OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been saying for years — years! — that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, would be something like a singularity. When we achieve AGI, Altman and others have said, it will fundamentally reshape society.
At the New York Times DealBook Summit this week in New York City, Altman said never mind. AGI is coming really soon, he said, but it’s not going to be a huge deal. Also this week: OpenAI began its “12 days of shipmas” campaign with a new $200 monthly subscription for its latest model. The stakes are lower, the prices are higher. Strange times in the AI race.
On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Kylie Robison joins the show to talk about Altman’s about-face, shipmas, and everything else happening in the AI world this week. Google CEO Sundar Pichai had a spicy take on Gemini, Amazon launched some models of its own, and the models just keep making mistakes.
But before we get to AI, Nilay and David spend some time talking about the world of subscriptions. Starting with ours! We launched a subscription for The Verge this week, and we’re grateful to everyone who has signed up to support us and be part of our community. Thanks also to everyone who has offered feedback, found bugs, and asked for ad-free podcasts. We’re still new at this whole subscription thing, but we’re learning fast. (And if you have questions, you have a little more time to get them in for next week’s episode! Email vergecast@theverge.com or call 866-VERGE11 to get them in.)
That takes us into a conversation about the ongoing cable-ification of the streaming world, which this week included Disney bundling ESPN into Disney Plus and Max launching always-on channels for HBO content. You know, like cable.
After all that it’s AI time. And finally, in the lightning round, we talk about bitcoin, AI browsers, the fediverse, Intel, Spotify Wrapped, and much more. It may be December, but there’s still an awful lot going on.
If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with streaming and cable:
- ESPN is coming to the Disney Plus app starting today
- Max is testing always-on HBO channels
- Streaming is cable now
- Walmart bought Vizio
And in AI news:
- OpenAI’s 12 days of ‘shipmas’ include Sora and new reasoning model
- Sam Altman says AGI will “matter much less” than people expect
- ChatGPT’s search results for news are ‘unpredictable’ and frequently inaccurate
- Stop using generative AI as a search engine
- Misinformation expert admits ChatGPT added fake details to his anti-deepfake court filing
- Amazon announces its own set of Nova AI models
- From The New York Times: Sundar Pichai Hits Back at Criticism of Company’s A.I. Leadership
And in the lightning round:
- Bitcoin just hit $100,000
- Dia is the The Browser Company’s AI-powered follow-up to Arc
- Threads takes an important baby step toward true fediverse integration
- Threads’ next update is a search feature that finds the post you’re looking for
- Meta says it’s mistakenly removing too many posts
- Intel’s CEO is out after only three years
- What happened to Intel?
- Trump picks two nominees who could decide the fate of Big Tech and crypto
- Verizon is once again raising its fees
- Spotify Wrapped 2024 adds an AI podcast to recap your listening habits