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OpenAI's Digital Assistant is Here
TECH IN THE NEWS
AI Safety Talks - U.S. and Chinese officials meet in Switzerland today to begin talks on AI risks and safety agreed to during APEC 2023.
Pixie? - Google’s annual I/O devcon today “will be all about AI,” and could include Android integration, the "Pixie," digital assistant, & genAI search.
Arming Up - SoftBank's UK-based Arm chipmaker plans to launch AI chip products by 2025, possibly via a TMSC manufacturing partnership.
Winning Semiconductor "War" - U.S. ally South Korea is preparing a support package worth over $7B for its domestic chip production industry.
Vive L’AI - Amazon and Microsoft both announced multibillion-dollar investments in France’s cloud and AI sectors at the Choose France summit.
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THE HOTTEST THING IN TECH
“O” is for “Omni” as AI Assistants Arrive
OpenAI announced GPT-4o, its latest AI model with text, vision, and audio capabilities in a shift towards a true digital assistant interface. While the “GPT-4-level” model improves multi-modal capabilities, the main innovation here is the first major step forward in the ease of use of OpenAI’s tools since its launch. GPT-4o will be accessible to all ChatGPT users in a staged roll-out, including those on the free version, so it’s also a move to “open up” OpenAI’s tools to more users and encourage lock-in. This reflects the heavy competition likely to emerge in this vertical from its big tech rivals.
A Conversational AI Digital Assistant
The model is available via a new web UI with a “more conversational” home screen and layout. It also includes a desktop version on macOS with keyboard shortcuts for questions or screenshots (windows version due later in year). It’s a supercharged upgrade to OpenAI voice mode with “real-time” responsiveness and low latency, resulting in a “conversational assistant” like Siri or Alexa but capable of much more complex tasks including:
Persisted streamed media input so it watches, listens along;
Vision capabilities to explain “What’s going on” from media input;
Better ability to detect and mimic human emotional nuance;
Ability to stop and recalibrate when interrupted;
Ability to instruct in real time on tasks - so long tutoring business;
Real-time language translation if prompted;
API access for all users to build their own applications off this base.
Pixie, Siri, and Camerabuds
Google is expected to announce similar digital assistant functionality today in its “Pixie” multimodal Google Assistant replacement. Yesterday right as OpenAI showed off GPT-4o, it teased a camera-powered AI feature that lets users ask what’s in the camera frame in real-time.
Apple plans to upgrade Siri with on-device AI to make it “more conversational and versatile", likely a huge priority for them now.
Meta is developing its "Camerabuds" AI-powered earphones with cameras that can identify objects and translate languages + its AI Smart glasses.
Apple and Google still have a huge lock-in advantage in that they already own the native voice assistants on your phone. OpenAI has moved fast to beat them to the drop on this, hoping its first-mover status will be enough.
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"This could become the AI agent product with a billion users from the get-go. The FSD for smartphones with a Tesla-scale data flywheel.”
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UAE’s AI Model - Open source Falcon 2 series could rival big tech models.
Meta - "Camerabuds" AI-powered earphones recognize objects & translate.
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House Cleaning Bots - San Francisco startup The Bot Company, by the cofounder of autonomous vehicle startup Cruise, raised $150M at a $550M pmv from Spark Capital and Nat Friedman.
Edge Computing AI Chips - South Korean startup DeepX raised a $80M Series C led by SkyLake to create AI chips for low-power edge devices.
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