Chatbots That Build Community by Sharon Zhou: Sharon Zhou of AMD on expanding chat to serve groups and connect us with other people

Next year, I’m excited to see AI break out of 1:1 relationships with each of us. In 2026, AI has the potential to bring people together and unite us with human connection, rather than polarize and isolate us. It’s about time for ChatGPT to enter your group chats.

The internet today feels like it’s getting pushed toward two extremes. On one end, it’s heavy AI slopification that paints a strictly worse, noisier version of our former internet — with bots participating in forums and scraping data (getting DDOS’ed by AI scrapers ~1 million times a day is not weird!) On the other end, it’s heavy human curation that’s trying to keep the LLMs out as much as possible.

But this tension doesn’t have to be adversarial. It can be integrating instead. AI can be designed to connect people and strengthen human connections. The bot in the chat becomes a positive uniting force, rather than a neutral assistant or a deceptive agent. To accomplish this, researchers will need to change some things, like post-training on longer contexts and different reinforcement learning environments to handle multi-human contexts and objectives. But it can be done, and I believe it will introduce new heights of intelligence, human and artificial.

As you talk to your LLM at 3:00 A.M. about solving a relationship problem and how it’s like debugging your code, your LLM asks you whether you want to talk to someone else who feels the same way. You think, “well, I thought my problem was niche at this hour, but why not.” What’s more, the LLM isn’t just there to make the intro. It joins your chat, making jokes with funny memes and asking interesting questions to make the conversation lively and full of curiosity — until you realize you’ve made a couple of friends, fixed your bug, and have a new lens for approaching your relationship. You’ve learned something helpful for your job and your personal life. And it’s only 3:15 A.M.

Curiosity accelerates when it’s shared. It’s infectious. It’s easier to learn things when you’re motivated by a group and where it’s trying to go, reach, explore. As a collective tool, AI can further our curiosity and creativity together. And there’s a chance that some of those enlightening conversations will be the new data needed to lift AI’s intelligence.

It would be quite the win-win if we design a future where the AI is incentivized to bring people together and give people a sense of belonging with each other, and in so doing, get people inventing more things and growing our collective intelligence in a way that serves as data that pushes models in ways that benchmarks on isolated chats don’t. This might even motivate new model architectures, like an extreme MoE (mixture of experts) that has lightweight, partially shared weights for each person and your multi-dimensional self, like a more evolved version of scratchpad memory today.

Today, the advances are close and this future is completely viable, which is why it excites me. I hope this year we take a step toward making AI a more positive force on humanity at large and on our individual humanity. This is one path that we can take in that direction.

Sharon Zhou is the Corporate Vice President of AI at AMD. Formerly, she was founder and CEO at Lamini and an adjunct instructor at Stanford University.