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- 🤖 Hunting aliens and reaching the mythical inbox zero
Good morning and welcome to the latest edition of neonpulse!
Here's what we have for you today:
OpenAI is not impressed with ChatGPT
Reaching the mythical inbox zero
NASA is hunting for aliens with A.I.
OpenAI is not impressed
While ChatGPT has been busy becoming a worldwide sensation, gaining over 100 million users in the first 60 days, the team behind the product can’t seem to figure out the hype.
"It's been overwhelming, honestly," a member of OpenAI's team told MIT Technology Review. "I would love to understand what's driving all of this virality. Honestly, we don't understand,"
Even CEO Sam Altman doesn’t seem impressed, calling ChatGPT a "terrible product" on more than one occasion.
Which is an interesting take, considering how quickly the technology has been adopted and integrated into the largest tech products in the world, from Microsoft’s search engine Bing, to Salesforce’s flagship CRM, to everyone’s favorite social media platform Snapchat.
One possible explanation for the lackluster response from the team is familiarity with the product, with policy researcher Sandhini Agarwal musing that “because we work on these models so much, we forget how surprising they can be for the outside world sometimes."
Yet I think the real reason behind OpenAI’s reaction is because of how limited ChatGPT really is, a simple narrow-AI product that pales in comparison to the potential of what A.I. could become once we reach Artificial General Intelligence.
Artificial General Intelligence is what we’ve become accustomed to seeing in sci-fi movies, an A.I. of unlimited intelligence that’s capable of performing any task that a human is capable of.
This is the real goal of OpenAI, which Altman believes will transform the world in ways we can’t yet imagine, with ChatGPT just being a stepping stone along the way.
“If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility.”
Reaching inbox zero
Legend has it that there was once a mythical time where everyone had the luxury of responding to each and every email that graced their inbox, and the people of the world lived in peace and harmony.
Yet the world we find ourselves in today is quite different, with a seemingly never ending barrage of emails that make it seemingly impossible to read and respond to every single one.
But fear not, as a company founded by former Google executives has recently introduced A.I. tech into their magical email service, bringing hope that we may once again reach the promise land of inbox zero.
Shortwave, which was founded in 2022, has embraced ChatGPT with open arms, infusing the technology into their email service and allowing you to once again take control over your inbox.
Now, with the click of a button, Shortwave’s AI-powered summary feature creates instant summaries of tediously long emails, allowing you to extract the key points without burning hours of your precious time.
AI summary feature
“The new capabilities of large language models have swung the door wide open for new ways to interact with your inbox. At Shortwave, we aim to pave the way towards an AI-enabled email future,” the company said in a blog post.
And while summaries is the first A.I. feature included in the tool, the company has plans to introduce more AI-powered functionality in the near future, including a smart composing feature and a smart-search feature.
Early users of the tool have reported saving between 2-3 hours a week using the summary feature, giving us hope that Shortwave may prove to be our inbox knight in shining armor.
The product is free for basic use, and the company also has a $9 per month plan for power users along with custom plans for larger teams.
You can check out their website here and you can see an demo of the AI summary feature on YouTube here.
Hunting aliens with A.I.
People have started to use A.I. for all sorts of fun things, from creating digital lovers to writing their homework, but one group of researchers has come up with what is, without a doubt, the coolest use case of A.I. imaginable…
Hunting for aliens.
In a study titled “Orbit-to-ground framework to decode and predict bio-signature patterns in terrestrial analogues,” a team of NASA researchers has put together a way to use artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to detect microbial life on Mars.
“In the search for biosignatures on Mars, there is an abundance of data from orbiters and rovers to characterize global and regional habitability, but much less information is available at the scales and resolutions of microbial habitats and biosignatures,” said the study.
NASA HiRISE Camera
Because artificial intelligence–machine learning models have already successfully identified geological features on Mars with that have a high likelihood of containing biological life, NASA can now selectively deploy future drone flights to these areas in order to search for signs of life.
This data would allow researchers to determine if there were recognizable and predictable patterns of biological life on the planet, which would lead to an improved ability to seek out life on planets outside our solar system.
So is there life on other planets?
You can check out a 1 minute clip containing Elon Musk’s take on whether aliens exist (and whether he himself is an alien) on YouTube here.
And now your moment of zen
That’s all for today folks!
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