AMNA NAWAZ: Rapid advances in artificial intelligence continue as companies introduce new products that cause both surprise and concern.
Last week, OpenAI announced its next generation chatbot, namely ChatGPT-4o.
new AI
When an engineer asks an assistant to tell a bedtime story, as in this presentation, the assistant can respond to voice, text, and visual commands in real time.
A.I.
Voice: Oh, a bedtime story about robots and love?
I had it covered.
Gather around, Barrett.
Once upon a time… Man: I want maximum emotion, like maximum expressiveness, much more than you did before.
A.I.
Voice: Okay.
Let's liven up the drama.
Once upon a time… Woman: Can you do this now with a robotic voice?
AI
VOICE: Starts a dramatic robot voice.
(Laughter) (Applause) AI
Voice: Once upon a time.
Amna Nawaz: OpenAI actually suspended the use of that particular virtual voice after some people pointed out its similarities to the robot voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the film “Her.”
Scarlett Johansson, actress: Good morning, Theodore.
Joaquin Phoenix, actor: Good morning.
Scarlett Johansson: I have a meeting in five minutes.
Did you want to get out of bed?
Joaquin Phoenix: You're too funny.
Scarlett Johansson: Yeah, great.
I'm interesting.
I want to learn everything about everything.
AMNA NAWAZ: Google also announced new AI-powered search features this week.
To learn more about all these developments, we were joined by Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of the podcast “Decoder.”
So Nirei, let's start with Google, the most visited website in the world.
Significant changes are coming to the way billions of people search the web.
Users will now see AI-generated answers to their searches.
How big is that?
NILAY PATEL, Editor-in-Chief, The Verge: This is a significant change in how the web works today.
Many of the websites you visit are driven by the need for Google traffic.
Up to 30% or more of most major websites' traffic comes from Google.
So if Google starts keeping more of that traffic for itself, it will change the economics of having content on the web.
Some of that content may migrate to platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
And that will certainly shake up the organization and structure of the web. Because publishers may try to hack into those AIs instead of getting links from her Google.
preview.
And I think the big question for Google is, what's the incentive for them to publish new content on the web if they're just synthesizing content and presenting it for free to people who are searching for it?
We spoke to Google CEO Sundar Pichai about this.
It's a paradigm shift, he said.
There will be changes that he believes the web can endure.
AMNA NAWAZ: You've said that the reaction of people who are actually building websites to the news of this new search is fundamentally apocalyptic.
why?
NILAY PATEL: Yes, so the web has reached a steady state over the last 25 to 30 years where people create websites and Google indexes those websites.
Google allows us to do so because it is considered fair use.
And in return, Google sends traffic to your website.
And a large portion of the traffic for many websites on the Internet is Google search traffic.
If Google started keeping that traffic for themselves, many businesses would fail.
AMNA NAWAZ: So what about the new chatbot that OpenAI just announced called ChatGPT?
We saw a quick demo of it.
Is this essentially a model for how we will all interact with technology someday?
Nilay Patel: It's a vision.
Google announced something very similar called Project Astra. The idea is that when you hold your phone in your hand, you have a multimodal search interface where you're looking at something with your phone's camera.
It's talking to you about what you see.
You can ask questions.
It has its own personality.
OpenAI is really leaning into the personal touch here.
What we haven't seen yet is a huge advance in terms of accuracy.
Chatbots are good at language, so they can build very persuasive products.
They can talk to you with these personalities, express emotions in different ways, and have different kinds of image generation.
It recognizes videos of broken toys in your home and tells you how to fix them.
The flip side of the coin is that language and intelligence are not 100% correlated, and perhaps not at all.
And in the demo, we see a gap where users ask questions and are very confident in what the demo conveys.
But it can also be wrong.
And I think what's actually holding back widespread adoption of this kind of product is the need to improve accuracy.
We've made amazing progress in our language abilities, and I think we're pretty stable in terms of actual intelligence.
Amna Nawaz: On the other hand, I would like to mention that Microsoft also plans to develop its own large-scale AI.
This week's announcement.
What do you hope to hear from them?
Nilay Patel: So today Microsoft announced a new line of AI
PC, Copilot PC That's their brand name.
They come equipped with a new chip that they claim is faster than the chip in Apple's MacBook Air, which has been the industry benchmark for a very long time.
And they're rolling out new versions of Windows.
It also has a lot of AI.
The built-in features for consumers also include an exciting feature called Recall, which is basically a feature that the operating system or Windows monitors with you.
You can ask questions while using the computer.
While playing the game, you can talk about what you see on the game screen.
You can ask for help during the game.
While using applications on your PC, you can ask your PC for help and drive your PC.
for you.
This is a big vision in computing.
It has been a dream for a long time.
There are intelligent agents on your computer that actually help you use your computer.
Microsoft is taking the first step today with Copilot PC.
That seems very convincing.
There are a lot of questions about privacy and security, where all the data goes, who's tracking it, and who has access to it.
Microsoft says that everything happens locally on the PC, but I'd actually like to test this to see if that's actually true.
AMNA NAWAZ: You also touched on privacy, security issues, and accuracy issues with some of the other AIs.
function.
The question is, how fast are some of these technology companies coming out with new products, and where do all these concerns rank? I think it's about whether you have enough insight.
Is it a common concern?
Nilay Patel: I don't think that concern is high enough.
What you're seeing here is an extraordinary battle, an extraordinary battle between major technology companies that are feeling competitive pressure from OpenAI and others for the first time in a long time, and they're competing with each other with products to grab market share in order to keep up.
In just a few weeks, Apple will be rolling out a ton of AI
The new version of iOS for iPhone includes a variety of features, some of which will likely involve partnering with Google or OpenAI in a way that violates privacy promises.
We have to look at what they are claiming, but it is all because of the pressure that this is a paradigm shift at the level of mobile and social networking.
And if they are left behind, they stand to lose significant market share.
AMNA NAWAZ: That's Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of the podcast “Decoder.”
Thank you very much for joining us.
Nilay Patel: Thank you for having me.