Your thoughts shape your reality, whether you realise it or not. Henry Ford famously said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.” While this statement encapsulates profound truth and wisdom, here come AI companies trying their best to control your thoughts, feelings, and how you navigate in this present reality.
A general belief is that humans have an inner voice, an internal dialogue that helps in decision-making – the ‘I think, therefore, I am’ ideology.
Now, with AI in the picture, many are bound to turn to it for advice on relationships, finances, health, and career development. Simply put, AI is getting louder as the third voice, besides the external voices of the peers and our inner voice. Now, you can actually talk to your AI friend (real, not imaginary) for $99.
Recently, OpenAI rolled out its advanced voice feature in ChatGPT to selected users, and the response has been very positive. “I spent an hour having an in-depth, zero-latency conversation about molecular biology with ChatGPT using the new voice mode while driving yesterday,” said Andrew Mayne, the founder of Interdimensional AI.
The OpenAI voice feature can sing, count numbers quickly, beatbox, help you practice dialogues, tell stories, and more. Overall, it’s like having a super knowledgeable friend.
Meanwhile, Meta recently launched AI Studio powered by the company’s latest model, Llama 3.1. This platform allows anyone to create and discover AI characters and enables creators to build AI as an extension of themselves to reach more fans.
Users can create an AI that teaches them how to cook, assists with Instagram captions, and generates memes to entertain friends—the possibilities are endless. This will definitely lead to more human-AI conversations.
Not only this, Meta already knows what we think and like. It is well-known that Meta employs machine learning to predict the kind of content users prefer. With the advent of AI agents, they will have an even greater control over our thoughts and feelings.
Previously, Meta used Llama 2 for personalization and recommendations, as revealed by Amey Porobo Dharwadker, AI engineer at Meta, in an exclusive interview with AIM.
Meanwhile, Google has also entered the personal AI agents market. The tech giant recently hired the co-founders of Character.AI, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, along with several other key team members.
Character.AI allows users to create their own chatbots, defining their personalities, traits, and backstories. These characters can be based on real people, fictional characters, or entirely new creations. Users can also chat with a variety of characters, including celebrities, and historical and fictional figures.
Now, with AI offering opinions to humans, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore this third voice, the ‘AI voice’, that might eventually evolve into the AGI voice – who knows?
What about the Inner Voice?
AI is permeating our inner voice as well. Neuralink has successfully implanted its device in a second patient, designed to enable paralyzed individuals to use digital devices solely through thinking. Elon Musk revealed this in a recent podcast with Lex Fridman.
He further said that in the second implant there are 400 electrodes which are providing signals. Neuralink on its website states that its implant uses 1,024 electrodes.
“I don’t want to jinx it, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant. There’s a lot of signal and many electrodes, it’s working very well. In a few years, it’s going to be gigantic because we’ll dramatically increase the number of electrodes,” said Musk.
He added that by the end of this year, the company is planning to have 10 Neuralink implants depending on the regulatory approval.
“The long-term aspiration of Neuralink is to improve the AI-human symbiosis by increasing the bandwidth of the communication,” said Musk, explaining that if humans are too slow, AI is simply going to get bored waiting for you to spill out a few words. “If the AI can communicate at terabits per second and you’re communicating at, you know, bits per second, it’s like talking to a tree,” quipped Musk.
Musk further said that Neuralink might help with AI safety as well. “I think maybe within the next year or two, someone with a Neuralink implant will be able to outperform a pro gamer because the reaction time would be faster,” said Musk.
Noland Arbaugh, a 30-year-old man who became the first human to receive a Neuralink brain implant. Arbaugh now browses the web, plays computer games, and performs tasks that were previously impossible for him.
Apart from Neuralink, Neurotech startup Synchron recently announced that it has connected its brain implant to Apple’s Vision Pro headset. This breakthrough enables patients with limited physical mobility to control the device using only their thoughts.
Synchron is developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) designed to help patients with paralysis operate technology, such as smartphones and computers, with their minds. The company has implanted its BCI in six patients in the US and four in Australia. As these technologies continue to evolve, the third voice of AI will only grow stronger, reshaping our reality in unimaginable ways. Meta AI chief Yann Lecun believes that it is already happening, and stated: “AI platforms will control what everybody sees.”
