An AI Update

Last week, I wrote an article that shared some of Julia Freedland Fisher’s thinking from her article titled “Beyond Bans: Schools’ Role in a Hard Reset on the ‘Phone-Based Childhood’.” In the article, Fisher writes: “There’s another article that should lend urgency to getting this [Artificial intelligence and other technology innovations] right. It’s a memo from the $35 billion dollar venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz called ‘It’s Not a Computer, It’s a Companion!’ It came out last summer and hasn’t made the rounds in my education or parenting circles. But it needs to.”

So I decided to spend some time reading the Andreesen Horowitz memo, and I found it fascinating.

The memo begins,

“’The great thing about AI is that it is constantly evolving. One day it will be better than a real [girlfriend]. One day, the real one will be the inferior choice.’”

“This quote is from one of more than 20,000 users who joined the early community of CarynAI, a voice chatbot created by influencer Caryn Marjorie. Users pay $1 minute to talk to an AI version of Caryn – your ‘virtual girlfriend’ – and she made $72,000 in the first week. CarynAI is just one of dozens of ways that consumers have been forming real relationships with artificial intelligence.”

“Having an AI companion might seem niche, but it’s emerged as a predominant use case for generative AI. There are already hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people – including us – who have already built and nurtured relationships with chatbots. We believe we’re on the cusp of a significant societal shift: AI companions will soon become commonplace. What was once the domain of science fiction, the likes of WALL-E, R2-D2, or Plankton’s Karen, is fast becoming a reality. And at a16z, we are excited about it.”

“Many of the popular use cases today are romantic, which won’t be surprising to anyone who has studied the history of the consumer internet. The most sophisticated consumers of generative models today are hacking together virtual companions, coordinating their efforts across platforms like Reddit, Discord, and 4chan to find tools and evade censors. In fact, we know of underground companion-hosting services that are globally distributed, with tens of thousands of users. This is an early developer community that we take seriously – they may be fringe today, but they’re building tomorrow’s mainstream products.”

“We’re also starting to see early signs of a much broader set of applications beyond AI ‘boyfriends’ and ‘girlfriends.’ Snapchat recently revealed that 150 million people sent more than 10 billion messages to its chatbot in its first two months. What were they chatting about? It turns out pets, pop culture news, and soccer were some of the top conversation topics.”

“Yes, chatbots have been around for decades, but we believe that this time really is different. Today’s bots aren’t merely a step function improvement on 1:1 conversations – they’re making inroads into our  social lives. AI companions are seamlessly blending into our relationships with friends and family members, and they’re joining out communities like any other human.”

“In this post, we’ll dive into the emerging behavior of AI companionship: why people are creating companions, how they’re doing it, and what features or use cases might be coming next.”

…

“So why does the new wave of chatbots feel so different? Past chatbots had a rules-based architecture, essentially scripts that would be triggered by your input. They had no true context of an ongoing conversation, couldn’t adapt to your tone, and were only programmed to respond to a limited amount of topics or execute set tasks. It was clear you were talking to a computer – they didn’t come across as intelligent, and certainly not human.”

“Large language models (LLMs) changed the game. Suddenly, we could have free-flowing conversations with bots, without predefined rules controlling their responses (even when companies try to censor their bots, it often doesn’t work!). The best chatbots today sound indistinguishable from humans – if you don’t believe us, check out the ‘Human or Not?’ Turing-test game.”

“This is why ChatGPT became the fastest consumer product to scale to 100 million users despite clear product limitations. True conversational AI is undeniably entertaining – computers now have a personality. Unlike humans, AI-powered conversation partners are always available, interested in talking to you, and can discuss any topic. This has made AI companions, in our opinion, one of the first few killer use cases of generative AI for everyday consumers.”

…

“There’s no shortage of products to create and interact with an AI partner. Options vary based on technical sophistication, how much control you want over the end ‘character,’ and where you want to chat.”

…

“There are dozens of apps that allow you to immediately start messaging with an AI girlfriend or boyfriend, no technical work required! Replika is one of the earliest and most well-known examples – the company launched its chatbot app in 2017, and some users have been in relationships with their ‘Reps’ since then. You design your ideal partner and your relationship progresses over time. Your Rep stores memories to refer to in future conversations (e.g., your interests or your dog’s name), and can even send you photos (either SFW or NSFW).

…

“If you don’t want to talk to just one AI bot, but several, platforms like Character AI allow you to message hundreds of AI-powered characters, from celebrities to popular anime characters. You can also create your own character, imbuing them with a description, image, personality, and more advanced features. Users create detailed lists of attributes and will spend hours training their character by rating their responses and generating new ones.”

…

“[DIY developer tools] gives you the most control over the form factor, as well as the personality of your AI companion. It’s possible to piece together a number of tools to create your ideal partner that you can message, call, or even video chat in real time:

Personality…

Memory…

Speech…

Appearance…

Movement…

Platforms…

User Interphase…”

“What’s coming next? AI companions are just getting started. Two or three years from now, the tools we have today will seem like toys in comparison to the depth and complexity of relationships that will be possible. We’re already seeing a few hints of what may come next[:]

“AI adaptations of real people…

Multi-modal companions…

Expansion in companion types…

Incorporating AI into human interactions…”

“Generative AI models will fundamentally change our relationship with computers, putting them beside us as coworkers, friends, family members, and even lovers. Most of the attention around LLMs thus far has focused on how they’re automating more traditional tasks – like customer support, research, document drafting, and summarization – but when you look at what’s driving emergent consumer use cases and excitement, AI companionship leads the way.”

“This is just the beginning of a seismic shift in human-computer interactions that will require us to re-examine what it means to have a relationship with someone (person or bot). We’re entering a new world that will be a lot weirder, wilder, and more wonderful than we can even imagine. This post provides a glimpse of the early activity we’ve seen, but we’re confident that there’s much more happening in the far flung corners of the Internet – and we can’t wait to see AI companions take their rightful place alongside the rest of us.”

So putting the romantic “girlfriend and boyfriend” function aside for now, what could all of this mean for traditional schools and possibly a new system of learning?

Our current K-12 education system just looks stupid if it thinks somehow they are going to “ban” AI. AI is here to stay, so our current K-12 system would be wise to figure out how to best use it to their advantage. The traditional system would be wise to start thinking about how AI bots can help them improve their teacher quality across the board, and how bots can support the work of teachers inside classrooms. The traditional system would be smart to begin thinking about how AI can help them provide a more relevant, personalized curriculum for their students. The traditional system would be prudent to begin thinking about how AI can help students better assess what they know and what they don’t know.

Even though the traditional system shouldn’t think about outlawing artificial intelligence, there’s a good chance they will. And if that happens, then AI might serve as the beginning of a new learning system, one created to help young learners better define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own personalized learning plan.

Til tomorrow. SVB