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Last week, while answering a question about the energy consumed by artificial intelligence models, OpenAI’s Sam Altman countered by explaining how much energy is consumed by a human. “It takes, like, 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took, like, the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to, like, figure out science and whatever to produce you, and then you took whatever, you know, you took. The fair comparison is, if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question, versus a human?” This answer made me think that some humans might need to put a little more energy into their opinions before they speak them out loud. It made The Atlantic’s (Gift Article) Mateo Wong ask whether Sam Altman Is Losing His Grip on Humanity.
+ The question of whether or not humans (megatech CEOs in particular) have lost their grip on humanity seems too obvious and depressing a place to start this edition. Instead, let’s focus on a less settled question. How much humanity can computers develop? One place where that question is being asked is in the homes of people like Jan Worrell, older humans who are getting some computer companionship. In the case of the 85-year-old Worrell, who is determined to live alone in her own home as she ages, the companion is a robot called ElliQ. “A few thousand ElliQs have been shipped to seniors across the United States since 2023, which means some of the first people living alongside artificially intelligent robots are octogenarians who came into a world without color television. The robots are available for purchase from the Israeli start-up Intuition Robotics, but so far they have mostly been provided to older adults by nonprofits and state health departments as an experiment in combating loneliness. As A.I. works its way deeper into daily life, ElliQ is designed for the most human act of all: to become a roommate, a friend, a partner. ‘A robot with soul,’ the company’s founder sometimes said.” With an aging and increasingly isolated American population, the question of how much soul ElliQ can show is a pressing issue. And you, like Jan Worrell, might be surprised at the answer. The always must-read Eli Saslow in the NYT (Gift Article): To Stay in Her Home, She Let In an AI Robot. (It went better than it would have if she had let in an AI CEO…)
