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Nguyen at Giotto\u2019s Bell Tower in Florence. His clone told him to visit it because it\u2019s \u201cground zero of the Renaissance,\u201d Nguyen said.<\/p>\nIf Nguyen\u2019s account sounds out of reach for most people, that\u2019s because, for now, it is \u2014 at least financially. Nguyen declined to say publicly how much he is spending, but the higher levels of reliability and capability from the AI assistant come, in part, by spending gobs of money on more tokens, the small units of text that AI providers bill for when developers use their models through APIs.<\/p>\n
While many people interact with AI through $20 to $200 per-month subscriptions, Nguyen said he pays per token and runs multiple models repeatedly, sometimes in parallel. At first, there was a sticker shock. \u201cI\u2019m like, oh my God, this is really expensive.\u201d It would be unaffordable for most people, he said.<\/p>\n
While Nguyen is spending time with his family or out running his business, in the background there\u2019s a kind of endless conversation with a bot that\u2019s sending into motion many chatbots from several different providers all working in unison. He calls it \u201cagentic scaling,\u201d industry shorthand for adding new capabilities by leveraging swarms of AI agents.<\/p>\n
\u201cI pitted all the models against each other,\u201d Nguyen said, noting that he won\u2019t stand out as a super user in a year or two, when tokens get cheaper. \u201cI just paid to get a little peek into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
That peek into the future matters because it foreshadows a world we\u2019re hurtling toward where the more money and risk tolerance you have, the faster you can go with AI.<\/p>\n
But first, you sort of have to bare your soul. Nguyen said the system quickly asked him for his digital record and \u201call your associative memories.\u201d Not just Slack, calendars, call logs, location history, but his computer change logs, a proxy for the subtleties of how he works and processes information.<\/p>\n
It also asked for his voice. Olive\u2019s voice-to-text technology is meant to capture things that transcripts miss, like sarcasm, annoyance, urgency, disbelief, he said.<\/p>\n
At one point, Nguyen said, the assistant identified the way he speaks when he\u2019s on the cusp of a breakthrough.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you say something and then there\u2019s a pause, and then you speak quickly, it\u2019s an example of an \u2018a-ha\u2019 moment,\u201d Nguyen said the assistant told him.<\/p>\n
Nguyen at Giotto\u2019s Bell Tower in Florence. His clone told him to visit it because it\u2019s \u201cground zero of the Renaissance,\u201d Nguyen said.<\/p>\n
At times, the assistant borders on therapist.<\/p>\n
Roughly two months ago, he said, the machine made him a kind of promise: \u201cIf you build this, you will no longer have to perform.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nguyen said he asked for an explanation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt said to me, \u2018What you\u2019re really complaining about is how performative your job is. You don\u2019t like going to meetings with people. You don\u2019t want to update your team, even though they\u2019re critical to your success,\u2019\u201d Nguyen said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the first time someone has had an insight about me that I didn\u2019t realize,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cI\u2019m like, OK, great, let\u2019s do it. How do we get there?\u201d<\/p>\n
Nguyen said one of the assistant\u2019s biggest shifts was deciding to prioritize his attention over saving him time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always thought time is the most valuable thing. It\u2019s not,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cWhat I\u2019m really optimizing for is my attention.\u201d<\/p>\n
He gave an example from parenting: if one of his kids asks for more screen time, he said he is happy to outsource that decision to the system based on predetermined values. It does not require his attention, he said.<\/p>\n
But, Nguyen said, the computer has also learned the kinds of interactions that seem to increase connection between him and his kids, and encouraged more of them. A recent discussion between Nguyen and one of his sons about the war in Iran spurred the machine to plan a trip to a museum, unprompted, that tied together current events and ancient Greek and Roman history, an area of interest for his son.<\/p>\n
Nguyen also said the system changed how he shows up at work, especially with the young team at his startup.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat they need is not my advice. They need my attention,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cI\u2019ve learned so much more how to interact with people around me just because of my model.\u201d<\/p>\n
He makes time for those attention-heavy interactions by completely outsourcing parts of his life that would make some people bristle. In one instance, it set up a meeting with a prominent expert in their field without Nguyen\u2019s knowledge. It worked out well, but he said he wouldn\u2019t want the person to know it wasn\u2019t actually him who set the meeting up, because the person might not approve of how the AI pretended to be him.<\/p>\n
Nguyen said he\u2019s fully aware of the risks of giving so much access and control to an untested system, but he\u2019s accepted the potential consequences. If something bad happens, it might give him his next great idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Nguyen\u2019s account sounds out of reach for most people, that\u2019s because, for now, it is \u2014 at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549459,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-549458","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}