Welcome to Volume 10 of the Blacklynx Brief.

As war is breaking out in the Middle East and the economy is on shaky ground, the progress of artificial intelligence keeps intensifying.

It’s up to a point where you go “meh” and are thoroughly unimpressed for an update that would only a year ago seem impossible.

The world IS changing only it’s difficult to see as you are in the middle of it. Just like you can’t see you are aging if you look in the mirror every day.

News snippets without context are always debatable and we live in a world where people have zero attention spans - so all news is vomited out into the world in the form of Tiktok videos and YouTube shorts. Very difficult to find thoughtful insights and context as I research the latest developments.

Luckily over the last few years there has been an undercurrent in podcasting where there are podcasts with long-form interviews with interesting people on interesting topics (Instead of podcasts as a self-glorifying commercial tool)

Last weekend Sam Altman , the CEO of OpenAI - who brought us ChatGPT - sat down with Joe Rogan for a 2,5 hour chat. A certain section from that interview caught some people’s attention and that is where we are starting this week.

Grab a coffee and join me as we go down this week’s rabbit hole.

🗣 Humanity’s Latest Invention ? 🗣

If tomorrow astronomers would tell you that an alien vessel is on a course to earth and would arrive on earth by 2030 - would you freak out ?

Difficult to say - in the US there are congressional hearings about UFOs and people claiming to have retrieved “non-human biologics” from alien craft and nobody bats an eye.

It’s a bit like that Netflix movie “Don’t Look Up” - where an asteroid is hurtling towards earth but we’re too busy with our Instagram and Tiktok to be bothered looking up.

Something similar is playing out in the field of artificial intelligence.

If what Sam Altman is implying in this interview is true - the alien vessel known as Superintelligence or Artificial General Intelligence is indeed about to land by 2030.

An alien mind will appear on the planet that is better at EVERY skill than humans, from science to art.

There have always been doomsayers but intellectual heavyweights like Elon Musk, Sam Harris, Mo Gawdat are warning us for the dangers of Superintelligence also known as AGI or Artificial General Intelligence.

(By the way, take a look at this chilling TED Talk by Sam Harris from 2016)

Joe Rogan asked Sam Altman : “When you started OpenAI, what kind of timeline did you have in mind, and has it stayed on that timeline?”

His answer: “AGI isn’t the end point , to accomplish ASI, that’ll take us to 2030 or 2031. That has felt to me, all the way through, kind of a reasonable estimate with huge error bars. I think we’re on the trajectory I would have assumed.”

ASI, is a term we didn’t hear often before but it refers to “Artificial Super Intelligence”.

Superintelligence is when the AI is smarter than humans - artificial superintelligence is when this superintelligence goes into self-learning mode. If he wants to , say, build a rocket he would become a rocket scientist in mere seconds.

OpenAI thinks Superintelligence will be here by 2027 - they have an inhouse team called (and this is not a joke) the “Notkilleveryoneism”-team

Food for thought as you go into the weekend:

• Is this humanity’s final invention and what will happen to us ?

• This is only OpenAI working on superintelligence but know other tech companies, including companies in China and India are also in a race to develop ASI. Make you wonder if they have a notkilleveryoneism team ?

I personally am slightly afraid but excited as well for the future to come. What about you?

🌌 Rollout of new ChatGPT tools still underway 🌌

I am writing this on October 12th and I can report that the new ChatGPT features (vision, voice, DallE3) have officially rolled out to my account. You need to have a Plus account to get these tools

If you have the same, you just gained an extremely powerful skill. You can throw in any picture and ask questions about it.

It’s better than your doctor for analyzing radiology scans - it spots “air in your rectum” :

It “unredacts” classified government documents …

And it cheats at online games … I used it to win on the game “GeoGuessr”. This game puts you in a random location in the world on Google Maps and you have to guess where you are. (By the way it’s super fun and addictive) :)

This was the photo I got:

Cheating ? Perhaps. Impressive ? Certainly !

🌌 AI Wearables Are Here 🌌

This week the Humane AI pin made its debut on the runway at Paris Fashion week , but the device that caught our attention is the “Rewind Pendant”.

It’s .. and I quote .. “ a wearable that captures what you say and hear in the real world and then transcribes, encrypts, and stores it locally on your phone. “

At this point I’m glad this is no longer a cybersecurity newsletter because this seems a nightmare on the privacy front.

🌌 Other AI News🌌

• Google’s AI assistant Bard can now converse in verse, taking inspiration from vast array of resources. Glad to know while OpenAi is tackling AGI they’re doing poetry at Google.

• The new Chromebook Plus laptops have built-in AI-capabilities for a low-price starting at around 400€. The move towards cloud only has started. You will have noticed this as a Microsoft Office user as well.

• Adobe teased “Project Stardust” - a powerful object-aware artificial intelligence photo editing tool.

• Canva has embedded three image generation apps into their platform : Dall-E, Magic Media and Imagen.

• Last week Meta announced “AI Stickers”. This week people are already exploiting them to generate stickers that are rude and nude. Or both !

• Linkedin is introducing an AI Recruiting Tool in order for businesses to find better candidates faster

• While Microsoft, Google and Meta are fully on the AI train, Apple seems to have missed the boat. Tim Cook confirmed that Apple is researching a ‘GPT-style AI”

AI Tool of the Week

As for this week’s AI tool - where we highlight companies that are using AI to revolutionize work - is PerplexityAI

Perplexity’s goal is to replace Google as a search tool and it’s doing a really good job. You can try it out for free at https://www.perplexity.ai 

Closing Thoughts

This might have been a newsletter edition that is a little bit atypical - but hopefully you’ll not only have something to discuss at the dinner table or in a bar with friends. And have some actual tools at your disposal as well.

Until next week, keep exploring and stay curious!