So recently, we’ve seen a lot of fund raising from the top contenders like OpenAI and Anthropic. They will drop beta functionality or demo and not release features, likely in the interest of generating buzz and investment. OpenAI released advanced voice features, but it was not quite like the demo. it doesn’t sing and there aren’t any vision features as shown in the demo. Gemini released notebookLM and the big hit there was the podcast generation. This is really great for lazy people who don’t have time to sit and focus on a document. Rather, they can have friendly banter about it that summarizes the document subject matter. It’s a really easy way to digest content. Anthropic recently released Claude computer-use where Claude can be given the ability to move a mouse and click on a computer screen. It’s like Christmas for AI geeks. It feels like Gandalf visiting the Shire sharing his gifts of magic and wonder. Here’s a fun experiment I did with advanced voice. There’s no physical tongue for it to get tongue twisted, so I thought this was interesting.

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have also both released open letters, basically IMO to get media attention and generate more funding. Funding not only for compute but looking at the massive energy requirements to feed this compute. The amount of power needed does not exist today, so in order to raise funding to build this compute and energy, they extol the virtues and wonders that AI can bestow on society as well as warn of the need for alignment – for AI to align with human values and principles. I prefer Mr. Amodei’s letter as it seems to be more thoughtful. The “gifts” that they’ve been releasing to the public seem like a lot of fun and even have some solid value, but they don’t seem to be paradigm-shifting things yet like curing cancer or designing genes safely or curing things like depression or dementia.

The computer-use release seems to show potential though. If it had stronger strategy chain operations, it could be very powerful. I had it enter description fields on forms in a DAM and it seemed to work pretty well. I can imagine someone automating a very tedious part of their job with this. For fun, I had Claude play with Firefly by asking what it thought it would look like if it was a human and even seeing what it might want to create. So it’s AI drawing with AI…

With some refinement, maybe you can have it performs tasks that might have otherwise been delegated to a personal assistant. I can see Apple Intelligence having the AI use an iPhone as long as proper safeguards and checks are put in place. Or Google Chrome performing as a personal assistant or agent with access to your browser tabs. But is this why these companies need billions (trillions?) of dollars of funding? What else can equate to a trillion dollars of value? And does this mean my electricity bill is going to get more expensive in the future! How can AI help with that?? I don’t have the answer. I’m just a non-artificial intelligence.