OpenAI president Greg Brockman: We ‘contort’ ourselves around computers, clicking and typing is a ‘phase’
· Fortune
Welcome to Eye on AI. Emily Forlini here. In today’s issue:
- Fidji Simo sits down with Fortune for her first interview since leaving OpenAI
- “Voice-pilled” is the latest AI lingo
- OpenAI fires back at Apple over device lawsuit
- Chinese models are getting even better—and cheaper
Emily Forlini here, back again to fill in for Jeremy while he’s out on a well-deserved vacation. This week, I’m thinking about the future of computing. How we will interact with our phones, computers, and smart glasses in the future? Right now, the trend is pointing toward voice technology, or dictation.
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The new term I’m hearing in my reporting: “Voice-pilled.” It’s a derivative of AI-pilled, meaning people who are all-in on AI and convinced it’s the future. (The industry seems to be lingomaxxing.)
At Menlo Ventures, a venture capital firm in San Francisco and early investor in Anthropic, has equipped four desks with microphones for dictation. “A few of our investors are totally voice-pilled,” the company tells me. “They believe that typing slows them down and they work faster and [can] be more productive when speaking versus typing.”
They use an AI platform called Wispr Flow. Wispr is in use at 450 of the Fortune 500 companies, with its revenue growing at 150% each quarter for the past year, according to Upstarts Media. The company is starting a new AI lab, staffed with 50 researchers to develop new voice models and find novel ways to interact with them.
So wait, that means all these people are talking out loud to their computers next to their co-workers? Isn’t that weird? Yes. Sometimes the VCs at Menlo “feel a bit awkward” using it in the company’s open floor plan office. “That might be one of the growing pains,” the company says.
Wispr Flow is optimized for its namesake: Whispering. Users can talk into the microphone with a low voice. Honestly, that might be even weirder—borderline creepy—in an office environment, but Wispr says it’s necessary when you’re “sitting just a foot away from someone else,” and potentially discussing sensitive information.
OpenAI’s big bet on voice
OpenAI is also investing heavily in voice models, positioning it as one of the company’s differentiators from rivals Anthropic and Google Gemini. On July 23, it added a voice model, called ChatGPT Voice, to the ChatGPT desktop app so that white collar workers can verbally direct their agents. A major application is expected to be software engineers, who can now code by speaking.
“I think voice will be the interface of the future, so that’s very exciting because it means that the computer moves closer to you rather than you having to contort yourself around the machine,” OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman said recently at a media roundtable the same day as the ChatGPT Voice launch.
“We’re going to realize this phase of us clicking and typing is a phase. It was never what we wanted to be doing. A hundred years ago, no one did this kind of stuff. I think a couple of years from now, no one’s going to want to do it anymore,” he added.
I see his point. I’ve always thought computers and phones are mind-numbingly boring. We spend our days staring at tiny screens, hunched over. Do we have to do this forever? At the same time, it’s hard to imagine voice can be a full replacement for typing, which is incredibly useful. Doing any in-depth editing, code reviews, researching, and AI prompting seems very difficult through voice alone. Sometimes, it’s easier to list all the details and think through a problem through writing.
OpenAI’s forthcoming consumer hardware device may have a voice component as well, intended for use around the house, Bloomberg reported last month. Can it unseat the Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Homepod? In my view, it all depends on how good the voice models are. There’s nothing more annoying than “Alexa voice,” or speaking slowly and loudly—and then she doesn’t get it, anyway: “Sorry, I can’t help with that.”
With that, here’s more AI news.
Emily Forlini
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@emilyforlini
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com