It’s happening. The race is on.

Google and OpenAI both premiered the early versions of their fully multimodal, eventually fully integrated AI agents. Soon your phone experience will get more and more tightly integrated with AI. You will talk to your phone, or your computer, and it will talk back, and it will do all the things. It will hear your tone of voice and understand your facial expressions. It will remember the contents of your inbox and all of your quirky preferences.

It will plausibly be a version of Her, from the hit movie ‘Are we sure about building this Her thing, seems questionable?’

OpenAI won this round of hype going away, because it premiered, and for some modalities released, the new GPT-4o. GPT-4o is tearing up the Arena, and in many ways is clearly giving the people what they want. If nothing else, it is half the price of GPT-4-Turbo, and it is lightning fast including fast web searches, which together have me (at least for now) switching back to ChatGPT as my default, after giving Gemini Advanced (or Pro 1.5) and Claude Opus their times in the sun, although Gemini still has the long context use case locked up.

I will be covering all that in another post, which will be out soon once I finish getting it properly organized.

This post covers some of the other things that happened this past week.

Due to the need to triage for now and ensure everything gets its proper attention, it does drop a number of important developments.

I did write the post about OpenAI’s model spec. I am holding it somewhat for final editing and to update it for GPT-4o, but mostly to give it space so anyone, especially at OpenAI, will have the time to read it.

Jan Lieke and Ilya Sutskever have left OpenAI, with Jan Lieke saying only ‘I resigned.’ That is a terrible sign, and part of a highly worrisome pattern. I will be writing a post about that for next week.

Chuck Schumer’s group issued its report on AI. That requires close attention.

Dwarkesh Patel has a new podcast episode with OpenAI Cofounder John Schulman. Self-recommending, only partially obsolete, again requires proper attention.

For now, here is all the other stuff.

For example, did you know that Big Tech is spending a lot of money in an attempt to avoid being regulated, far more than others are spending? Are you surprised?

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