😲 An AI phone agent in 5 minutes, without coding?

AI-HOI AInauts,

It's crazy what's going on at the moment, aiaiaiai … One innovation follows the next, and don't forget: Google I/O 2024 starts on May 14th, and rumor has it that OpenAI will be presenting something new on Thursday, 9 May at 6 pm CET … And there is plenty of other stuff happening, see here and here.

So, for now, we have these exciting topics:

• 😲 How to build an AI phone agent in 5 minutes, without coding

• 🥇 Why Nvidia is the most important company of our time

• 🙈 GPT-4 is the dumbest model …

• 🤖 Robots have their ChatGPT moment

Let's go!

😲 How to build an AI phone agent in 5 minutes, without coding

Phone communication is likely to change soon … Thanks to text-to-speech (TTS) and fast, intelligent voice models in combination with the corresponding infrastructure (groq, anyone?), completely new possibilities are opening up:

• You can outsource time-consuming or annoying phone calls to your virtual assistants, and they can hold the line for you.

• Or you can use such assistants to handle incoming calls (e.g., in customer service, office, consulting, …) and let the AI try to solve them.

One provider that promises a solution for this is RetellAI.com. It is a platform for the creation of voice-based AI applications and designed to enable realistic and human-like conversations with a low latency (= response time).

You can see how this works in the diagram here:

There are three options for using the platform:

• Dashboard: Build an MVP in 5 minutes without coding, and have an AI phone agent with a Twilio number - for all those who can only click and don't code

• Retell LLM: A powerful API for seamless integration of voice AI - for anyone who is not afraid of APIs and speaks JavaScript

• Custom LLM: Implement your desired LLM with telephony services such as Vonage or SignalWire - for everyone who can also communicate with 0 and 1

We can't code, so the only option we can use is the Dashboard ... and it promises that you can set up such an agent in 5 minutes. Really?

The live test: Building a telephone agent in 5 minutes?

Naturally, we wanted to find out more, so we put it to the test. It's super easy:

1. Log in with your existing Google account (or create a new one)

2. Choose a voice from ElevenLabs

3. Customize your prompt, change settings if needed

4. Test with a web call (10-minute test is free)

We were quite pleased with the result, you should definitely give it a try!

🥇 Why Nvidia is the most important company of our time

So, from the practical test to the man who made it all possible …

Sometimes there are these videos where so many lightbulbs go off in our heads. Like this discussion with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang! He is super likeable and easy to follow as he talks about what we can expect in the future.

Let's summarize the highlights and go a bit deeper.

Fact: Without Nvidia, all AI cloud providers would have a real problem …

Nvidia is the biggest player in the AI industry and has achieved true technological leaps in the last 10 years. The share price has even exploded by over 1800%.

Sure, because these chips are currently driving practically the entire GenAI infrastructure of Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure (which also powers the Open AI models), Meta, Amazon AWS and so forth.

Of course, the big players are trying to build their own chips or look for alternatives. But that won't happen overnight.

Meta's Chief AI, Yann LeCun, has just confirmed that Meta has invested $30 billion (!) in Nvidia GPUs to train models like the brand-new Llama 3. For comparison: that's more than the Apollo moon mission cost, he says (… but beware, that's marketing-speak and not inflation-adjusted - still sounds good, doesn't it?).

Everyone wants chips for data centers, but also for autonomous machines

Nvidia has already reduced the cost of computing and deep learning by a factor of millions (yes, you read that right …). And in the next 10 years, computing power is set to skyrocket a million-fold 🤯 …

But that's not all. CEO Jensen Huang has the declared aim of reducing costs even further and pushing them as close to zero as possible! The reason? When costs fall, penetration increases and AI is omnipresent.

Behind these efforts are the latest chips. These are real heavyweights, with over 30 kilos of high-tech, consisting of 35,000 individual parts. This computing power practically replaces an entire data center!

Nvidia is already skimming off as much of the market as it can, accounting for over 70% of all AI chips sold. But this is just the beginning, as the company has big plans for the future and is also making progress in the field of autonomous machines. Yes, like Terminators humanoid androids (see post below).

That's why language models are not yet continuously improving - but this will change soon!

Technological advances mean that training and inference (i.e. chatting with the language model) will no longer have to be separated in the future.

At the moment, the model is trained first, and we then interact and chat with the frozen model, so to speak. In the future, however, AI will learn, question itself and improve around the clock.

The aim is for AI to become an exponential superhero in all areas. And that is something that we humans find quite difficult to imagine!

In the future, content will no longer be retrieved, but generated.

But the future belongs to generative computing. Static content (as we mostly use today) will be a thing of the past. Instead, much of what we consume will be generated directly “on the fly”.

Of course, this change requires a radical overhaul of the computer infrastructure - a digital spring-cleaning of epic proportions. But don't worry, Nvidia has already rolled up its sleeves and is ready for the big transformation!

What's more, on the network side technologies such as 6G are already in the making, so we'll never again be faced with a screen that says “Buffering …”.

So, that was the Nvidia story. Keep up the good work, Nvidia - and keep an eye on the marginal costs!

🙈 GPT-4 is the dumbest model …

OpenAI frontman Sam Altman is also making himself heard again. He was at Stanford University to talk about the possibilities of AI. And finds clear words:

“GPT-4 is the dumbest model you will ever use … by far!”

He's not telling us anything new, but it's always good to know that something bigger must be coming soon from OpenAI. For May 9th, there is apparently a new search feature planned. Let's see what they have in store …

Back to Sam. We don't find the first part of the interview very exciting, as the host tries to get “scoops” out of Sam with clumsy questions. But when the students' questions come into play (around minute 24), it becomes more exciting and a bit philosophical.

After the visit to Stanford, Harvard was on the agenda. So far, there is only a short, but worthwhile summary.

In an interview with the MIT Journal, he gives even deeper insights into his thinking. He sees the AI killer feature in “super-competent colleagues” who know everything about our lives and can help us with tasks.

Such AI agents would be a further development of current applications like ChatGPT and could also operate outside the classic chat interface - without necessarily requiring new hardware.

Sam makes it clear what concerns him: the debate is no longer about whether general artificial intelligence (AGI) will be achieved, but how society can be prepared for this rapid and massive transformation and what guard rails we need.

Our tip: fasten your seatbelt, take a deep breath and dive in!

🤖 Robots have their ChatGPT moment

Robots and AI are the new dream team! Why is that?

Because robots are no longer programmed by humans as before, but are learning systems! They understand physics and the relationships in the real world, and they can gain experience to improve themselves.

The Figure 01 is supported by GPT, the Tesla Optimus is trying to be helpful in the factory, and we have already set up a savings account for the new household helper Astribot S1.

DrEureka balances on a big yoga ball (anything but trivial for a robot!) and amazes everyone after its predecessor had already demonstrated its fast fingers.

Also, the bionic bees from Festo are super clever - but the first thing we remembered was the Black Mirror episode with those robot killer bees … Someone should take a look, which Black Mirror scripts have already become reality today.

So, let's finish on a lighter note with this clip from Boston Dynamics featuring Sparkles, the well-behaved robo-dog … and not the fire-breathing Thermonator.

P.S.: These robot examples are all based on nature. Have you ever wondered why most robots look human-like? The answer is quite simple: so that they can interact in and with our world.

We made it! But no need to be sad. The AInauts will be back soon, with new content for you.

Reto & Fabian from the AInauten

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