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Did you guys see the movie Her? It struck me the other day how all the pieces of technology are coming together to make the technological context for that movie's world OUR world.
If you haven't seen it, basically, advanced AI personal assistants live on everyone's phone. Things happen. When I first saw the movie (when it was released in 2014), if you asked me, I wouldn't have said we would never have this tech, but I wouldn't have predicted that we'd have all the pieces within 10 years. The main difference between its world and ours, at the time, was the human-level ability of AI to converse with users. Siri existed and still exists, but, very quickly, you need to take over for her. In Her's universe, Siri is reading your emails, summarizing them for you, and talking with you about how you want to reply and doing most of the work for you, like a real human assistant would... and I feel like we pretty much have everything we need to make that a reality. As soon as Apple puts Chat GPT behind Siri and gives it access to your entire phone, I think speech will become the main interface we use with our phones/computers. Combine C-GPT with other recent AI innovations such as voice reproduction and you at least have new ways to do the old things we've always done.
The central plot of the movie is the protagonist's love story with his AI. That might sound far fetched, but have you heard of the brouhaha about Replika AI? People are already falling in love with these things (and experiencing heartbreak when they're updated and aren't the same anymore).
To use an old phrase, I think we're in the weeks where decades happen, or we will be very soon.
What's happening now and in the near future is the dark humor "Coen Brothers" version, where the AI isn't nearly as sentient or convincing as in Her, but people are falling in love with it anyway.
I see it more in the frame of decades than weeks, if I'm understanding your turn of phrase there. Siri is a good example of a lot of hype that didn't really go anywhere. In fact, I believe all of the Siri-likes got noticeably worse at some point after some zenith point after their launch. I personally used "Ok Google" for a while until I just didn't anymore. Is that a question of will, technology, or expense that we saw that degradation? It seems plausible that whatever challenge was there will continue to dog future versions, and then you add the layer of uncertainty with AI just randomly choosing tokens and I have some skepticism we're really that close to it working as a business model.
As for the specific tech portrayed in Her, you need to move past the "wide as an ocean, deep as a stream" effect of current chatbots, and I think that problem is severely, severely underrated in the AI discourse. That feeling you get with ChatGPT where it suddenly feels paper thin, where it starts feeling like a mode of Quora-summary? That never happens in Her, and you don't even feel like it could happen. And the question is how fundamental or persistent will that shortcoming be to the model of ChatGPT, and I find it very plausible that it remains that way for a long time.
I agree. What we have isn't on the level of Her's Samantha, but I think we have enough to make Siri et al. much more usable than it is now. Once this new vein of human-computer-interaction is struck, we'll start to see consistent progress and optimization to suit this domain. While ChatGPT is still shallow, it's much deeper than what we've had before and, crucially, it's way more conversational. There's a sense that, if I could just word something right, not in a technical way, but in English, I could get it to do what I want, and I don't have that sense with Siri at all (where I'm constantly thinking of keywords). We'll see.
BTW, that quote is from Lenin:
I do think voice support would be really fun to try with a version of chatgpt that's just a bit more interesting to talk to, with near-perfect voice-to-text accuracy. I'm not sure how far away we are from that, but I do feel like voice-to-text progress has stalled, you would have hoped we were there by now. And while chatGPT is amazing, its "Quora" mode, or you could call it "buzzkill" mode, where it really seems like it's just summarizing common denominator internet opinions is definitely a hurdle, and I don't think its just a result of PC-ification. I think a lot of it is just a result of processing a ton of text, rather than actually having a model of reality.
Beyond being interesting to talk to, getting it to do things is hopefully getting worked on, but I still think I'd take the bet that it either hits some fundamental consistency challenges a la self-driving cars, or just doesn't get widely adopted because it turns out people just don't like the mode of interaction a la VR.
If you think voice to text stalled, then you might not have heard of Whisper from OpenAI. It's miles ahead of the competition.
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The Bing phone app has this. It defaults to speech recognition for the prompts and TTS for the replies.
So I didn't realize that, I actually just downloaded it and tried a "brainstorming" session with it. There's some promise there, but it's interesting what specific ways it falls short of providing a natural conversation.
You have to press a button every time you want to talk
It will arbitrarily interrupt you and respond
Each conversation can only go 15 replies deep, presumably because of some technical limitation
The quality of its responses lean towards that "buzzkill" quality of repeating what you say and giving the most generic reply possible.
Input-wise, I think it would be really interesting to see a version of this where the microphone is always on, and the AI could try to interrupt you in your pauses, but if you kept talking it would shut up and keep listening. Just having that, with the existing tech (and removing the 15 reply limit) would be a pretty cool tool to possibly organize your thoughts in a way. But then if the AI was actually interesting to talk to in a conversational way, that would be pretty fascinating, and get quite a bit closer to the Her bar. So I'm definitely keeping an eye on it.
You may want to set the conversation mode to "more creative".
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When you see a dog playing the piano, the amazing thing is it playing, not playing well. LLM-s and AI in general seem to have leapfrogged past what I would have thought possible before the 50s of this century.
It is up in the air.
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