I was about to start writing this column Thursday afternoon when Facebook parent Meta Platforms launched a new chatbot. It wasn’t procrastination, I swear. As a technical writer, I need to be aware of this stuff. So I spent a few minutes trying out Meta’s new generative AI tool. The column could wait. Sorry, editors.
But a few minutes turned into more. I challenge you to go to Meta.ai without spending the next hour texting your friends and family with all your artistic creations. I started by asking the robot to imagine cows in a field, then I superimposed turtles, all in a baseball stadium. I do not know why. The machine added each item in real time, as I typed.
My main dish was a series of cartoon giraffes bathing in toilets. I suggested to my wife that it would be good for our bathroom wall. (She was less enthusiastic.)
This is amazing technology and a complete waste of time.
Meta’s new chatbot, based on its latest large language open source model, called Llama 3, has all the features required of an AI chatbot in 2024. I was able to get a solid list of album recommendations and a bulleted list of comparative sport utility vehicle data. But I’m not ready to update my views on the current state of generative AI; as a daily consumption tool, I’m not impressed. (My colleague Eric J. Savitz has a different view.)
Advertisement – Scroll to continue
Still, I try to keep an open mind. The stock market has added billions of new values thanks to AI. That has to count for something. I will return to the “Wall Street” portion of this column, but first on my quest to appreciate AI.
Right after my Meta.ai lark, I spoke to Dr. Peter Noseworthy, professor of cardiology and medical director of business development at the Mayo Clinic. I had contacted Mayo in hopes of getting beyond the chatbot chatter.
It didn’t take long. Within minutes, Noseworthy was speaking about the life-saving implications of the AI projects and clinical trials Mayo is working on. He combined technology, business and medicine in a way I had never heard before.
Advertisement – Scroll to continue
“One of the problems with health care,” Noseworthy told me, “is that it’s delivered as a service, and therefore it’s not scalable. There are likely aspects of medicine that, thanks to extended language models and AI, can move from a service to a product. And once that happens, it’s scalable, it’s portable and people can carry these things in their pocket.
He says the Mayo team is using AI to find disease markers with a commonly performed EKG: “We found that this is actually a very powerful marker for all kinds of diseases that even people who read EKGs for a living don’t rely on an EKG. »
Ultimately, these ECG tools can be used with a device like an Apple Watch, he says. “And then the consumer wears, on their wrist, a clinical-grade ECG tool to deploy our AI.”
Advertisement – Scroll to continue
We’ve talked about phones as a ubiquitous form factor. “We can detect all sorts of signals about health and disease in a patient’s voice, especially as they change over time,” says Noseworthy. Similar signals could come from a phone’s step counter and measuring changes in a user’s gait.
He compared AI and phones to a mother quickly spotting illness on her child’s face. “This kind of clinical gestalt coming from an astute observer is probably reproducible with AI. And we make dozens, if not hundreds, of recordings of our faces every day. There may be opportunities to take advantage of this stuff.
Our phones have already taken on many roles in our lives, but loving mother would be a new one.
Advertisement – Scroll to continue
Noseworthy also gave me a different framework for considering chatbots. “Probably the closest thing to a patient-doctor interaction is a generative AI LLM solution in the form of a medical chatbot,” he says. “If you had asked me six months ago, I would have thought we were a few years away from something I had confidence in.” Now I think we could be six months away from something that is clinically useful.
Mayo is actively working on these chatbots, says Noseworthy. It will take a few more years, he adds, “to fully imitate clinical sense.”
In the short term, Noseworthy says a chatbot could help patients adjust their medications and ask questions about drug interactions.
“The most advanced version of this technology will allow patients to converse in natural language with a chatbot to discuss their symptoms or concerns and get high-quality, verified medical information presented in an easy-to-understand and natural conversation,” he told me.
Advertisement – Scroll to continue
This type of custom tool takes AI to another level.
I spoke to the founder and CEO of a company called Limitless, which claims to harness AI to give us memory superpowers. I had previously tested an earlier product from the company called Rewind.ai, which uses character and audio recognition to record everything that comes through a Mac screen and speaker, including calls, texts, and messages. -emails. Then, using a large language model, the app can answer questions about our lives: “Tell me about my last conversation with Mom. What time is our lunch?
The company’s newest product, also called Limitless, offers apps for Mac, Windows, and Web. Last week, the company launched a wearable pendant with a microphone that users can attach to their clothing to record life’s real conversations, the ones that don’t come through a device.
All this offers huge possibilities and, of course, serious privacy concerns. Dan Siroker, founder of Limitless, says the two are not contradictory. “It starts with the fundamental principle: that privacy should not come at the expense of convenience,” he says. “Facebook and all the advertising-driven companies have done the world a great disservice by making you believe that this should be a choice, that you should have to compromise your privacy for the sake of convenience.”
The new pendant features a consent mode that will only track voices that have given permission to be recorded. The company says it has already received 10,000 orders for the $99 pendant, which will ship in August. Limitless claims that all data brought into its cloud is encrypted with a secret key that no one else can access, including the company. Data sent via large language templates for summarization and transcription is deleted after 30 days.
Limitless has raised $33 million from venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and New Enterprise Associates, as well as OpenAI founder Sam Altman.
According to Siroker, the key to Limitless is that it provides context for AI models. It’s like providing a prompt to a chatbot that says, “I like the colors blue and green.” Choose me the best Benjamin Moore paint color.
With Limitless, the context is not limited to liking blue and green. This potentially sends every conversation you’ve had. Ultimately, this is how an AI model trained on generic internet data will provide personalized responses to our lives.
So what does all this mean for stocks? The promise of AI has already led to a massive market recovery. The irony is that Apple
,
the company with more context on our lives than any other, has been left behind.
Think about the Apple Health app on my phone. This app contains years of data on my daily step count, heart rate, number of times I stand per day, exposure to loud sounds, and blood oxygen level. A few lines on my home screen, I have thousands of photos with location and time stamps. And then there are my texts. With my permission, Apple could eventually integrate all of this into a large language model to create an absurdly detailed diary of my life. This would be a self-help book on steroids.
Yes, there are privacy concerns, but we have already passed all this data to Apple. I agree with the company making more personalized use of it.
Apple’s current problem is that, unlike its Big Tech rivals, Meta and Alphabet
,
or the start-up OpenAI, it has not yet created its own large language model.
I have no proprietary information on whether this will be the case. CEO Tim Cook said Apple is spending a lot of time on AI, and details will be revealed later this year. The company will likely make major announcements in June at its annual developers conference. For now, however, investors have all but abandoned Apple and AI. And that seems like a major oversight.
Late last month, Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Melius Research, published a note on the Cupertino, Calif., company’s AI efforts titled “Apple May Still Have the Last Laugh.”
Reitzes has covered Apple for more than two decades, as an analyst and banker. “The reason we wrote that note was to say, remember, these guys are market makers. And maybe we should listen to them,” Reitzes told me. “Even going back to the original example from when Steve Jobs was trying to create iTunes. He wasn’t the one who made the music. It made it easier to appreciate music.
Reitzes says Apple won’t need to create a best-in-class AI model to win in this new world. “They don’t have to be Microsoft
.
They don’t need to be OpenAI or Gemini. Apple needs to be Apple, and this provides an interface that lets you take advantage of where apps are headed in this new world. We think they can do it, and they’ll start carefully laying the groundwork for it, potentially with a splash in June.
So far, Apple is down 14% this year, compared to a 4% gain for the
S&P500
index and gain of 56% for AI leader Nvidia
.
Melius says there are legitimate concerns about Apple’s iPhone sales in China, where the company appears to be rapidly losing market share. And he understands why some investors have been concerned about the company’s AI efforts so far.
But Apple has been here before. From September 2012 to September 2013, between the release of the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 5S, Apple stock fell 33%, compared to an 18% gain for the S&P 500. At the time, Samsung Electronics was gaining momentum with its larger screen phones.
Then, in late 2014, Apple released the iPhone 6, its first phone with a larger screen. Since then, Apple shares have returned 635% compared to 198% for the S&P 500.
The move to AI is of course more complex than making a phone with a bigger screen. But Apple’s dominance hasn’t changed. And this places him at the center of all change, real or artificial.
Write to Alex Eule at [email protected]