53 | Open AI launches the GPT store! Baidu AI Chatbot hits 100M users,, and more AI news for the week ending Jan 13th

0:00Hello and welcome to a short weekend news edition of the Leveraging AI podcast. This is Isar Maitis, your host. And like every week in AI, a lot of stuff happens. So let's get started.

0:15The first piece of news this week comes from China. Baidu, the Chinese parallel to Google, launched their chatbot called Ernie a few months ago, and they just hit a big milestone, which is 100 million users. Since they launched it in mid-late August, that means they hit 100 million users in just four months. Now, we need to remember that this chatbot, while they're claiming is as powerful as GPT-4, is censored and monitored by the Chinese government. And Baidu is one of the very few companies who actually got an approval to launch such a chatbot in China. So there's obviously a huge demand. So there's obviously a huge demand and not enough supply in China for chatbots.

0:58And with the size of the Chinese population, I expect this to be very quickly, probably the largest and most used chatbot in the world. I haven't seen anywhere an actual real comparison between Ernie and GPT-4 or any of the Western models, but I assume sometime soon, somebody will have access to both and we'll do a fair comparison. And then I promise to report that to you. This week, the world's largest tech conference took place, that CES that happens every single year this time of year in Vegas. And as you can imagine, AI was the big buzzword in more or less every single product. That includes many smart AI capabilities from manufacturers like Samsung with their smart home platform, as well as their TVs with the abilities to scale up all this D-resolution 5s into an 8K TV and stuff like that.

1:48It also included some really cool AI-based gadget such as Anura Magic Mirror that analyzes facial blood flow in order to estimate heart rate and age and stress levels and the Ruchi Smart Mattress that allows to leverage AI with sensors to align spinal cord and track your sleeping to provide better sleep. It had an anti-snore pillow that uses AI to change the pillow in order to adjust the head position, in order to fight snoring and sleep apnea. Samsung showed a big upgrade to their Bali personal assistant robot with a new design, onboard projector, and some additional fancy AI features. Asus showed off their new Rogue Phone 8 Pro that has a lot of AI capabilities, including semantic speech search, noise canceling, and a lot of other cool little gadgets.

2:44Sear Grill introduced a grill called perfecta that uses AI in order to learn how to cook steaks better, your particular steaks, and make them better and better all the time. That's pretty cool. That's something I would love to test out. A company called Holobox presented the ability to have full-sized hologram conversations over video chats. Now, this may not sound like an AI thing, but if you think about the possibilities of combining the ability to create a 3D hologram of a person together with the advanced AI capabilities and creating deepfakes together with companies like character.ai, it tells you that in the very, very near future, there are going to be services where you can meet and talk face-to-face to a person that could be a high-end out-of-your-reach business consultant or a famous individual or a celebrity or your famous artist.

3:38Whatever the case may be, you'll be able to have a face-to-face conversation with an AI avatar of them. I haven't seen anything like this, but this is just me speculating on the convergence of some of these technologies. Volkswagen, the car manufacturer, announced that they are going to integrate ChatGPT into their vehicles. So they're the first company to announce something like this, and it's going to come out in some of their vehicles in Europe in mid-2024, so in the very near future. And the idea is to provide a conversational voice assistant within the car that will be able to activate different controls within the car, but also answer general queries, probably navigation and food recommendations and stuff like that.

4:17This sounds like a very logical transition, and we're probably going to see this merge into car voice activations and voice conversation through more manufacturers in the near future. But the biggest AI story coming out of CES is probably Rabbit R1. So Rabbit R1 is a pocket AI companion. It's basically like a small phone that sells for$200 and it acts as a universal controller for different things and apps within the thing. So you can talk to it and it understands what you're going to say and it can help you launch your favorite music and shop for different things and send messages to people and so on.

4:56Rabbit, the company, said that they were expecting to sell a few hundreds of these in the show. They've opened the first batch for 10 ,000 of them and it sold within a single day. So then they opened a second batch of another 10 ,000 and that sold during the show as well. So they already have a commitment for 20 ,000 people buying these things. If you want to get your hands on one of those, the third batch is going to open sometime around the May, June timeframe of this year. Now, while this sounds really cool, and as we can understand, a lot of people want one of those, I actually think it's way overhyped.

5:29And the reason I think it's way overhyped. I expect all these capabilities to be available within our cell phones in the very near future. We know that Apple is working on that. We know that Google have said that they're going to release their small Gemini model on the Google 8 Pro. We know Samsung released some of those features on their new phones and so on. So while it's a cool device and a cool idea having an AI companion in your pocket, I think a standalone device that does just that, is just ban to fail. Where I see this going is I see AI becoming de facto the operating system for cell phones, meaning you will not operate your cell phone, at least most of the time, through tapping on the screen.

6:10You will operate your cell phone and every single app on it by having a conversation with it through a natural language discussion. And you're going to ask it just like you ask a travel agent to help you book travel. You will ask it just like you ask your friend for a recipe on something. You will ask it to answer emails for you, et cetera, et cetera. And it's going to be integrated to everything we know from cell phones today. So while Rabbit had a huge run this show, I don't anticipate Rabbit or such devices will have a big advantage in the future since they're missing a lot of the functionality that the phones have and the phones will have all the functionality that Rabbit has.

6:49This is just me analyzing what I think is coming in the near future. And obviously, we cannot pass a week without some news coming from OpenAI. So OpenAI replied to the lawsuit from New York Times. If you don't know, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for infringing copyrights when they trained on their content. The response from OpenAI included two main components. One is that they're claiming, as expected, that training AI on copyrighted material constitutes what's called fair use, meaning it's just like anybody else reading that information online. I don't know if that's going to hold in court or not.

7:30If it does, it's obviously going to set a precedent. If it doesn't, it's going to be very problematic in the future when it comes to train such models. The other thing that they said that comes to address one of the claims in the New York Times lawsuit is that regurgitating of specific exact passages out of the New York Times is a rare bug. Those of you who haven't looked at the lawsuit, there's actual segments that show ChatGPT literally copying and pasting stuff from articles into its answers. And they're claiming, as I mentioned, that it's a rare bug. I don't know if that gets them off the hook legally.

8:06I doubt it. As I mentioned last week, I don't see this resolved any other way other than OpenAI and then some other big companies paying some kind of a really big compensation to have this go away and then having relevant licensing agreements to be able to use this data. Another option is obviously companies like that, the size of Microsoft and OpenAI with the amount of money that they can raise, can actually go and buy the New York Times or a company like that. So they own the data moving forward and then they don't have to sign any licensing deals. I obviously don't know anything like this that it's happening, but it makes perfect sense.

8:42As we mentioned last week, OpenAI announced they're going to open their GPT store this week and they actually did. So the GPT store is officially live. It went live on Wednesday. those of you who don't know what GPTs are, GPTs are like mini custom versions of ChatGPT that are geared to do something very specific. You can create one on your own if you're paying the$20 a month. If not, you don't have access to the store either. By the way, regardless of GPTs, it's worth paying the$20 a month. So if you're not doing it, go ahead and do that. It's a huge difference in the value that you're getting.

9:15But already there's over 3 million custom GPTs available to users through the GPT store. That's a huge amount of them. Something a little alarming, but not surprising is that there's been a huge surge since the store launched just a couple of days ago of quote unquote girlfriend chatbots that allows you to flirt with a virtual girlfriend on chat GPT. That surge is not surprising. It's something that was totally expected, maybe not as big and not as early, but people are going to create a very huge variety of chatbots. And obviously this is an area that will probably be of high demand. Now the store itself highlights the most useful GPTs and it's going to showcase different ones weekly in order to help people find the ones they want.

10:05Obviously there's going to be a big flood of more and more of those as we move forward. OpenAI mentioned that they're going to have a revenue sharing mechanism. In that, that has not been launched yet, and they're still claiming that it's coming in Q1 based on the level of user engagement. Looking at it myself, there's already a lot of GPTs that are highly useful in doing multiple things, and right now it costs absolutely nothing to use them. So you can find well-tailored, customized solutions for multiple business and personal needs that you don't have to pay anything in order to use. As I mentioned last week, this might be the App Store moment of OpenAI and AI as a whole, meaning this may change the industry completely if this thing actually works, but only time will tell if this is a fluke like the plugins were or if this is a huge success like the App Store was.

10:59So I'll definitely keep you updated on how this thing is moving forward. Another thing that OpenAI introduced this week is ChatGPT for Teams. So far, ChatGPT was a standalone product that you can install and run with your own login, but you could not collaborate in the development of GPTs or using ChatGPT, including GPT-4, DALI, and all the other tools. And now they've introduced the ability to create a team and have an admin manage that team, which is obviously geared toward organizations. The cost of that is$25 per user per month, billed annually, or$30 a month if you bill it month to month.

11:37I definitely see more and more organizations moving into that capability because it makes perfect sense to be able to share and collaborate on the development and usage of ChatGPT and GPTs specifically. And from OpenAI to their partner, Microsoft, Microsoft made a lot of announcement in the past few weeks on upgrades to Microsoft Copilot. And now they've added the ability to analyze a screenshot. So there's a add screenshot button added to Microsoft Copilot that will take a screenshot of the screen, but then will allow you to have a conversation about what's in that screenshot. While that's a cool feature, it's not very different than the ability that existed before just to take the screenshot on your own and load it as an image like any other image and have a conversation with it.

12:22So it's a cool gimmick and it's a user friendly capability to have a conversation about what's on your screen, but not really a big improvement. But there are two very interesting pieces of news about Microsoft that's related to AI. One, Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world this week based on market cap. It's the first time they passed Apple since 2021. And it happens in obviously the wake of their huge increase in share value this past year since they launched their partnership with OpenAI and introduced Microsoft AI Copilot. As we mentioned, they're now releasing keyboards that has the Copilot button integrated into it, and those are already available in CES this week.

13:05That being said, another very interesting piece of news that I saw this week is despite the growth in Microsoft Copilot that now integrates all the capabilities of GPT-4 Turbo for free, it still does not affect the growth of ChatGPT or its revenue. So just to put things in perspective, on the App Store, there has been 2.1 million downloads so far of Microsoft Copilot versus 6.3 million of ChatGPT in the same timeframe. Also, Copilot installs is slowing down while ChatGPT's installs is growing and their revenue is growing with it. And as I mentioned, that's a little strange based on the fact that the Microsoft Copilot has the same capabilities and it's absolutely free.

13:50well to get those capabilities in the chat gpt app or their website you need to pay 20 bucks a month i must admit personally i still use chat gpt most of the time and not microsoft copilot i don't have a really good reason to explain why my gut is it's just branding and people get used to just talking about chat gpt and hence that's where people are going but i assume over time this will level off and probably copilot will take a very big share out of chat gpt just because it has the same capabilities and it's free, not to mention the fact that it integrates with all the Microsoft capabilities on your computer and on the cloud and so on.

14:27So in the long run, I definitely see a much bigger usage for Copilot, definitely on the enterprise level. And from Microsoft to a very interesting research that was done by Google testing its new medical LLM called Amy. In this test, Google took 149 actors that were playing patients that were texting live with 20 primary care doctors and with Google's Amy Medical LLM. Then these chats were analyzed by human specialist doctors and the patients themselves for quality of care across 32 different characteristics. Amy has achieved better results on 28 out of the 32 characteristics and tied the other four compared to the human doctors.

15:14So what does that tell us? It tells us that when you train an AI model on a very specific topic, it will most likely outperform humans, even when it comes to providing human care. So it's not just about the knowledge. It's also about how you approach the situation. How do you show compassion? How do you communicate effectively? And on all of these, it did either the same or better than humans. I expect the whole area of customer service, as well as human services, such as medical services to have more and more AI replacing humans. And I know you heard a lot of people say, well, it's not going to replace humans.

15:54Humans are going to use AI. I've seen AI capabilities doing outbound cold calling that is outperforming human salespeople. I've seen research on amazing results of AI doing fantastic customer service over the phone and over text. And now this research as far as providing remote medical assistant. And in all of them, the AI is doing at least as good as humans, which tells me that within the next few years, we will see less and less human call centers perform these kinds of actions as AI is going to take over. There's still probably going to be human supervisors for one of really weird or complex cases, but I think the vast majority of cases, AI is going to solve and it's going to do it better than humans with a significantly smaller investment for companies who want to provide these services.

16:44And then the last piece of news is just a weird article that I saw this week that has nothing to do with AI, but then it connected in my head to something I've been saying for a very long time, but I have not seen any research on. There was a study done that finds that humans, people can accurately discern chickens' emotions through their clucking sounds and know when they are unhappy versus when they're happy versus they're hungry. and stuff like that, 69 % of humans correctly identify the emotional context behind chickens' vocalizations. So what does that have anything to do with AI? If we can do this just based on gut and listening to chickens, I can guarantee you AI can do this much better with enough training, which leads me to the next step of the thought that I had for probably close to a year now, that the day that we'll be able to talk to our pets or at least some of the animals out there, is not that far.

17:40Because if we can look at videos of dogs or cats or animals that we have a lot of information about and a lot of videos about and see their behavior while listening to the sounds that they are making, AI will be able to make that connection and we will be able to most likely understand their language and in a slightly later phase, actually communicate back to them in their language. Now, do I know that for a fact? Absolutely not. But it just makes perfect sense to me with everything that I know about AI. So with this fun, but completely not scientifical assumption of mine, we will end the news for this week.

18:19I would really appreciate it if you pull up your phone right now and rate and review this podcast on your favorite platform, whether it's Apple or Spotify. It helps us a lot to bring the right guests in producing this. And it's going to help people like you to find this podcast that you hopefully find valuable. On Tuesday, we'll be back with another fascinating interview episode that will deep dive into a specific practical use of AI. And until then, have an amazing weekend.