Meta AI director Rohit Patel leaves to take on Microsoft Office and Google Workspace

A former Meta leader starts his own company

Rohit Patel spent eight years building AI at Meta. He was a director at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Now he has left to launch Ndoc, a startup. He describes Ndoc as an AI-first replacement for Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. His goal is to put work tools that are now spread across many apps into one place.

Key facts

• Patel worked at Meta for eight years.
• Ndoc has a team of three people and no funding, according to the article.
• Ndoc has three main tabs: Stage (presentations), Narrative (analysis and citations), and Model (datasets and Python scripts).
• Documents can be saved as a single ".ndoc.html" file that opens in any browser.
• Ndoc is built with a mix of open-source AI models, which the article says makes it cheaper to run.

Why Patel built it this way

Patel focused at Meta on reinforcement learning, a way for AI to learn by trial and error to get rewards. He also worked on checking whether AI output can be trusted. He believes that if AI builds the spreadsheets and slide decks that companies use to make decisions, people should be able to check its work. In Ndoc, users can look at the Python scripts behind a document and check the formulas.

Why this story matters

Office and Google Workspace are used by huge numbers of workers, so a new rival is a big challenge. Patel also wants to change the file itself. He plans to open source his file format so other developers can build apps for it without being locked into one company. Other large AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google, are also building enterprise AI tools, so the competition is strong.

What to watch

• Whether Ndoc can win users from Microsoft and Google tools.
• Whether Patel releases the open-source ".ndoc.html" format as planned.
• How OpenAI's new Space workspace, launched last month inside ChatGPT, competes with Ndoc.