The Official ChatGPT Mobile App Will Change How We Use AI

0:00Today on the AI Breakdown, we are digging into ChatGPT's huge announcement of their official mobile app for iOS. Before that, on the brief, Meta announces an AI chip, Apple prohibits use of ChatGPT among employees, and the New York City schools unbanned ChatGPT. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. If you're enjoying it, please like, subscribe, and share. Today we start with the hardware wars heating up. We've heard recently about a number of different companies starting to compete in the hardware space for their AI efforts, and Meta has now joined those ranks.

0:38Yesterday, the company posted this blog post, reimagining our infrastructure for the AI age. The key takeaways for their articles are their, quote, ambitious plan to build the next generation of our infrastructure backbone specifically built for AI. And they say that that includes, quote, our first generation custom silicon chip for running AI models, a new AI optimized data center design, and the second phase of our 16 ,000 GPU supercomputer for AI research. So the first thing that they announced is what they call the MTI chip or meta training and interface accelerator. According to the blog post, the chip provides, quote, greater compute power and efficiency and is customized for our internal workloads.

1:16Now, in addition to the MTIA, Meta is also introducing a new ASIC, which is specifically designed to help with video transcoding. This they're calling the MSVP, or Meta Scalable Video Processor. The MSVP is designed to help them support both, quote, the high-quality transcoding needed for video on demand, as well as the low latency and faster processing times that live streaming requires. So you can imagine that they're thinking about AI-produced AR and VR content, given how much emphasis Meta has on the Metaverse. They also discussed their next-generation data center design, as well as the second phase of their Research Supercluster, or RSC AI supercomputer.

1:52And given that we've heard about this supercomputer before, some are taking this as effectively Facebook or Meta positioning itself relative to other hardware news that's come out recently. An example of that was earlier this month when reports came out that AMD was partnering with Microsoft on its Athena project, through which it's developing custom AI chips to compete with NVIDIA. Even after a Microsoft spokesperson denied those reports, AMD's stock still went up, which suggests just how significantly AI is being seen from public market investors. Another company that public markets are watching closely to see what their AI efforts might be is, of course, Apple.

2:26The news yesterday, however, was not about some new product announcement, but that Apple has followed a number of other companies in restricting its employees' use of chat GPT. Samsung did this earlier this year, and of course the concern is that proprietary data from Apple or Samsung or whichever company makes these type of restrictions would find its way into OpenAI's training models. OpenAI, maybe in response to these types of prohibitions, did announce that the ChatGPT business version, which would be forthcoming, would be private by default, i.e. their models would not train on that proprietary data.

2:55However, that seems to be not enough of a reassurance for many companies, given the level of secrecy around these new technologies. In addition to the prohibition on ChatGPT, Apple also said that its employees could not use GitHub's Copilot, which is owned by Microsoft. Now, one revelation that's buried in this Wall Street Journal report is that Apple is apparently working on its own LLM as well. That's basically all the journal says about it, though, and it's just according to people, quote, familiar with the matter. Apple has been super cagey about its AI efforts, which leaves people to read the tea leaves, or in this case, jobs boards.

3:25A number of outlets reported yesterday that Apple has posted at least a dozen jobs relating to generative AI on its career page. Those job listings started appearing at the end of April and have been updated up to this week. Now, it's not exactly clear what these generative AI specialists would work on, but as TechCrunch writes, some of the roles focus specifically on visual generative AI applications for machine learning experts to work on, quote, visual generative modeling to power applications across computation photography, image and video editing, 3D shape and motion reconstruction, and avatar generation.

3:55Apple has its WWDC event next month, which is its developer-focused event, and people are wondering if we're going to see a little bit more about Apple's AI plans. Finally, heading the opposite direction to Apple, New York City schools have lifted their ban on ChatGPT, saying that as they've dug into it, they weren't necessarily appreciating all the upsides and benefits that ChatGPT could afford. David Banks, the head of the city's public schools, said that they had a, quote, knee-jerk fear and risk response, but they've evolved that to one of cautious exploration. In an op-ed, he wrote, The knee-jerk fear and risk overlook the potential of generative AI to support students and teachers, as well as the reality that our students are participating in and will work in a world where understanding generative AI is crucial.

4:37While initial caution was justified, it has now evolved into an exploration and careful examination of this new technology's power and risks. It sounds like part of their opinion was changed by seeing how chat GPT was used positively in the classrooms. Banks cited students at a Queen's Middle School who were, quote, debating ethical issues surrounding AI prejudice, as well as figuring out both how to ask ChatGPT questions, but then verify whether the information it was giving was true. Banks said the New York City public schools will encourage and support our educators and students as they learn about and explore this game-changing technology, while also creating a repository and community to share their findings across our schools.

5:12This to me seems like a radically smarter response to ChatGPT and other generative AI than just banning it, and a recognition that this is now a part of the future that students will be participating in. If the goal of schools is to help people prepare for that future, they can't just ignore it. Anyways, guys, that's it for the breakdown brief. If you're enjoying this, please like, subscribe, and share. And I'll be back soon with the main AI breakdown. The second phase of the ChatGPT era is here. ChatGPT has officially launched its iOS mobile app. Welcome back to the AI breakdown. When the history books are written, it's pretty clear that this phase of the AI era or the generative AI period will be started with ChatGPT's launch last November of 2022.

6:01ChatGPT showed that it wasn't just the underlying AI technology that mattered. It was also the interface. It was also the way that people interacted with that AI that really brought it from a novelty to something that was transformative in the world. And that, I think, is what makes yesterday's announcement of ChatGPT's iOS app so significant. To me, it's not just a set of features. It's a fundamentally different paradigm for ChatGPT. I'll get into a little bit more about what I mean by that, but first, let's go through the actual announcement. OpenAI's developer relations person, Logan, says the official ChatGPT app is here.

6:38It's another huge step forward in the product and comes with tons of new features. He points to what he calls a beautiful new UI and a new feature, which is voice to text. He also points to another new feature, which is the ability to search message history. Now, one of the reasons that this is such an important update is that for months, the App Store charts have been just absolutely dominated by chat GPT knockoffs or clones or basically just apps purporting to give you chat GPT like services, but in a mobile wrapper. Some of those were scams, some of those were problematic, and most importantly, none of them was an official OpenAI ChatGPT app.

7:16Even today, after this app has released, there are still something like five of these knockoffs in the top 50 apps overall. Now, by and large, feedback has been very excited. And one of the things that people have discussed a lot is just how fast it feels. Developer McKay Wrigley writes, ChatGPT's iOS app is out. It's beautifully simple and crazy fast. He then shares a video to show off that speed, but in my experience, you really have to try it for yourself. Now, when it comes to the design, there has been a pretty mixed response. Linus Ekenstam tweets, The new ChatGPT designs are bland. I get that they are trying to keep things clean, but if you only have a few elements in your app, at least make sure the ones you got are ace.

7:56They have the opportunity to make one hell of a first impression, and I feel they missed. ChatGPT is a consumer product. Most people will have their first experience with AI through this app. Let's make it count. Sebastian DeWitt agrees, saying, Well, the official ChatGPT app for iOS is here. Rather disappointed to see that the design is so incredibly soulless. One of the coolest problems in design now is to make AI products humane, ethical, and approachable. Removing all soul is not the right move, in my opinion. Still, that wasn't the only take on the design. Jana Wellender writes, the new ChatGPT app is a marvel of product design.

8:33The haptics, the clean UX, the dot, not to mention whisper. Such a delightful way to interact with ChatGPT. Now I wanted to mention the haptics, the feeling that it actually vibrates in your hand. This is something that in this app feels really natural. It feels like part of the app being alive. It's something that I certainly responded to as well. And I think it is a big piece of the app design that shouldn't be dismissed. Personally, I think that OpenAI was trying to create a design that got out of the way, and I think they accomplished that. The marvel of ChatGPT isn't that it's pretty. The marvel is the world of information that it unlocks access to.

9:06Here we have to talk for a moment about Whisper, though. As you heard, the official ChatGPT app gives you the ability not just to type your query, but to actually speak it. And this doesn't use Apple's voice-to-text model. It instead uses Whisper, which is proprietary to OpenAI. Whisper, they write, is an automatic speech recognition system trained on 680 ,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web. So far, people have responded incredibly positively to Whisper. The AI solopreneur writes, The new feature perfectly suits mobile use and leverages OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition model.

9:38It's like Siri but on steroids, 10x. Mies Basayi did his own test and writes, Whoa, ChatGPT app can understand more languages than iOS keyboard in dictation mode and can reply back in the same. Testing in six languages and it understands well. Nice use of OpenAI Whisper. Make search even more convenient for a global audience. I also found for whatever it's worth in my queries that Whisper was extremely good at understanding exactly what I said. And so in this way, this makes this even more directly competitive and frankly a threat to Apple than ChatGPT already was. What about the things that this doesn't have?

10:10Obviously, if you've been paying attention, one of the things that people are most excited about with ChatGPT right now is the new suite of plugins. Well, ChatGPT iOS app doesn't have those plugins built in natively. To me, at least initially, that feels okay. It keeps the experience really clean, and a lot of the plugins so far are perhaps for things that are more natively suited to that desktop type of experience. It's things like research, travel planning, stuff that isn't necessarily exactly right for a quick on-the-go type of query. However, as some have pointed out, there is a way to access plugins even on the mobile app, which is just resuming an old chat that's already using them.

10:45Brex AI lead Pietro Chirano even figured out a way to hack the system so that he could use his designer plugin to build a website from his mobile app. How useful these very simple landing pages are, I think is in the eye of the beholder, but the fact that he can do it from his phone using only ChatGPT is still pretty cool. Now, one of the reasons that this has people so excited is just the number of new people that it opens up access to. Something like 86 % of the world owns a smartphone at this point, and many of them use that as their primary internet connected device. That's billions of people that ChatGPT's desktop app wasn't going to be able to serve.

11:17Now, so far, this app is just for iOS, not for Android, and the official app is only available in the U.S. This is much to the chagrin, of course, of Android users and people outside the U.S., but you have to believe that it's not going to be long before these apps roll out more broadly. Still, the thing that I wanted to focus on for just a moment is how I think that we are, even now, as excited as people are about this, underestimating just how different the experience of having this type of AI in our pockets will be as we're going about living our daily lives on the go. It's amazing to be able to preemptively plan and research things, but think about what it'll mean when you can just do things on the fly.

11:54Later this year, my wife and I will be in Paris, and I imagine being able to pull up ChatGPT and ask based on where I was standing at that point in the city, which restaurants were nearby that had some connection to the city's literary past or something like that. ChatGPT could become a tour guide, giving me information about wherever I was. And this is only going to increase as browsing becomes more integrated, which it should over the next few weeks. This is just a basic type of mobile use case that while available on the web will be fundamentally different, I feel, when we're using it on mobile, but I guarantee there's going to be so many more things like that where people realize that mobile really is different when it comes to using these AI tools.

12:28Now, Sean Perry here yesterday made what I think is just about the safest bet in the history of the world. ChatGPT app will be number one in the App Store within 24 hours, and sure enough, it is. In fact, I'm still seeing something like five apps that are in the top 50, even though they're ChatGPT knockoffs. So friends, as I said at the beginning of this video, I believe that we are now entering era two, the mobile era of ChatGPT. While it may not be the same zero to one shift that last November's introduction of ChatGPT in general introduced, I do believe that it's going to surprise us with just how different the mobile applications of this type of AI can be.

13:00I'm certainly excited to have this in my pocket and to explore what it helps me do that I can't even imagine yet. And I'll be looking forward to sharing what I find as I do. That's it for today's AI Breakdown. If you're enjoying this, please like, subscribe, and share. Please also go check out the AI Breakdown podcast and the AI Breakdown newsletter. You can find links to both in the show notes. Until next time, peace.