Future Bites #7
The fight for AI data, Apple's upcoming AI health coach, Starship launch, how to install AutoGPT, and more.
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Welcome back to Year 2049!
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Today’s Edition
Stories:
The fight for AI data
Apple’s upcoming AI health coach
Starship explodes during its test flight, but it will still help humanity
Recommendations:
How to install AutoGPT
How to plan your next trip with ChatGPT
The inside story of ChatGPT’s astonishing potential
Poll: Should AI-generated music be banned?
📰 Stories
The fight for AI data
OpenAI is struggling from success and others want their fair share.
Their large language models, like GPT-4, were trained on a wealth of data scraped from the internet. OpenAI doesn't disclose the specific data GPT-4 was trained on, but a report from the Washington Post details the list of websites in Google’s C4 dataset which have been used to train other LLMs.
The list of websites includes:
Google Patents
Wikipedia
Reddit
Pirated e-book websites
Many news websites
The problem is that free content is being used without permission by the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Meta. They get to train powerful language models and profit from the free data, without compensating the owners of that data.
Reddit recently announced that it’ll begin charging third-party developers for using their API to access the site’s data moving forward, because we all know Reddit has some of the best answers on the internet.
Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with.
– Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit
Expect more websites with valuable data to adopt a similar model. It gives companies their fair share of returns from successful AI products trained with their data and a massive new revenue stream.
I’m curious to see if Wikipedia will follow a similar approach. It might be a way for them to generate reliable revenue instead of relying on donations, giving them more money to improve the platform and reward contributors.
You can check if your website is part of the C4 dataset.
Scroll down to the last section of the article and use the search function.
Further reading: Should AI tools pay artists?
Apple’s developing an AI health coach
Apple’s obsession with health and fitness is only growing stronger. It’s building a paid AI health coach, codenamed Quartz, which is expected to arrive next year.
The service will leverage Apple Watch data and help people with exercise, nutrition, and sleep, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. This is a natural evolution of Apple’s desire to turn its devices into personalized health and wellness gurus.
Apple has an intriguing long-term strategy. Instead of just building new smartphones, tablets, and watches, it’s pushing aggressively into auxiliary services like health and finance. It signals a change in perspective: people don’t want a phone or watch, they want to live healthier lives and build better spending habits.
I just hope they’re adding Morgan Freeman’s voice to motivate me to get up in the morning and go to the gym.
Starship explodes during its test flight, but it will still help humanity
The much-anticipated test flight for SpaceX’s Starship ended with the rocket exploding 4 minutes after launch… but the full story is much more significant than this.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. NASA’s SLS rocket that launched back in November is a fossil compared to it.
While the test flight didn’t go as planned, Starship will play a central role in the future of space exploration.
's piece on is a great breakdown of all the ways Starship will help humanity.
Further Reading: The Lunar Gold Rush
🎁 Recommendations
How to install AutoGPT
If you missed the AutoGPT craze, I made a short video about it. If you want to try it out yourself, I found this handy YouTube tutorial. And a much easier way to try it out without any technical work is by using AgentGPT.How to plan a trip with ChatGPT
I planned my Europe trip using ChatGPT and it was pretty good. I followed about 80% of what it gave me and filled the rest with activities I discovered while I was there. I made this short video tutorial a few weeks ago.The Inside Story of ChatGPT’s Astonishing Potential
Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, talks about how ChatGPT was developed and where it’s headed. He also demos some neat and unreleased plugins that are coming to ChatGPT soon. Watch it on YouTube
🗳️ Poll: AI Music
Music generated using synthesized voices of Drake, The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, and other artists has been all over my feeds. The songs are surprisingly good, but they were quickly taken down by social platforms and streaming services.
While many artists have shunned AI, Grimes declared she would split 50% of royalties for successful AI-generated songs that use her voice.
What do you think: should AI-generated music be banned or should artists embrace it and split the profits if someone uses their voice?
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How would you rate this week's edition?
Wow first time visitor/new subscriber to your stack--loving this! Especially enjoyed the link to Uncharted Territories re Starship, thank you for that.
I enjoyed your summation on where Apple is going re providing a service that helps customers live healthier lives. My iWatch and I saw our futures in your mention of Quartz.
It seems to me Quartz could begin leveraging millions of humans'-worth of data toward future thriving of the human species. The impact daily feeding and movement habits could be fundamental and invaluable--and it's wild to think how long the species has been around and yet how little we understand of the maintenance needs for our evanescent electrochemical skin suits. I'm here for the evolution from basic sleep, water, and step trackers into an emergent system's worth of knowledge that can coach me from my wrist.
I just hope I can get it to use Moira Rose's voice from Schitt's Creek.