason for winding down
Supports: secondary reporting that Dot was shutting down and that the company announced it publicly