This might be the most significant 2024 development of all, closing the list with a bullet. A frightfully under-reported and understated story appeared yesterday in MIT Technology Review, headlined, ā
OpenAI and Google are launching supercharged AI assistants. Hereās how you can try them out.ā We have now supercharged right up to, if not
the singularity, at least
a singularity, or in other words, a kind of escape velocity point of no return.
What do you notice about OpenAIās unquestionably successful dev team?
When does the AI assistant become the boss, and the boss become the assistant? I would emphatically argue you
need to know about this tech story, except that soon you wonāt be able to avoid it. Hereās how one AI news streamer ā used to reporting on the breakneck pace of AI tech developments ā began his extraordinary YouTube yesterday (linked below):
Iāve been doing this AI channel for a while now. Iāve been featuring the newest and the coolest AI tools and the most advanced AI innovations. But this just dropped. And Iām feeling something that Iāve never felt before in my life. I am mind-blown. And shocked. But at the same time, also terrified. Iām terrified of whatās to come, what our future will be like, and ā things are going to get wild. But anyways, OpenAI just dropped THIS.
What could terrify a seasoned AI streamer? Hereās his video, a vignette of demo clips from OpenAIās development team showing off its seductive new AI chatbot that
talks to people in real time. Possibly the most terrifying one was the clip of the two AIs talking
to each other.
YOUTUBE: Insane OpenAI News: GPT-4o and your own AI partner (28:47).
Itās not just
talking. Watch the whole thing. Seriously.
More human than human. The mystery of the AI
blitzkrieg could fuel a thousand conspiracy theories. How did this
Turing-test demolishing technology of human-like chatbots spring fully-assembled from nowhere, from multiple allegedly independent development teams, who admit they donāt completely understand how it works, and which rapidly reached this singular point in a handful of months?
Ultimately, it doesnāt matter. Wherever it came from, UFOs, demons, neural networks, or good old fashioned knowhow and elbow grease, itās here now, and itās about to change
everything.
MIT reported that the new model, not yet available to the public, can hold a conversation with you in real time, with a question-answer response delay of only about 320 milliseconds. That makes it indistinguishable from a natural human conversation. And it can
look at things.
You can ask the model to describe and interpret anything in your smartphone cameraās view. It can help with coding, translate foreign text, and provide Babelfish-like
real time translation between two people. It can summarize large amounts of information, and it can generate images, fonts, and 3D renderings from spoken descriptions.
We could see this coming, true, but now itās here. The commercial applications are incomprehensibly infinite. Teaching, customer service and support, drive-through order takers, games,
lawyers, doctors, you name it, virtually any service industry,
especially the sin industries (e.g., paid phone erotica), are about to be transformed overnight.
But itās the potential
personal implications that are the most disturbing.
Folks ā especially younger people ā will soon be tempted to form
relationships with their AI. We humans crave relationship and in creating them can easily bridge any gaps. Think about the depth of peopleās relationships with their wire terriers, parakeets, iguanas, boa constrictors, or even tarantulas.
āMy dog is better than most humans.ā
But these alluring AI relationships will be much more rewarding, or at least more affirming, even than pets. And they could conceivably be even more rewarding than real human relationships. Real humans are messy, argumentative, distracted, jealous, selfish, and self-interested. Simulated humans only care about
you.
Donāt get me wrong. Iām no Luddite. I got my first computer ā an Apple II ā when I was twelve. This imitation human technology undoubtedly offers tremendous untapped potential for good. But we are about to run head-first into a social and economic disruption more transformative than the last centuryās auto and air technologies. The vast scale of its implications is literally unimaginable.
So get ready. Itās a Brave New World. Once the AI genie, now just a dot on a screen, wafts out of the iPhone, it will only take a few weeks to obtain a real face. And from there, itāll just be a short trip to
embodiment in a lifelike robot shell.
And these days, as World War III continues rattling across the worldās plains, itās getting more difficult to argue the AI could possibly do a worse job than we are doing. Many folks will welcome our robot overlords. Donāt underestimate this. They accepted
masks and they believe in magical gender changing, for crying out loud. If they digested a
wise Latina as Supreme Court Justice, theyāll believe in transcendent AI.
At least the AI wonāt sniff kidsā hair. It probably wonāt claim New Guineans ate its relatives, either.
What do
you think? Is this good news or bad news for we real humans? And maybe thatās not even the right question. How should we prepare to respond to living with simulation?
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