Good morning. Yesterday, OpenAI started rolling out its controversial GPT-4o voice mode feature to a small number of ChatGPT Plus users. OpenAI said the feature will roll out to all Plus users in the Fall.

The company said that the lengthy gap between demo and launch was due to extensive safety testing, specifically involving “100+ external red teamers across 45 languages.”

Let us know if you have access.

— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View

In today’s newsletter:

AI for Good: Smart precision farming 

The agricultural industry is a major water user, consuming roughly 70% of available freshwater resources. 

For years, though, tech has been working alongside the industry to increase sustainable efficiencies. 

The details: In 2024, the AI in agriculture market exceeded $2 billion; researchers expect it to exceed $5 billion before the end of the decade. 

Why it matters: Researchers have found that “with proper irrigation management through effective monitoring and optimal control, water can be saved, as well as providing a reduction in other indirect costs incurred from energy use in the form of electricity or fossil fuel for pumping, for optimal cost-effectiveness.”

Still, a careful cost-benefit analysis must be kept in mind here; if the water/energy use of running these models exceeds that which is saved, it probably isn’t as sustainably impactful as it seems. 

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Now you can make your own AI on Instagram 

Meta this week announced that it is beginning to roll out AI Studio — a place for people to “create, share and discover AIs to chat with” — in the U.S. 

And so begins that circular future of non-human communication, wherein one person’s AI talks to another and reports back. Fun. 

The details: The studio, which is built on Llama 3.1, allows anyone to create AI characters, which they can then use “as extensions of themselves to reach more fans.” 

Meta’s AI Studio policy states that it’s against the rules for users to instruct their AI to disseminate hate speech, identify their AI as a licensed professional of some kind or instruct their AI to help them engage in illegal activities, including child sexual exploitation.  

This implies that the system is capable of all of these things. 

Meta at the same time scrapped its celebrity AI chatbots, according to The Information, which the company launched last year.

Microsoft shares fall despite strong earnings beat 

When Microsoft reported earnings Tuesday afternoon, the numbers looked good. 

The company reported revenue of $64.73 billion, above expectations of $64.39 billion, and earnings of $2.95 per share, also above expectations. 

The market’s reaction to Microsoft’s earnings beat here comes as investors are beginning to move away from these AI-happy, Big Tech giants which are trading at enormous price-to-earnings ratios. It highlights the import (and volatility) of investments in AI, which is running up huge bills but has yet to drive revenues to match. 

Deepwater tech analyst Gene Munster expects AI stocks to be down today on Microsoft’s cloud miss, but believes the “AI trade is intact.”

Global X analyst Tejas Dessai said that “questionable ROI around AI investments in the short term is weighing on the stock.”

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AI, AGI and the economy of Star Wars: ‘Humanity rises above the machine’ 

As it stands today, artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a fiction. And often, it seems that the groups trying so hard to make it real are heavily inspired by fiction (Sam Altman and Her, anyone?) So, I thought it would be fun and interesting to look at one example of fiction as a lens to examine what AGI might mean if it were achieved here on Earth. 

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …. 

Although a unified definition of AGI remains lacking, the droids of Star Wars have arguably achieved it. Both R2-D2 and C-3PO, for example, are able to communicate between different alien species, robots and computers without making mistakes (AKA hallucinations). They are reliable in their tasks, they can apply their knowledge to other scenarios and they even display emotion and what seems to be sentience (now, we don’t know the training data, but they seem to check off all the criteria on Gary Marcus’ list).

Here on Earth — despite the lack of scientific evidence that AGI will ever be possible — there is a belief among many that if AGI is achieved, it would surpass human intelligence and replace most labor, necessitating a Universal Basic Income. 

But AGI might not be as dramatically transformative as Elon Musk and Altman would have you believe. 

I sat down with Dr. Noah Giansiracusa, a math professor and AI expert, to discuss the thought experiment. He found it “very plausible” that achieving AGI is one thing; replicating/replacing humans with AGI is a much different equation. 

“Achieving doesn't mean universal deployment, it doesn't just happen even in our imagination,” he said. “There's just so much focus on achieving the timeline, but I feel like that's only part of the equation.”

“Just assuming that something is capable and literally possible, doesn’t mean that all of a sudden everything just completely changes,” Giansiracusa said. 

He also envisions the potential economic impact of a cultural resistance to AGI “because we just want to live in a world of real things and real people.” Today, for instance, people pay more for handmade clothes, gourmet food and organic produce; in a world with AGI, people might well pay more for non-AGI, human-centric experiences and products.

The view that AGI will automate everything of economic value has “such a hyper-capitalistic feel that makes it feel like life is just a race toward efficiency and production,” Giansiracusa said. 

This journey to find meaning has played out in science fiction as well as our own history of industrialization, both of which point to a theme, according to Giansiracusa, of “humanity rising above the machine.” 

A poll before you go

Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!

We’ll see you in the next one.

Your view on Google’s Olympic AI ad:

40% of you said it could’ve been great, but it missed the mark. 19% of you said it’s a terrible idea and 15% of you said you hate everything about it.

I hate everything about this:

Could’ve been great: