A hands-free internet future is now

Back in March, I proclaimed that the proliferation of LLMs and ChatGPT would lead to a hands-free internet that is led by voice interactions. It appears that online commentary is now catching up to this idea.

The implications of AI tools and language models are mostly misunderstood. I see this leading to a fully voice-based hands-free internet. That is to say - interaction in 3D space is now solved. https://t.co/aSHGUtYnXf

— Geoff Kim (@geoffkim) March 30, 2023

OpenAI has recently made Voice Conversations available to Plus subscribers on its mobile app, allowing users to effectively speak to ChatGPT and have it respond back conversationally. Yes, this HER future we’ve all been dreaming of has arrived, but did we think it would come so quickly?

On the podcast This Week in Startups, Jason was shown how to use the new voice conversation feature with ChatGPT, providing a glimpse into how conversational AI could play out in the future. While the demo itself was clunky, with long pauses that tried Jason's patience, it was entertaining to see Sunny apparently setting his AI to sound uncannily like Scarlet Johansson. See the interaction below:

Sunny gives Jason a live demo of how conversational AI could work with ChatGPT’s Voice Conversation feature.

And at Meta's Connect 23 event last week, Zuckerberg announced Meta AI, which features a number of celebrities and athletes portraying archetypal personas for conversational AI interactions across Meta's social apps. In their words:

We’re introducing Meta AI in beta, an advanced conversational assistant that’s available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, and is coming to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest 3. Meta AI can give you real-time information and generate photorealistic images from your text prompts in seconds to share with friends. (Available in the US only)

This hands-free future is unfolding before our eyes. Although there are still some user interface kinks to work out, the underlying computing challenges have been solved. How long before we’re chatting effortlessly with AI assistants during our daily commutes and throughout our everyday lives?

How I learned to stop worrying and love talking to my cat

I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud but I’m more than 50% convinced future GPTs will allow us to speak with our pets.

— Allie K. Miller (@alliekmiller) April 1, 2023

Over the past few months, many of us have experienced vivid hallucinations on how the singularity will transform our lives in ways we cannot anticipate. Amidst the whirlwind of predictions, there is one idea I hold with a sense of certainty: the possibility of engaging in a conversation with my cat.

Feliciia is a 7-year old indoor cat and I posit that I have til 2035 to see this happen. Perhaps our one-sided interactions could one day turn into a meaningful dialogue about - well whatever she gets up to during the course of a day.

The tweet above (sent on April Fool’s Day, US time) spurred me onto ChatGPT.

Could my pet evolve to be an AGI?

No, pets cannot evolve into artificial general intelligence (AGI) because AGI is a type of intelligence that is specifically designed and developed by humans through advanced technological means such as machine learning and artificial neural networks. Pets, on the other hand, are biological organisms that have evolved through natural selection over millions of years and do not possess the necessary cognitive abilities or physical structures to develop AGI. While some animals are capable of learning and exhibiting intelligent behaviors, they are still limited by their biology and cannot evolve to become AGI.

Could my cat develop its brain to display characteristics of AGI?‬

While cats are intelligent animals and have their own unique ways of processing information, their brains are not capable of supporting the kind of advanced cognitive abilities that AGI requires. AGI systems rely on complex algorithms and massive amounts of data to learn and process information, something that the brain of a cat cannot do. It's important to note that while animals like cats may not be capable of developing AGI, they do possess their own unique intelligence and abilities that humans can learn from and appreciate.

So if the only thing stopping a cat from exhibiting the ability to communicate with other species is the limitation of their brains’ throughput (I/O problem) and processing power, why not just add more GPUs?

What about a human’s brain?

It is theoretically possible for a human brain to develop AGI, but it would require significant advances in neuroscience, computing power, and artificial intelligence research. The human brain is a highly complex organ that is capable of processing vast amounts of information and performing a wide range of cognitive tasks, but current scientific understanding of the brain is still limited.

In addition, developing AGI would require creating algorithms and architectures that mimic the way the human brain processes information. While there have been some successful attempts to create artificial neural networks and other machine learning models that resemble the human brain, these models are still limited by their computational power and the amount of data available to train them.

Overall, while it is theoretically possible for a human brain to develop AGI, achieving this goal would require significant advances in neuroscience, technology, and artificial intelligence research.

I’ll take that as a yes.

Large Consciousness Model (LCM)

Instead of asking if a machine can have consciousness, consider if the human brain is just a large language model. 🧠💭

— Geoff Kim (@geoffkim) January 7, 2023

This tweet, or to be more precise - the concept of the tweet - came to me in a dream last night. I slept on it knowing how poorly worded it was and used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to re-construct the sentence. Happy with the result.

ChatGPT’s version of a poorly worded tweet.