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Hello reader,
What are your ChatGPT personality settings? For me, I always put it on “Robot” and tell it to get to the point without sugarcoating anything.
Simply put, I’m not interested in small talk. The chatbot irritates me when it sounds too eager to please, so I’d rather limit my interactions with it and just get answers straight. Turns out I’m not alone: OpenAI revealed last week that only 11% of ChatGPT users rely on it for personal reflection and play.
But while ChatGPT boasts 700 million weekly users, that doesn’t mean it’s everyone’s favorite AI tool. Because apparently, people do like having conversations with AI – just not with ChatGPT.
I’m referring to AI companion apps like Character.ai and Nomi.ai, which offer a diverse set of characters that people can interact with. My colleague Melissa Goh spent two weeks testing these apps. Although the experience wasn’t enough to convert her to a paying user, it helped her understand why people spend millions of dollars on them – enough to make some companies profitable, as she details in her latest piece.
Image credit: Timmy Loen
It’s definitely worth a read, particularly for anyone curious about how these apps stand out in a crowded field. But as much as I’d like to believe AI companions are changing how we interact with tech, another story shifts the focus to something far from trivial: brain computer interfaces.
No, I’m not talking about Elon Musk’s Neuralink, but about its Chinese competitors making real progress in commercializing a piece of tech once confined to sci-fi.
This week’s issue also touches on Meta’s new smart glasses and what they mean for AI, plus a controversial take on the tech from Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI.
Whether it’s AI you want to befriend, wear, or wire into your brain, one thing is certain: the boundary between human and machine is getting thinner every day.
Glenn Kaonang, journalist
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