Tag: ai assistants

Eyelash Mites and Remarks on AI from Neal Stephenson

Fascinating point here from Stephenson and echoes my own sentiments that AI itself is not necessarily a horrid creation that needs to be locked away, but a “new” modern cultural concept that we’d do well to realize points us back towards the importance of our own integral ecologies…

Remarks on AI from NZ – by Neal Stephenson – Graphomane:

The mites, for their part, don’t know that humans exist. They just “know” that food, in the form of dead skin, just magically shows up in their environment all the time. All they have to do is eat it and continue living their best lives as eyelash mites. Presumably all of this came about as the end result of millions of years’ natural selection. The ancestors of these eyelash mites must have been independent organisms at some point in the distant past. Now the mites and the humans have found a modus vivendi that works so well for both of them that neither is even aware of the other’s existence. If AIs are all they’re cracked up to be by their most fervent believers, this seems like a possible model for where humans might end up: not just subsisting, but thriving, on byproducts produced and discarded in microscopic quantities as part of the routine operations of infinitely smarter and more powerful AIs.

The coming (very soon) torrent of artificial intelligence bots on the web and throughout our lives is going to be revolutionary for humanity in so many ways.

“We are now confident we know how to build AGI…”

That statement is something that should be exciting as well as a “woah” moment to all of us. This is big and you should be paying attention.

Reflections – Sam Altman:

We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.

OpenAI’s Strawberry

Happening quickly…

Exclusive: OpenAI working on new reasoning technology under code name ‘Strawberry’ | Reuters:

The document describes a project that uses Strawberry models with the aim of enabling the company’s AI to not just generate answers to queries but to plan ahead enough to navigate the internet autonomously and reliably to perform what OpenAI terms “deep research,” according to the source. This is something that has eluded AI models to date, according to interviews with more than a dozen AI researchers.

OpenAI’s Lens on the Near Future

Newton has the best take I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot) on the ongoing OpenAI / Sam Altman situation… worth your time:

OpenAI’s alignment problem – by Casey Newton – Platformer:

At the same time, though, it’s worth asking whether we would still be so down on OpenAI’s board had Altman been focused solely on the company and its mission. There’s a world where an Altman, content to do one job and do it well, could have managed his board’s concerns while still building OpenAI into the juggernaut that until Friday it seemed destined to be.

That outcome seems preferable to the world we now find ourselves in, where AI safety folks have been made to look like laughingstocks, tech giants are building superintelligence with a profit motive, and social media flattens and polarizes the debate into warring fandoms. OpenAI’s board got almost everything wrong, but they were right to worry about the terms on which we build the future, and I suspect it will now be a long time before anyone else in this industry attempts anything other than the path of least resistance.

AI Assistants and Education in 5 Years According to Gates

I do agree with his take on what education will look like for the vast majority of young and old people with access to the web in the coming decade. Needless to say, AI is going to be a big driver of what it means to learn and how most humans experience that process in more authentic ways than currently available…

AI is about to completely change how you use computers | Bill Gates:

In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.

It’s a Different Sort of Revolution

I don’t think we’re prepared to understand how AI (especially more advanced generative AIs) will impact what we currently consider career jobs… especially for those with advanced degrees.

This represents a stark difference in past societal shifts when physical labor-focused employment and careers were impacted…

Biggest Losers of AI Boom Are Knowledge Workers, McKinsey Says – Bloomberg:

In that respect, it may be the opposite of significant technology upgrades of the past, which often came at the expense of occupations where workers had fewer educational qualifications and got paid less. Many were performing physical tasks — like the British textile workers who smashed up new cost-saving weaving machines, a movement that became known as the Luddites.

By contrast, the new shift “will challenge the attainment of multiyear degree credentials,” McKinsey said.

Tackling Tech Bias for People with Disabilities

Fantastic post… every organization, nonprofit, and church could gain valuable insight from the takeaways here:

The best path ahead is to seek out the affected stakeholders and work with them towards a fair and equitable system. If we can identify and remove bias against people with disabilities from our technologies, we will be taking an important step towards creating a society that respects and upholds the human rights of us all.

Via Venturebeat

Alexa, go buy me some milk.

In the shadow of Amazon’s offices in downtown Seattle, people enter a tiny grocery store, take whatever they want, and then walk out. And nobody runs after them screaming. This is what it’s like to shop at Amazon Go, the online retail giant’s vision for the future of brick-and-mortar stores. There are no checkout clerks, or even checkout stands. Instead, a smartphone app, hundreds of regular and infrared cameras on the ceiling (black on black, so they blend in), computer-vision algorithms, and machine learning work together to figure out what you’re picking up and charge you for it on a credit card connected to your Amazon account.

Source: Amazon’s Checkout-Free Grocery Store Is Opening to the Public – MIT Technology Review

AI Assistants and Important Meetings

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That’s a worry I’ve heard before. Whether you’re a job seeker meeting a recruiter, an account manager calling a customer, or a novice getting coffee with an industry veteran, handing off communications to an assistant might give you pause. You might worry that you’ll blow the opportunity, come off impersonal or worse, arrogant.

via How to use an AI assistant for important meetings – x.ai

I’ve been using Amy as my personal assistant to schedule meetings and add things to my calendar for a little over a year now. Amy is an “artificial intelligence powered assistant” that you act with as you would a person. The advantage is that Amy does all of the time-consuming email back-and-forths that come along with scheduling meetings.

There are a number of companies coming out with similar AI powered assistants, but x.ai has been my preference (I do test out others to keep up with things).

I schedule lots of meetings with clients, potential clients, boards, and colleagues (and podcasts), so anything that frees up my time while coming across with the same genuineness and kindness that I normally try to convey via email is a winner.

Over the past year, I’ve learned a good deal about how to deal with Amy as well as how to introduce or include Amy into an email thread with people who have no clue what AI is or why this personal assistant is not a real human being. I’m sure that will continue, but as a culture we are on an upward slope of awareness about AI (whether that’s because of interactions with Alexa and Siri or news stories) and the concept of having a personal assistant that is powered by AI won’t be such a novelty in a few short years.

I’ve not had anyone comment about my pretentiousness of having a personal assistant or tell me that they were annoyed or inconvenienced by the experience of working with Amy. So maybe we’re getting over our preconceptions about the role of personal assistants in a post-Siri world.

For now, I’m continually using Amy to power meetings and enjoy the experience of doing so!

Marsbot Is Your New Scarlett

But Marsbot is important for other reasons, too. She represents a different kind of bot than the ones you see in Facebook Messenger — one that’s proactive rather than passive. She’s not a chatbot, but an interruptive bot. Crowley says that most other bots are in the model of Aladdin’s lamp: you invoke them and the genie appears. Marsbot is more in the Jiminy Cricket mode, hanging over your shoulder and chiming in when needed.

Source: Marsbot Is Dreaming of You — Backchannel

I’ve been testing out Marsbot the last few days, and I’m seriously impressed. I’ve been using the Ozlo bot for my random food suggestions based on location, time, preferences etc… and I’ve been happy with Ozlo.

However, Marsbot has something unique going on… it’s not a bot that waits for you. Rather, it’s proactive. If you’ve seen Her, you know immediately what I’m talking about.

Plus, it’s based on Foursquare’s accumulated data over the years, which is immense. Plus, it works in your text messaging app (iMessage if on Apple) where you’re used to getting personal updates or messages rather than going into another app on your device.

Messaging bots are going to be big and change the way we do computing and think of computers.

Take notice, churches 🙂