AI Infiltrates the Mind

Welcome to edition #14 of the “No Longer a Nincompoop with Nofil” newsletter. I’ll be releasing at least two more premium newsletters this week barring any complications in health. Big things are happening and we need to discuss them in detail.

Here’s the tea ☕

• AI Mind reading 🧠

• The future of personalised AI 🐕

• Microsoft is flying 🚀

First Images, Now Thoughts

Back in March I wrote about how researchers from Osaka used AI to reconstruct images from what someone was seeing. This essentially opened up the possibility of one day visualising your dreams, thoughts and memories.

Now researchers from the University of Texas have gone one step further. They’ve created an AI powered system that can decode and translate your thoughts into text. Yep, mind reading is actually here.

The AI system generated the text while the participant was either listening to a story or imagining it. It generated text from someone imagining a story, something they were not seeing or hearing. Absolutely mind boggling.

It’s not perfect, but the fact that it even gets a single sentence right is truly remarkable. We’re actually witnessing the dawn of a new age of tech. The type of stuff we’ve seen in movies like Star Trek and games like Cyberpunk genuinely don’t seem so far-fetched anymore. When this gets coupled with things like Neuralink and other brain implants, I think it’s in the realm of possibility that we could see ways to download a language into your brain and speak it. Imagine you don’t pay your subscription fee for your implant and suddenly you can’t speak your second language anymore. One things for sure, the future is going to be weird.

A new friend appears

HeyPi is a new chatbot released by a company called Inflection. If you hadn’t heard of them I don’t blame you, neither had I but it turns out they’ve managed to raise over $220 million to build this new ChatGPT competitor. So is it any good? Let’s break it down.

Inflection is taking a different route with HeyPi. It’s much more personal and a lot better at the “chat” part than ChatGPT. This chatbot is designed more to be like a companion, friend or therapist you can always have ready at the touch of a button. When you use it you’ll understand what I mean but this signals a shift in how we use AI. Let me explain.

We’re at a point in time where AI is really new. If you’re reading this right now you’re earlier than most of the planet. But how will AI look like 10 years down the line, when it’s much more mainstream? Personalised. Every single person with a phone or some new wearable device will have their own, personal, private AI “companion”. Essentially an AI extension of yourself.

Imagine your AI knew everything you did; the things it could do for you would be staggering. I know some people reading this are struggling to comprehend the potential safety and privacy concerns associated with such an idea, but the reality is we are headed in this direction.

The final step after this is AI implants directly in our brains. That is the endgame and the way we’re moving now, I think it’s a very real possibility we see it in our lifetime.

Microsoft is on roids

I almost feel bad for Google. Okay that’s not true but honestly seeing the moves Microsoft is making, I can imagine why Google is shitting themselves. Microsoft is pushing Bing forward in big ways. It can now generate graphs and charts from data, can retain memory for longer conversations and answer with images and videos. But the most important update is that plugins are coming to Bing.

I’m not going to pretend that Bing is anywhere as good as ChatGPT, but if Bing, an AI that already has access to search can also access websites for you, that’s a big deal. If Microsoft can get this out to the general public before OpenAI, it’ll be a big win for them. Oh wait, Microsoft effectively owns OpenAI as well… yeah, things aren’t looking too great for Google

AMD Joins the Party, but does it even matter?

Microsoft hasn’t stopped there either, and this time they’ve even brought a friend. Microsoft has allegedly been working with AMD to create their new in-house AI chip code named “Athena”. I don’t blame them. Do you know how much it costs to run ChatGPT every single day? $700,000. Every. Single. Day. The biggest victors no one is talking about in the AI arms race is the hardware companies, the companies that provide the compute power to build and run these AI systems.

Take Nvidia for example. I don’t even have to say anything, I’ll let the numbers do the talking.

In 6 months, Nvidia’s stock price has gone up over $115. With AMD partnering with Microsoft and slowly getting into the AI chip business, I don’t see how their stock only goes in a single direction from here; up.

Tools

Photoshop + Stable Diffusion in your browser

This tool lets you not only run Stable Diffusion locally on your computer, but also edit images just like photoshop. If you don’t know, Stable Diffusion is an AI image generator. This gives you photo generation + editing in one.

Ellie AI

Ellie is an AI powered email assistant that can write emails in different tones and voices. She understands context and you can even teach her new things to reference in emails.

Perplexity AI

Perplexity is an AI powered search engine that very recently announced its first plugin as well. These companies are real competitors to the likes of Google and if they can ship these features fast and ensure they work well, their potential is massive. In the answers Perplexity provides, it also shows references for where it got its information. This style of search could very well be the future.

You can help me find tools you think I should showcase by messaging me on Twitter or emailing me :)

You can check out last weeks Reddit thread here.

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As always, Thanks for reading ❤️

Written by a human named Nofil