The future is … sending AI avatars to meetings for us, says Zoom boss | Artificial intelligence (AI)
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Zoom users could in the not-too-distant future send AI avatars to attend meetings in their absence, the company’s CEO has suggested, delegating the heavy lifting of corporate life to a system trained on their own content.
Such a system will be in “five or six years”, Eric Yuan told The Verge magazinebut added that the company is working on closer technologies that could bring it closer to reality.
“Let’s assume, fast forward five or six years, that AI is ready,” Yuan said. “AI can probably help with maybe 90% of the work, but in terms of real-time interaction, today you and I are talking online. So I can send my digital version, you can send your digital version.
Using AI avatars in this way can free up time for less career-focused choices, added Yuan, who also founded Zoom. “You and I may have more time for more personal interactions, but maybe not for work. Maybe for something else. Why do we have to work five days a week? Down the road, four days or three days. Why don’t you spend more time with your family?’
Eventually, he suggests, each user will have their own “large language model” (LLM), the underlying technology of services like ChatGPT, which will be trained on their own speech and behavior patterns to allow them to generate highly personalized answers to inquiries and requests.
Such systems could be a natural evolution of AI tools that already exist today. Services like Gmail can summarize and suggest responses to emails based on previous messages, while Microsoft Teams will transcribe and summarize video conferences, automatically generating a to-do list from the content.
Other services will generate realistic video avatars and believable generated speech from a text transcript. Put them all together and you might feel like an AI avatar is tantalizingly close.
However, artificial intelligence expert Simon Willison dismissed the idea that such technology was inevitable or even possible. “My main problem with this whole idea is that it’s pure AI science fiction,” he said. “Just because an LLM can make a passable impression on someone doesn’t mean they can actually do useful ‘work’ on that person’s behalf.
“LLMs are useful tools for thinking. They are terrible tools for delegating decision-making. Right now, that’s my red line for using them: Anytime someone delegates actual decision-making power to an opaque random number generator is a recipe for disaster.
Others expressed concern about the blurring of real and fake. Steve Won, chief product officer of security and identity company 1Password, pointed to Yuan’s claims as evidence that online verification is about to get significantly more sophisticated.
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“How many digital twins can I have at any given time? It’s like a Max Headroom situation,” Vonn said Tuesday, referring to the 1980s TV series.
“The fact that the world’s leading virtual communication app thinks, ‘Yes, it’s perfectly fine to have inauthentic conversations, to present and make business decisions,’ I think that makes it a hot issue that we’re going to have to solve.”
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