LLM Links, 8/8

Ethan Mollick on voice interaction with LLMs; another pseudo-acquisition; would you like to speak with an ai clone of me?; a robot factory worker; and a robot dentist

Ethan Mollick writes,

Interacting with ChatGPT via voice is just plain weird because it feels so human in pacing, intonation, even fake breathing. It is capable of a wide range of simulated emotions, because it isn’t just triggering a recording, instead, the system is apparently fully multimodal in outputs and inputs, taking in and producing sounds in the same way older generations of LLMs took in and produced text.

He also points out that it has low latency and can handle interruptions.

TechCrunch reports,

In a big move, Character.AI co-founder and CEO Noam Shazeer is returning to Google after leaving the company in October 2021 to found the a16z-backed chatbot startup. …

Character.AI co-founder Daniel De Freitas is also joining Google with some other employees from the startup. Dominic Perella, Character.AI’s general counsel, is becoming an interim CEO at the startup. The company noted that most of the staff is staying at Character.AI.

Pointer from Alexander Kruel. As with Microsoft’s pseudo-acquisition of Inflection, Google will pay a licensing fee to keep Character’s shareholders quiet. And we assume that the goal similarly is to keep anti-trust folks quiet.

Would you want to have a conversation with an ai clone of Arnold Kling? Check out Delphi to see what I am talking about.

I am working on an Arnold Kling clone. It takes work to make this clone, and it will take a lot more work to tune it. It will not have me appear in video (maybe I can figure out how to do that?), but you can text message my clone or have a voice call with my voice.

So far, I have only tested it with queries about economics. On other subjects, I wouldn’t surprise me if it goes off the rails.

I think that in order for you to access my clone, I have to invite you be email. Let me know in the comments if you want to try it out.

Another new AI on the block is Figure02. It is a humanoid robot. I probably would be more interested in how well it takes instructions than in its mechanical characteristics.

Pointer from Alexander Kruel, who also points to a robot preparing a dental patient for a crown. I still make my bet on these sorts of specialized robots will be more practical than a generic humanoid robot. But there is room for both.

Looking at Delphi’s clones and the latest robots, I go with Tyler Cowen’s trademarked phrase: It’s happening.

substacks referenced above:

@

Links for 2024-08-06

@

Links for 2024-08-04

@

On speaking to AI