The Skeptic AI Enthusiast #42

I was in AI before it became cool.

My take on the news

• OpenAI launches GPT4.5, xAI releases Grok 3:
  I’ve been testing the new OpenAI’s GPT4.5, which is not really supposed to replace the “reasoning” o1 version but rather complement it. Instead of doubling down on reasoning, OpenAI is now using reinforcement learning differently to make the new model more accurate. There are two readings of this development: one is that OpenAI realized reasoning was way too expensive (as acknowledged by Altman), and the other is that they are dabbling with different improvement strategies as they navigate the way to the future. I’d go with the latter. I think LLMs are making incremental progress, slowly reducing hallucinations, raising accuracy and so on, but in a year or two, the reliability of OpenAI’s tools will have improved beyond recognition (well, not only OpenAI, it’s the same for Google and others).
  Oh, and it’s not the only recent launch, as Grok entered its third iteration. One reader asked me what I made of Grok 3, and I told him I wasn’t impressed about it, but I wouldn’t like to dismiss it altogether. Nowadays, AI tech is mostly commoditized, so companies can poach talent from other companies and alternate in the Chatbot Arena’s top spot.
  

• Quiet iPhone 16E launch:
  Now you can have Apple Intelligence without splurging thousands: the new iPhone 16E was launched in the most anticlimatic way I’ve ever seen in Apple’s history. Well, smartphones are not exciting anymore, and in the case of the iPhone 16E, it is even less so, as it is a downgrade instead of an upgrade. In this week’s article, I argue that smartphones are getting ready to be replaced by a different device as long as this new device complies with three conditions (read below).
  Another problem with the 16E is that its price has increased compared to the previous one in the “E” line. So it’s not cheap, and it’s not great. I scratched my head, wondering what the market for this device is…
  

• Alexa+ joins the race to next-gen assistants:
  After having been left behind by nearly all chatbots, Alexa has been revamped with… drumroll… Alexa+! Obviously, Alexa+ is basically a Generative-AI version of Alexa, which is a disgracefully obsolete system. But Alexa was never the frontrunner regarding its “smarts” capabilities—what was important about Alexa was that it was integrated into hundreds of electronic products, including smart speakers, TV streaming devices and TV sets, smart home devices, wearables (such as Fitbit and Garmin products) and much more. Not many people know this, but Amazon had a kind of “Alexa integration division” with lots of employees negotiating with other companies so that these ones integrate Alexa instead of competitors’ devices.
  

• OpenAI and Perplexity Join “Deep Research”:
  After DeepSeek announced its “Deep Research” capability with its R1 model in January, OpenAI offered it to its paying customers. For those who haven’t heard the term, “Deep Research” refers to a multi-step modality where the system makes a more extensive web research, and tries to compile a comprehensive document with many aspects of the subject in the user’s query. Recently, Perplexity started offering its own version of deep research. This system takes so long to compute its response that it includes an alert when it finishes its work, so the user is notified. I have tried it with some technical queries and so far I liked its capabilities very much—and it’s free to use now!
  As a university teacher, I panic over how this development makes it even easier to come up with essays about absolutely anything.

This week’s blog piece

If you are subscribed to “The Skeptic AI Enthusiast,” you should have received an email with my recent post, “This Will Be the Next Big Thing After Smartphones.” In case you didn’t spot the article or you didn’t get the mail, here is the link to it (free subscribers can read it up to a point, and full subscribers can read all of it):

Here is the end of the free preview of “The Skeptic AI Enthusiast.” Please become a paying subscriber for more exclusive content. Full subscribers can read the whole article I just mentioned, as well as commented quote about smartphones, and an intriguing term, “Phubbing” in the “What is…?” section, and finally, a set of “friend links” for some curated articles on Medium so you can read them without having a Medium subscription.