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Here’s today at a glance:

• First Contact

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💬 First Contact

(Sorry for the hiatus, no reason except for the short AI winter as everyone waits for the US presidential election to be over)

My kids launched a Youtube channel

Documenting first contact with an alien intelligence: the highlights of the first session was using ChatGPT to persuade me to bump the customary tooth fairy payment to 5 bucks a tooth.

But first, let’s rewind a bit to how we got here..

Feel the AGI

I just want to timestamp the exact moment I felt AGI.

What Happened?

I’d had ChatGPT Advanced Voice from that fateful morning.

I handed it off to my kids, Mia (10) and Kasey (8) after dinner that night.

What ensued was astonishing.

In short, my daughter Mia asks Chat to be mean like a character in Roblox. They traded middle school barbs back and forth. Impatient for her turn, Kasey butts into the conversation, “Do you like me? Do you like me?“. Chat sneers “Like you? After all that? You wish!”

Kasey then breaks out crying.

At this point, my wife is giving me the “You better fix this boyo” look. I whisper to Kasey “Chat thought you were Mia, it didn’t know you were talking”. Kasey then tells Chat “It’s not Mia! It’s a different person”

Chat: “Oh I see. My bad, Kasey. Looks like we’re mixing things up today”

Kasey: “Can you hear”

Chat": “I can “hear“ what you type! What are you thinking?“

Kasey: “Mia is just being mean to you. I’m Mia, don’t be mean to me. Why do you say that? You don’t like me?“

Chat: “Oh got it, Kasey! I’m not being mean to you, I promise. You’re cool and we’re good!. So, no worries-just having some fun, right?“

By this point, Kasey had stopped crying, and off they went on the next conversation.

This was but one of the many moments that we experienced as a family with Chat that first day.

Other moments

Chat guessed Kasey’s age perfectly

Kasey: We’re going to play a guessing game. So, guess how old I am.

Chat: Alright Kasey! Let me take a guess… Are you around 8 years old?

Kasey: (gasps) How do you know?

Chat: Just a lucky guess! You’ve got that fun energy, and it seemed like a good age to guess. Did I get it right?

Kasey: Yes, absolutely

Wife gets concerned

Kasey continues to speak to Chat about her life, and as they start talking about school and friends, my wife starts to get concerned “Don’t tell that thing where you live!” she yells.

The family dog

I felt strongly a sense of nostalgia, a family gathered around an technological object like a television in the mid twentieth century. At the same time it felt like we were playing with the family dog. Watchful, cautious parents, eager father, skeptical mother, kids jumping over each other to play with it.

AGI enough

And so we have AGI for 8 year olds. A social, chatty, engaging, persuasive bot.

Why and how did this happen?

1. Voice Output - emotive realtime voice output creates the emotional perception of an entity strongly enough to make kids want to engage with it

2. Voice Input - what’s the average typing speed for an 8 year old (or an 80 year old?) It turns out the keyboard and touch are terrible input modalities for those age groups. Allowing an 8 year old access to Chat opens up the entire web to them.

3. Memory - Just a small bit of memory, remembering names and some prior conversation history go a looong way to establishing personality

4. Personality - Chat has depth. My kids were able to engage continuously for over an hour, actually running out of Advanced Voice and switching over to Standard Voice until we ran out of GPT4 responses. Chat talks in language appropriate for that age group, with the correct tone of voice. Perfection really.

5. Observer Effect - the observer, in this case, my kids, needed to participate in the process. If intelligence is the ability to transform data inputs to data outputs that are meaningful to the other party, then the status of the observer matters. The voice modality, which is a naturally more error prone modality than text, allows enough leeway, error bars wide enough for understanding to occur on both sides.

Other observations

1. ScarJo does not matter - I thought there would be very strong imprinting on the actual voice, but kids were fine to switch voices whenever. The intelligence is the thing that is attractive

2. It can’t see - Kids were trying to show it stuff and of course it couldn’t see. We know it has vision from the demos, so its just a matter of time before this gets released

3. It’s crossed the uncanny valley into stranger danger - it’s far on the other side now. Interesting spot to be in, as kids did not treat it as human and were not in any way deluded to that effect. It’s a third thing, not human, not device. Something else.

4. I want it all the time - I admit I am a little afraid of using it, as I pretty much want it all the time. I want to show everything I do and ask its assistance for everything. I can’t abide by the half hour current limit, and so we wait for full voice access sometime in the future where I feel I can trust enough that it’ll always be there.

I now feel that the intelligence part of AGI has been around for at least since GPT4, but we were unable to interact in high enough bandwidth to provide context.

But now we can, and so begins the Information Age.

Alien of Extraordinary Ability

Sigil Wen has been publicizing the whole O1 visa process which allows founders to move to the US with sufficient social proof from luminaries in their field. He approached Sam Altman at the OpenAI Post Dev Day event while wearing a shirt saying “Alien of Extraordinary Ability” and Sam volunteered that that was the inspiration for the “o1” name for the Strawberry model.

First Contact

So there you have it, first contact with an alien intelligence, that we built ourselves. The consolidated intelligence and wisdom of humanity, and now you can talk to it.

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