OpenAI 1.0: Preview and Predictions for the Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the Emergence of a New Era in the Internet

Today, let’s consider the implications of a truly profound week in the development of artificial intelligence and discuss whether we may be witnessing the rise of a new era in the consumer internet.

On Monday, OpenAI announced the new updates. One feature lets you interact with its large language model via voice. Another lets you upload images and ask questions about them. The result is that a tool which was already useful for lots of things suddenly became useful for much more. For one thing, ChatGPT feels much more powerful as a mobile app: you can now chat with it while walking around town, or snap a picture of a tree and ask the app what you’re looking at.

It is the earliest stage of all this; access to the voice feature is just rolling out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, and free users won’t be able to us it for some time. And yet even in this 1.0 release, you can see the clear outlines of the sort of thing popularized in the decade-old film Her: a companion so warm, empathetic and helpful that in time its users fall in love with it. The Her comparisons are by now cliche when discussing AI in Silicon Valley, and yet until now its basic premise has felt like a distant sci-fi dream. I asked the speaking version of the conference to give me a pep talk as I was running back from the conference and was inching up on my deadline, but the model did it’s best to gas me up.

You can imagine the next steps here. A bot that learns about you, remembers your life history, or entertains you in any way you choose. A synthetic companion not like the real people you meet during the day is more patient, more empathetic and more available.

Those of us who are blessed to have many close friends and family members in our life may look down at tools like this, experiencing what they offer as a cloying simulacrum of the human experience. But I imagine it might feel different for those who are lonely, isolated, or on the margins. On an early episode of Hard Fork, a trans teenager sent in a voice memo to tell us about using ChatGPT to get daily affirmations about identity issues. The power to give a warm and kindly voice to a text message should not be underestimated.

Source: The synthetic social network is coming

OpenAI in Social Feeds: Where Are We Going? What Will We Be? How Will We Think about AI in Social Networks?

OpenAI tends to present its products as productivity tools: simple utilities for getting things done. Meta has an interest in the entertainment business. The company has found its own uses for the artificial intelligence and voices it is building.

The company released 28 personality-driven Chatbot to be used in Meta’s messaging apps, and also an all-purpose artificial intelligence assistant. Celebrities including Charli D’Amelio, Dwyane Wade, Kendall Jenner, MrBeast, Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, and Paris Hilton lent their voices to their effort. MrBeast describes his character “the big brother who will roast you because he cares.”

At the same time, this technology is new enough that I imagine celebrities aren’t yet willing to entrust their entire personas to Meta for safekeeping. Better to give people a taste of what it’s like to talk to AI Snoop Dogg and iron out any kinks before delivering the man himself. The potential seems very real when that happens. How many hours would fans spend talking to a digital version of Taylor Swift this year, if they could? How much is it going to cost them for the privilege?

While we wait to learn the answers, a new chapter of social networking may be beginning. Until now we have talked about AI in consumer apps it has mostly had to do with ranking: using machine-learning tools to create more engaging and personalized feeds for billions of users.

This week we got at least two new ways to think about AI in social feeds. New stickers from the company will be coming to the company’s messaging apps. It is not known how much time people spend creating custom images while they text their friends, but the demonstrations were nice enough.

It’s believed that Meta plans to place its AI characters on every major surface of its products. They have Facebook pages and Instagram accounts; you will message them in the same inbox that you message your friends and family. Soon, I imagine they will be making Reels.

feeds that are defined by the connections they enabled between humans will be turned into a partially synthetic social network.

Will it be more engaging and entertaining? Or will it feel uncanny, hollow, and junky? Surely there will be a lot of opinions on this. Something new is coming into focus, I believe, either way.

Google Bard Assistant: Managing my email reminders using an AI assistant: How I can do things for me on the Pixel 7 Pro and how I can use it in my daily life

Every morning at 8:30AM, Google Calendar pings me with a reminder containing just one word: EMAILS. My workday begins as I speed-clear every email that arrives in my inbox. They are largely useless and clog up the space between legitimate emails that I need to read and respond to.

Imagine for a minute, though, if you could just tell an AI assistant to show you your most important emails and delete all the rest. I told the assistant on thePixel 7 Pro that I wanted to deal with it on my own and it just escorted me to my inbox. Thanks a bunch.

Techtember and the fall hardware event are fast approaching. We will see the Pixel 8 and what I am most excited about is how the company brings together their various ideas about artificial intelligence and its use in our daily lives.

They’re hit or miss. Sometimes they’re useful: I asked it to expand a bullet point list of notes into some care instructions for my houseplants, and it added some helpful context about how often to water them. I asked my office to build a weekly meal plan for me, and the answers it gives are obvious. When I was forced to come up with healthy snack and meal ideas, there were some great suggestions, but they left me to make my own snack in every cell.

Giving me a rundown of those important emails and interpreting them into reminders or to-do list items would be a good one, for a start. I’d listen to Google Bard Assistant do that while I make my morning coffee. Maybe if I asked it to find a good time to go for a run, it could cross-reference my calendar and the hourly precipitation forecast, make a suggestion, and remind me 10 minutes before it’s time to head out the door. For all its strengths, Google’s current Assistant is still mostly a tiny repeating machine. It can tell me when my next meeting is but it can’t combine it with the likelihood of rain.

Microsoft has computers that look like a phone but they are not artificial intelligence, and Apple is against saying that. If artificial intelligence is something that will take the pain out of our daily chores then the device that shows us how it works ought to be the Pixel. I would like an assistant that I could use to do things for me on my phone, but I am not interested in having generative Artificial Intelligence write emails for me regularly.

Realistically, these kinds of features are still a ways off. processing power is one of the major barriers to allowing artificial intelligence to run on your phone. AI needs a lot of it, and Google — like other companies — offloads the heavy lifting to the cloud when you ask Bard to summarize a document or write up a meal plan. Consequently, it takes a while — much longer than most of us would tolerate from an on-device assistant.

Is the third- generation of the Tensor chipset up to the task despite the fact that it is supposedly designed with the goal of doing more local processing? It doesn’t seem likely that the Tensor G3 will run a lot more complicated processes on-device because of how common overheating complaints are about the Pixel 7 phones. Though the current limitations of Tensor may make them hard to see, there should be a glimpse into whatArtificial Intelligence can do for us.