He used to own an office supply business. He sold it to a large office supply company but continues to manage it under it's previous (smaller company) name.
I use it quite often both tho barely scratching the surface of its functionality. I primarily use if for basically upgraded search tasks. For example when travelling, I will ask it to prepare for me an itinerary for x number of days for whatever city we'll be visiting to include entertainment, arts/culture, food, drink, etc and voila....done and very well done at that. I did it for several cities on our Nov/Dec trip to Europe and the time savings was huge and the results were top notch. From there a very easy matter to have it plugged into your calendar/planner and make reservations for flights, hotels, cars, meals, etc Another example, my daughter is soon to begin her 4th year of med school and is deep into prep for a critical medical licensing exam and her time is at a premium between studying and doing her hospital rotations. I'm always on her to eat well, be her best self to prepare for her exam and she's always telling me she has no time and eats poorly. I asked it to prepare a healthy daily food plan for 2 weeks of meals, along with basic recipes and a grocery shopping list. BOOM! Done in the blink of an eye. Imagine having it integrated in to your Instacart account and boom.....2 weeks of meal planning, recipe searching and grocery shopping done in an instant and delivered to your door. They have smart fridges now that can take and maintain inventory and tell your shopping app what you have on hand versus need to purchase without moving from the couch. Even with these simple examples it's easy to see the productivity enhancements available as usage scales up. Still very much a newbie, I just use the free version of Google's Bard/Gemini. I don't have any apps integrated as yet e.g., calendar, spreadsheets, phone, contacts, email, Instacart, Amazon, etc tho it is becoming more easily done and with more apps designed for integration. The wife uses the premium version of ChapGPT regularly for her blog/on-line publishing business to research, write content, generate images, etc. Imagine if you had all the accumulated learning and discovery ever developed over the recorded history of mankind available to assist you to answer any question or solve any problem that may pop up at your fingertips, 24/7 at your convenience available to you at light speed...you do. It's right here ==> https://gemini.google.com/app I encourage everybody to play around with it, you'll quickly see how it can be very helpful in many areas of your life. Good luck and have fun
I'm almost finished with a book "The Age of AI" co-authored by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttonlocher. No doubt 3 pretty big thinkers. The book provides a primer of the impact of AI on society from a global perspective. It's a kinda dry read, but helpful to me in trying to give myself some perspective on the thing, it was eye opening and thought provoking to say the least. I've always put Schmidt in my group of "smartest guys in the room" and I always listen to what he has to say and of course Kissinger's views on global security implications is always of note. One of the most profound things that I've heard on the topic is Schmidt's interview on CNBC recently. He said, " The arrival on Earth of a non-human intelligence is a big deal....it is here, it's AI and it's been under-hyped." Something to think about.....
I'm not thrilled with the rapid advancement of AI. While there are a multitude of positive impacts it could have... I'm constantly drawn back to all the "bad apples" in this world, and have to consider the massive harm that can also be done by these things. It's basically impossible to believe anyone you see or hear on video since deep fake technology is almost to the point of being undetectable by a human eye or ear.
Yep, it's clear that the pace of the roll-out is gonna run away from our ability to put up any "guard rails" even on a national level much less a global perspective. While I am a strong advocate for limited government and minimal regulation, in my view anyway the need for some guardrails here is critical. The authors of the book argue that the only meaningful "rules" must be international in scope not unlike WMD arms agreements. The notion being the unbridled proliferation of AI will compel every nation state into an arms race like no other....we may already be there tho the most dangerous applications, e.g., autonomous weapons systems, still lag a bit. No worries tho, I have great confidence in this current crop of political leaders and the crack group of legislators we've sent to Washington to craft an effective response to keep the world safe.
Scott, not to worry! It has just occurred to me that we have nothing to fear from the "black hat AI" as we can always count on the "white hat AI" to defend our interests and maintain world order. Only half-joking here as it would seem that that is the inevitable path on some level If, as it seems, that advanced AI will be able to posit solutions to problems that humans have thus far been incapable of solving, does it not stand to reason then that they will also create problems that are beyond our reach? That being the case, to whom can we turn for solutions?
Terry, what scares me most is listening to the groups who profess to be the "police" of AI faking tech. They say they are both cat and mouse. They have to create and maintain the best faking AI, to be able to detect the best faking AI. Um... doesn't that sound like giving the fox the keys to the henhouse and trusting he'll not poach anything himself??? Expand that to all the versions of AI and you get my continued skepticism about this genie that's already out of the bottle.
Still on an AI kick....currently reading "The Coming Wave - Technology, Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma" by Mustafa Suleyman. He's currently head of AI at Microsoft and founded Deepmind which was acquired by Google as one of the centerpieces of their AI efforts. By all accounts, one of the "wisemen" and power players in the AI world. Thus far, his message seems a little more alarmist than the others I've read. He speaks to the inevitability of AI ubiquity and omnipotence if left unchecked, suggesting the need for meaningful international cooperation is more critical than even that from the nuclear threat arguing that it's really hard to source materials, build, deploy and activate a thermonuclear weapon from a laptop. Devastating AI unchecked.....not so much. Just to put things in perspective.....there are estimated to be around 86 billion neurons in the human brain. Very rough estimate of 390 billion pages in every book ever published in the history of mankind. The largest AI model, as of June 2024, is estimated to have around 174 trillion parameters upon which it has been trained. So...here we are, the current AI top-of-the-line model standard for the training sources/data inputs/compute power/data is 500 times greater than all the pages of all the books ever published in the history of the world. And....the compute power, processing speed, learning efficiency continues to increase exponentially while the cost/parameter continues to decrease thereby making this incredible tool ever more powerful and ever more accessible to more people on more applications and more devices every single day. Synthetic biology, 3D-Bio printing, gene editing, molecular architecture, etc....consider the possibilities. Hmmmm, a big question is will it solve more problems that confront the human race than it creates? Imo, that depends on the degree of collaboration within every element of our global society