127 | AI and human customer service agent are now indistinguishable (SalesForce CEO), Sam Altman’s takeover of OpenAI is complete, The entertainment industry and AI relationship is evolving, and more important AI news from the week ending on Sep 27 2024

0:00Hello, and welcome to a weekend news edition of the Leveraging AI. The podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host. And while last week was the week of AI Agents Explosion, this week we have multiple topics. All of them are fascinating. Some of it are major changes in OpenAI, in their leadership. That is not the first time, but it seems to be the final nail in the coffin of the nonprofit version of OpenAI. We're going to talk in depth about that, but also lots of fascinating news from other leaders in the industry, as well as impacts to creativity with amazing new video capabilities and its impact on Hollywood, as well as some big, bold predictions from leadership in the industry.

0:49So we have a lot to talk about. By the way, I'll be speaking at the AI Realize conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 2nd. So if you are there and you're a listener of this podcast, I would love to meet you. So come and say hi. And now let's get the news started.

1:13If you've been a regular listener to this podcast, that there's been major departure of senior leaders in OpenAI since the big event of the ousting of Sam Altman as the CEO, and then his return, and then all the turmoil that came after that. So one after the other, more and more leaders from OpenAI has left. And this week, there was another big earthquake in OpenAI when Mira Moradi, the chief technology officer of OpenAI for the past six years, has announced that she's leaving the company to, quote unquote, pursue personal exploration. Immediately after that, Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and the VP of Research, Barrett Zoff, have also announced that they're leaving OpenAI.

1:59Now, these are top leaders on the technical side of OpenAI that are leaving the company. That's in addition to Greg Brockman, who is on personal leave until the end of the year, which that's not very clear what that means, but he announced at the same time they announced the launch of O1. What does that tell us? All of this is happening as OpenAI is in the midst of raising amounts that are not clear yet, but it's going to be probably around$6 to$7 billion and around$150 billion in valuation. Now, there's some big names that are going to be a part of that investment, including some of the biggest companies in the world, including Apple and potentially Google, as well as obviously Microsoft, who invested in the first one and a few other big investing firms.

2:49None of these companies, I think, will agree to the current structure of the company. And hence, there's been discussions and rumors for a very long time that OpenAI is probably going to separate itself from its origin, which is a nonprofit organization that was built to benefit humanity with AGI. And this seems to be, as I mentioned earlier in the opening, might be the last nail in the coffin. Now there's only three people of the original founders of OpenAI and its leadership that are still in the company. Out of 13, everybody else has left. Now that's not the first time that a company gets founded and then people are leaving.

3:27But I think most of these departures have to do with the fact that OpenAI has left the direction that it initially took that people signed up for, both in means of the purpose of the organization, as well as the level of importance of safety in that environment. So to benefit humanity, you need to be very cautious with what you're doing. And I think that has went out the window for a very long time now. And we've seen multiple examples in the past year about that. So the departure of such important figures in the company is obviously a big deal. And I think it hints that if you want takeover of Sam Altman over the company to lead it in the direction he feels is the right direction is very obvious.

4:15I think there's going to be very little opposition to Sam moving forward. And I think we will see OpenAI changing into a for-profit company sometime in the near future and then raising this initial amount of money, which again, I don't think is a lot of money. And we're going to talk a lot about money in this particular episode, including about OpenAI, but they're going to raise$6 or$7 billion, at least in this round. And I think they're going to raise a lot more than that in the coming year. But the other big interesting piece of news coming from OpenAI this week is they finally released the advanced voice mode.

4:52So OpenAI demoed advanced voice mode a day before Google made their announcement early this year, but they did not share it with us until this week. There were a lot of rumors why, that it wasn't ready, that it's dangerous. There were a lot of issues with the voices that they were using that sounded too much like celebrities and people didn't like it, but it's now available and it's released and you can start using it. I must say that I'm using OpenAI with voice for a very long time now, mostly my voice inputs. Instead of typing, I just talk to it and tell it what I wanted to do. But I never actually tried to have a conversation with it.

5:29Or I tried once or twice before and it wasn't great. And this week I found myself driving back home late at night and I wanted somebody to talk to and I didn't want to bother anybody. And it was the day that this was released. I was like, okay, that's going to be interesting. I'm going to be speaking at this conference next week and I have different ideas on what exactly I want to change and focus my presentation. And I need somebody to brainstorm this with, and this will be interesting. And I had a 20 minute conversation with the new advanced voice mode, and I must admit it's incredibly good.

5:59Now, in the beginning of the conversation, it was really awkward because it's weird having a conversation with a machine. I must admit that about five to 10 minutes in, you totally forget about the fact that it's a machine and just having a great brainstorming session with somebody who's an expert on any topic that you want. So it was really a helpful thing for me as I was preparing for my presentation next week. But I think in general, this is an incredible capability that I think is going to take over the way we communicate with machines and computers moving forward, because it just makes so much more sense to communicate just like we always communicate with our own voice versus having to type, which is very cumbersome and slow and doesn't make any sense unless you were forced to do that because that was our way to interact with computers until now.

6:56So I think this has profound implications in the near future to how people are going to talk to machines. And I also think that you should try this out because it's a very interesting experience. For me, one of the weirdest things was I was telling it about the conference and what my plans are, and I asked it for its opinion. And then it started talking for a few minutes about what it would do and what it would change and about things about the topic. And it's not what I wanted, but I felt uncomfortable stopping it in the middle of the sentence, which is weird because it's a machine and it's not going to be offended if I stop it in the middle of a sentence.

7:27But I think it's something we will get used to very quickly and we'll be able to find the right way to work with this, just like we learned prompt engineering and other capabilities to make the most out of these AI capabilities. Now, this advanced voice mode was released in the US, but it was not released in the EU because there's restrictions in the EU AI Act that is preventing it from being released. Specifically, the AI Act has specific clauses that are saying that AI systems will not infer emotions from actual people. And this tool has the ability to detect and inflict emotion. And so it's currently not allowed to be released in the EU.

8:11I don't think when the EU has put this law in place, they had that particular use case in mind. There's obviously pros and cons in here. On one hand, it's going to put the EU people and businesses in a disadvantage compared to other people on the planet that will be able to use this functionality. On the other hand, it's protecting them emotionally from these tools, potentially manipulating their emotions. And so I'm not sure where I'm on the fence on all of this. I'm sure we're walking into a very weird future right now. So this is not science fiction. This is not five years down the road and we have time to think about it.

8:49This capability is available right now. So what's the right approach to this? I'm not 100 % sure. I definitely think we need very clear regulations on what these tools are allowed and not allowed to do. And I think they need to be enforced very aggressively with very severe consequences to whoever is not following those rules. By the way, the flip side of these rules, and if I already mentioned the EU, LinkedIn has started scraping user data to train AI models. They initially claimed it's just to train their own models, and then they said it might go to Microsoft as well. So it's not very clear what the training goes for, but they've done this without changing their terms and conditions, which means they're practically breaking the law, just like anybody else who's scraping data to train their AI models.

9:42only they did it on their own platform for their own users that has an agreement with them, which is obviously wrong. They went and corrected that as soon as they got caught and this went out. But if you want to switch it off, you can do this in your settings. So in your settings, they have a toggle switch for what they call use my data for training content creation AI models, and you can find it in your settings and switch it off. And then they presumably are not training on your data. That being said, a lot of other companies are scraping LinkedIn to train on that data. So all you're doing is preventing LinkedIn from training on your data.

10:19You're not really preventing that from anybody else. The reason it's connected to my previous news is they did not do this to people in the EU. So obviously these regulations are working. They are protecting the individuals who own the data and the companies who own the data and the people who are sharing information online from having their data being used for other reasons. And so I do think that regulation works. I think that clear guidelines on what companies are not allowed to do with very severe consequences is the only way that we can protect ourselves from the negative aspects of this AI future.

10:57That being said, there's issues with open source models, and we're going to talk about that later on today. But back to OpenAI, Sam Altman, as we know, has been pushing for a while for a very significant investment in AI-related infrastructure. There was the whole conversation earlier this year about raising$7 trillion from multiple bodies around the world, including Saudi Arabia. But now Sam Altman has released a blog post actually on his own personal website and not through OpenAI advocating for how critical it is that the US specifically invests significantly in infrastructure that will drive AI growth.

11:38He went as far as saying that not doing so may lead to lack of infrastructure and resources, which is a similar situation that in the past had led to significant wars. So in Sam Altman's eyes, and I never underestimate his vision, he believes that AI is the power of controlling the future. And so governments will have to invest to do that or go to war for those resources. That's obviously not something I think anybody wants, but that might get there. Now, in parallel to all of this, Microsoft and BlackRock, one of the largest investment companies in the world, has launched a$30 billion fund for AI competitiveness and an energy infrastructure all tied into AI infrastructure in the future.

12:30The White House has held a roundtable with AI leaders to discuss that. And so it's definitely a focus, but it's also a very big problem because there's no clear path to profitability. It doesn't necessarily, putting large data centers in specific cities doesn't necessarily provide any economic benefits to that region because it's mostly data. There's not a lot of jobs that it generates. We talked in the past about several different reports, including from Goldman Sachs, that's saying there's no clear path to ROI to any of those big investments that are being made right now. The negative environmental impacts that these data centers have right now is significant because they require a huge amount of water to cool them down.

13:18They require a huge amount of electricity that currently also comes from fossil dependent energy. And there's obviously a lot of discussions on how to build nuclear reactors in order to drive them and so on. But either way, there are a lot of implications to pushing that forward. And there's also the other negative impacts that we talk about a lot in the show, which is weaponizing these systems, which there's zero doubt in my mind, it's already happening. So building AI driven or quasi AI driven weapons and deep fakes in the news and AI generated misinformation and disinformation and job displacement.

13:56So there's a lot of negatives in that. But the fact that there's a huge push forward to provide the right resources for that is undeniable. And it's happening right now. And you just need to be aware of that and try to impact that as much as you can, mostly in the awareness and education about the negative implications to hopefully prevent them or at least minimize them as much as possible. Now, also in his blog post, which by the way, was called the intelligence age, which he released this past week, he also talks about the fact that AGI is imminent and it's actually coming pretty fast. So he used the phrase a few thousand days.

14:34I don't know how much is a few thousand days, but it sounds to me like less than five to 10 years, which was the previous assessment. So if we use the concept of a few thousands, not a lot of thousands, we're talking about 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 days, divide that by 365 days a year, you're in, I don't know, four to five years timeframe where we're going to have super intelligence or AGI. The truth is, as I mentioned in this podcast several times before, it doesn't really matter when AGI is achieved because every single milestone along the way has very significant impacts already. So GPT-01 is already better than PhDs in many different topics in answering questions, doing research, solving complex problems.

15:21So we don't need to wait for AGI to get all the implications of what it means to the workforce, to society, to education, to healthcare, to all these different things that make us what we are as far as a society. And speaking about education, about AI, OpenAI has announced that they've launched the OpenAI Academy, which is an initiative aiming to boost AI skills and career in developing countries. So low and middle income countries. So this is obviously fantastic, right? It's a great thing. And I really hope that more companies go in that direction. And we're going to talk in a minute that Google is actually doing similar things.

15:59But the funny thing or sad thing, if you want to be realistic, is that they've assigned$1 million in API credits for that fund. That's not a lot of money. That's actually a negligible amount of money in the big scheme of things. Now, in addition, they're going to do other things in the program. They're going to host incubator and contest. They're going to be providing access to AI experts and developers for these developing countries. And they're building a global network of developers to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing and so on. So fantastic. This is great. I think, again, it's a good idea.

16:38I think it's an initiative that has to move forward. But the amounts are just so sad because they're so small compared to all the other numbers that you hear. So we just talked about the fact that they're planning to raise$7 billion. and out of that, they're investing$1 million or maybe a little more because there's going to be all the infrastructure around it, let's say$5 million, let's say$10 million in providing AI education across the world. That's not enough. Now, in parallel, Google has announced that they are launching$120 million global AI opportunity funds. So Sundar Pichai announced that in the UN summit in New York this week, and it aims to expand AI education and training around the world, focusing on local language.

17:23So using Google Translate, they can take that content and knowledge and deliver it across the world very effectively. And they're going to do this through partnership with different nonprofit organizations around the world. So again, great news,$120 million. That's a way bigger amount than OpenAI is investing, which makes sense. Google is a much bigger company with insane amount of positive revenue versus OpenAI that are losing billions every single year. But to put things in perspective, there was another article this week that talked about the return of Noam Shazir into Google. So a quick recap, we talked about this a few weeks ago.

17:57Noam Shazir was a leading Google AI researcher who left due to disagreements with Google and founded Character.ai and recently OpenAI in a weird licensing deal, did not really buy Character.ai, but they assimilated Character.ai. So this particular piece of news says that they've done the math on how much money actually was involved in that overall process to getting Noam Shazir and his team, to be fair, into OpenAI. And the number is$2.7 billion with a B. So Google invested$2.7 billion in getting a few leading researchers back into Google, but they're going to invest$120 million in Global Opportunity Fund.

18:45So again, you see where the funds are being invested right now. The real money, all of it, or the vast majority of it, is invested in driving these models faster and better in a fierce and insane competition that nobody knows its implications, and investing some of it to say, hey, look, we're going to go to the UN and we're going to announce this global fund. That sounds amazing. But in the big scheme of things, this is cents on the dollars or not even that. in the amount of money that these companies are investing in actually driving the models forward. We have been talking a lot on this podcast on the importance of AI education and literacy for people in businesses.

19:27It is literally the number one factor of success versus failure when implementing AI in the business. It's actually not the tech. It's the ability to train people and get them to the level of knowledge they need in order to use AI in specific use cases successfully, hence generating positive ROI. The biggest question is how do you train yourself if you're the business person or people in your team, in your company, in the most effective way? I have two pieces of very exciting news for you. Number one is that I have been teaching the AI Business Transformation course since April of last year. I have been teaching it two times a month, every month since the beginning of the year, and once a month all of last year, hundreds of business people and businesses are transforming their way they're doing business because based on the information they've learned in this course.

20:23I mostly teach this course privately, meaning organizations and companies hire me to teach just their people. And about once a quarter, we do a publicly available course. Well, this once a quarter is happening again. So on October 28th of this month, we are opening another course to the public where anyone can join the courses, four sessions online, two hours each. So four weeks, two hours every single week with me live as an instructor with one hour a week in addition for you to come and ask questions in between based on the homework or things you learned or things you didn't understand. It's a very detailed, comprehensive course that will take you from wherever you are in your journey right now to a level where you understand what this technology can do for your business across multiple aspects and departments, including a detailed blueprint of how to move forward and implement this from a company-wide perspective.

21:24So if you are looking to dramatically impact the way you are using AI or your company or your department is using AI, this is an amazing opportunity for you to accelerate your knowledge and start implementing AI in everything you're doing in your business. You can find the link in the show notes. Just open your phone right now, find the link to the course, click on it, and you can sign up right now. The other piece of news is that many companies are already planning for 2025. And we are doing a special webinar on October 17th at noon Eastern. So that's a Thursday, October 17th at noon Eastern.

22:05We're doing a 2025 AI planning session webinar when we are going to cover everything you need to take into consideration when you're planning HR, budgets, technology, anything you need as far as AI implementation planning in 2025. We're going to cover all the things you can do right now. So still in Q4 of 2024 in preparation to starting 2025 with the right foot forward, but also the things you need to prepare for in 2025. If that's something that's interesting to you, find another link in the show notes that's going to take you to registration for the webinar. The webinar is absolutely free. So you're all welcome to join us.

22:47And now back to the episode. Now, another really interesting piece of news that came out this week that is related to OpenAI is that Johnny Ive, who is a legendary Apple product designer, who is behind some of the most notable products in tech history. He left Apple a while back to start his own company, and it's called Love From. And there were rumors that he's working together with Sam Altman from OpenAI on an AI product, a physical product. And this week he confirmed these rumors. So the goal of what they're working on, and I'm quoting, is to create a product that uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially destructive than the iPhone.

23:31That's it. They didn't mention what it's going to be. They didn't mention exactly what they're working on, but it's going to be some kind of a device, probably a wearable device that you don't have to hold in your hand. So this could be glasses, this could be a pin, this could be an earbud, this could be many different things. We don't know the shape and form that it's going to take, but we know the two of the most advanced minds, one in creating products and the other one in creating usable, addicting consumer products, and the other in AI are working together on something like this. Now there's devices like this today, and we're going to talk about a few new capabilities like that that's moving forward.

24:10But Rabbit that came out and had a horrible device, there were different pins and necklaces, and they all didn't have very good success. A, because they just weren't good enough and they didn't deliver on what they were promising. But B, and that problem will continue to exist, is there's a lot of ethical questions in privacy. When somebody's wearing sunglasses and you don't know if they're recording you and analyzing you while they're talking to you, There's a big problem there. The thing that I see is that resistance is futile in this particular scenario because this is coming. How exactly are we going to figure it out?

24:46I don't know, but we will have to because I don't see a future in the near future where this doesn't exist, where everybody's wearing a device that is connected to AI that can help them analyze everything that they're seeing and take actions in the digital world that's connected to what's happening in the real world. And some of it could be really cool, like you're seeing something wearing something that you like, and you can ask what they're wearing, and you can order it online with two seconds without actually clicking or opening anything. That is cool. And there's analyzing of rocks that you find that are interesting, or identifying animals or plants, or knowing how to navigate in a city you've never been to, or talking to people in the language you don't understand.

25:24Again, there's a lot of beneficial things to it, but there's a lot of really bad things that can be done with it. And we have to find a way, again, as a society to deal with that. But again, whether we're ready or not, these products are coming. And to continue in that thought, Meta just unveiled its Orion augmented reality glasses prototype in their Meta Connect event this past week. So Meta had a huge event. We're going to talk a lot about different announcements that they made. But the coolest stuff, and again, the most exciting and troubling stuff that they announced is this new pair of glasses.

25:59So as Meta has this partnership with Ray-Ban, when they already released consumer grade glasses that has a camera and a microphone, and you can do different things with it. But this is a whole different kind of animal. And it's worth going and watching the demos of Orion from the Meta announcement. It's very cool. It knows how to do eye tracking and hand tracking and voice control. and there's like this cool thing, wrist user interface where you can type out your wrist to do things. And it comes with its own set of AI features and relatively small batteries. Right now, this thing costs a fortune.

26:34So Meta's Reality Labs, which is the developer behind this thing, has lost$16 billion in 2023. That's obviously not the only thing that they've developed, but it tells you how much money goes to the development of this. And I think one of the challenges is going to be how do you make this thing, which is amazing in some of its capabilities, in a cost or a price that people will be willing to pay. But the other questions are all the questions that I asked earlier. What does it mean to society? How do we live in a world where everybody's recording everything all the time and analyzing with AI everything all the time?

27:09As I mentioned earlier, that's where we're going. Start thinking about it. If you have any ideas, raise your voice and let's try to figure it out together. Now, the other thing that Meta announced this week, surprisingly, roughly at the same time that OpenAI announced their advanced voice mode is that you'll be able to communicate with Meta AI using your voice and getting answered by different voices. Some of these voices are AI voices, but some of these voices are voices that they licensed from specific celebrities, such as Judi Dench and Kristen Bell and John Cena and Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael He.