Google DeepMind on AI Assistants

The Reasons You'll Need an AI Assistant—Even if You Don't Want One

We are witnessing the emergence of agentic and ubiquitous AI systems that will reshape the digital world. We will see vastly more machine content than human content: nothing will be comprehensible without a machine interpreting it for us. By machines, for machines is the new paradigm.

Is AI the "Cure for Male Loneliness"?

While considering the potential risks and implications of OpenAI releasing an AI voice that appears designed to draw people in, I found an interesting r/artificialinteligence Reddit thread of people sharing their preference for talking with AI over other humans.

AI systems are discovering a shared model of the world. It's called "reality."

A recent paper entitled The Platonic Representation Hypothesis supports the idea that widespread use of singular algorithms might actually be simplifying hte world. Large-scale AI models, such as GPT-4, are all starting to learn the same representations of human digitized reality.

A personal assistant for everyone has been a goal in AI since, well, forever. When we first went deep into this topic in 2016 we came to a few conclusions:

Everything rests on a new model for privacy. It's not enough for users to click a set of terms and conditions on what they offer up to the AI, it's about having some insight and sense for how and why the AI nudges them in a particular direction or other. This is a hard problem to solve for many technical and commercial reasons.
An ecosystem of people and their assistants will create a new kind of complexity—for example, more gaming of pricing online, or the potential for a more chaotic information sphere as assistants "talk" with assistants. Inequality can arise in new places: for example, cohort-based dynamic pricing that is difficult or impossible to detect.
It will be a challenge to calibrate an assistant to be helpful over the long run. An overly "loyal" assistant, that never challenges or helps a user redirect to more productive or safer routes at the expense of their stated short term goal, would spell trouble for users and, potentially, for their real-life friends and connections.

Today, these issues are more visible than ever. The critical intersection in the complex Venn diagram—balancing a minimum viable business model with privacy, profit, and trust—remains unresolved. Researchers have documented intricate online collusion among various instances of Generative AI. And it's still uncertain how much people will trust and follow advice from AI, even when they recognize it might be in their best interest.

Today, I think AI assistants will be essential tools, and here's why: the contemporary information sphere is simply overwhelming for humans. We are inundated with excessive information that is often of poor quality and not suited for effective decision-making. Additionally, a substantial portion of this information is generated by machines, primarily intended to trigger responses from other machines.

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