Because Nilay doesn’t usually have enough stuff to fiddle with during the Vergecast recordings, you know what I mean? There was a ton of news this week, from the AI Pin to the Steam Deck to custom GPTs. But that’s all just the sideshow to the grand (or not so grand) finale of Nilay’s experiments with Samsung Dex. Is it the end of the road, or the beginning of the future? You be the judge.
The CEO of OpenAI has weighed in on the new chatbot from Elon Musk— on Musk’s own social platform, no less!
For those who don’t know the backstory here, Musk was instrumental in the creation of OpenAI but walked away from it and is now trying to compete with ChatGPT. (And GPTs are custom AI bots that OpenAI just started letting ChatGPT subscribers create.)
TechCrunch’s report from a visit to Humane’s offices includes a few details I wasn’t aware of, including that the AI Pin has 32GB of local storage and that the first batch of devices will consist of 100,000 units.
The piece is worth reading to round out the picture of the Pin. But until people actually get to try the device for themselves, take everything Humane says with a grain of salt — the AI-powered future may not be everything it’s cracked up to be.
[TechCrunch]
As pointed out by more than one Verge commenter and on this post on Threads, Humane’s AI Pin demo features it confidently making an error about where you can watch April’s total solar eclipse. I’m getting flashbacks to when Google’s Bard made a factual error in its first demo.
These sorts of high-profile flubs are why I have a hard time getting excited about many generative AI tools right now.
I keep reading the big New York Times feature about Humane and it just keeps getting sillier and (delightfully) sillier:
A Buddhist monk named Brother Spirit led them to Humane. Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno had developed concepts for two A.I. products: a women’s health device and the pin. Brother Spirit, whom they met through their acupuncturist, recommended that they shared the ideas with his friend, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.
Sitting beneath a palm tree on a cliff above the ocean at Mr. Benioff’s Hawaiian home in 2018, they explained both devices. “This one,” Mr. Benioff said, pointing at the Ai Pin, as dolphins breached the surf below, “is huge.”
“It’s going to be a massive company,” he added.
The best part about all this — beyond the Times printing this with perfect Times self-seriousness — is that Benioff is an investor in Humane, and the Benioff-owned Time magazine followed up by naming the AI Pin one of the “best inventions of 2023” before it had even been announced.
The company is looking to collaborate with organizations to help AI models understand “all subject matters, industries, cultures, and languages.” Through the partnerships, it wants to create both open-source datasets to train large language models, as well as private datasets for proprietary ones.
[OpenAI]
Altman on stage with the WSJ’s Joanna Stern last month, discussing AI hardware: “I think there is something great to do but I don’t know what it is yet.”
Altman to the NYT for its shiny feature on the AI Pin, today (my emphasis):
Humane has the advantage of being the first of those A.I.-focused devices to become available, but Mr. Altman said in an interview that was no guarantee of success. “That will be up to customers to decide,” he said. “Maybe it’s a bridge too far,” he said, “or maybe people are like, ‘This is much better than my phone.’” Plenty of technology that looked like a sure bet ends up selling for 90 percent off at Best Buy, he added.
Props for honesty, Sam.
OpenAI said it had to fight off the attack which caused ChatGPT and its APIs to go down for 90 minutes on Wednesday.
“We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing work to mitigate this,” the company said.
CEO Sam Altman originally pointed to an increase in users as the cause of the problem. He said people may continue seeing “service instability”
[status.openai.com]
Sources tell Windows Central that Microsoft is planning to bring its AI Copilot assistant to the Windows 10 taskbar in a future update. If true, this could bring Copilot to a bunch more people, as Windows 10 currently has around 1 billion monthly active devices, as opposed to the 400 million with Windows 11.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says usage of the new features announced at its developer conference are “far outpacing our expectations” and that “there will likely be service instability in the short term due to load.”
ChatGPT suffered a “major” 90-minute outage on Wednesday.
In a sitdown with Verge EIC Nilay Patel on Decoder, the 44th president discussed Joe Biden’s recently-signed executive order about AI, why Obama disagrees with the idea that social networks are a “common carrier,” and which iPhone apps he uses the most, now that he’s no longer president and he can use an iPhone.
