Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on October 27 that, according to a report by technology outlet TechCrunch today, Meta AI chief Rohit Patel has left the company. He had spent eight years working on AI research and development at Meta and served as head of Meta Superintelligence Labs.
According to the report, Patel has founded a company called Ndoc, where he will develop AI-native office software intended to replace Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.
The former Meta researcher hopes Ndoc will do more than add an AI tool on top of existing workflows: he wants to change the fragmented way people use different tools. For example, people often switch back and forth among Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Tableau, while repeatedly copying and pasting content into ChatGPT.
Ndoc aims to bring all those workflows together in one space so that everyone can work with ease.
Ndoc reportedly combines three main modules in a single interface. “Stage” displays key content such as slides, dashboards, simulation results and mini-apps; “Narrative” presents analysis, numbered citations and generated charts, and explains the reasons behind the data; and “Model” stores the underlying datasets and Python scripts.
In practice, users can upload datasets for Ndoc to analyze and have it write explanatory text based on the results. The software’s more ambitious goal is to “redefine files”: its documents can be exported as standalone “.ndoc.html” files and then opened in any browser. Patel hopes to make the format open source so other developers can use it too.
Patel is one of many executives and researchers to leave Meta recently. Meta’s head of global affairs, Joel Kaplan; AI researcher Andrew Tulloch (IT Home note: Andrew Tulloch); and Emily Dalton Smith, who headed AI products for the workplace, have also left.