One question that has been nagging me for the past year and a bit since the launch chatGPT is: If AI can do it, why does my phone’s Assistant still perform so poorly?
The gulf between the two widened even more on Monday when OpenAI released a new model named GPT-4o (the ‘o’ is for Omni) which allows the chatbot to create and understand audio, video and still images.
It is a fascinating system. The system can carry on long conversations about the world as seen through a camera, translate between two languages in real time, and even make appropriate jokes.
It is inevitable that the shine will wear off once users discover the flaws in the system. However, its creators remain more confident than ever. Sam Altman of OpenAI, who founded GPT-4 in 2023, said that it was “still flawed, still limited and it seems more impressive when you first use it than after spending more time with it”.
The launch of its successor a year later was a complete success. Along with a statement that we will be able to “use computers to do more than ever before”, Altman also tweeted one word: “her”, which is the title of the 2013 Spike Jonze movie depicting a young man falling in love his AI assistant.
GPT-4o has come closer to the science fiction scenario than ever before. GPT-4o is closer than ever to that science fiction scenario.
The new system, on the other hand, can be operated directly through speech, without relying on any models. This allows it to respond faster and to recognize quirks like tone of voice.
It’s not quite an AI assistant. It can answer queries and do knowledge work but not yet act on requests. OpenAI’s GPT Store could be helpful, but for GPT to truly integrate itself into the lives of ordinary people, it needs Siri.
Apple seems to agree. Apple has been in discussions with AI developers including Google and OpenAI since March to license their technology for its AI assistant. Over the weekend, “neared a deal” with OpenAI. Bloomberg broke the story, stating that the deal will allow Apple to include ChatGPT with the other AI features they plan to announce at their annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
ChatGPT and Siri are unlikely to be able to replace each other completely. Apple does not want to embed another company’s tech too deeply into its devices. The scars of the painful switch from Google Maps to Apple Maps a decade ago are still visible. But it is also because the best AI systems can’t handle the demands of an assistant.
Predictability is more important than generic intelligence when it comes to AI systems that can perform tasks. If you don’t know what your AI will say, it’s not worth it to have it send your friends text messages. This is a problem that some AI hardware startups like Humane and Rabbit faced when they tried to replace smartphones with AI.
It is slightly more difficult to train an AI system that will always give the correct answer to a question, even if it’s different every time, than to make one that can respond to questions in a variety of ways. If technology keeps improving at this rate, your phone’s AI Assistant might not be so bad any longer.
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