OpenAI’s ChatGPT has set the generative AI train in motion and now, the biggest tech companies in the world are trying to get themselves on board. We already saw how Microsoft got on board while Google was late to the station. But there are other big names in technology that are developing their own AI products and services for their business. Here are some of the latest AI offerings that Apple and Tiktok are working on. Also, as a bonus, see how engineers integrated ChatGPT with Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot to make it understand and respond to some natural language voice commands. Apple’s AI-powered health coach Apple is the biggest technology company in the world by revenue and it is no surprise that it has a few AI tricks up its sleeve. The Cupertino-based tech giant seems to be working on an AI-powered health coaching service, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Apple already has a big head start in this space with products like the Apple Watch and services like its Fitness+. The company has codenamed its new AI-powered coaching service Quartz and is reportedly being designed to motivate users to work out every day and stay healthy. Just like Fitness+, Quartz will also come with a monthly subscription cost. Gurman reports that the company has involved talent from the Siri and AI teams to accelerate the development of the Quartz project. Due to this, the service could launch as early as 2024, provided it does not come across any roadblocks. TikTok integrates AI TikTok may be blocked in the most populous country in the world but despite that, the short video platform remains as one of the biggest social networks in the world with more than 1.05 billion monthly active users, as of February 2023, according to Statista. But despite its popularity, the ByteDance-owned app is going through rocky waters at the moment. The United States, where the app has 150 million users, is considering a historic move that could either ban Tiktok or force ByteDance to sell it to American owners. As that is happening, in the background, TikTok is working on a feature that will let users create AI-generated profile pictures, according to a report by The Verge citing social media consultant Matt Navarra. The tool seems to create headshots that look a lot like what you might see from the Lensa app by Prisma Labs. But since the feature would be directly integrated into the TikTok app, there is a chance that more users could use AI-generated profile pictures. Boston Dynamics Ten years ago, if someone asked you to imagine what artificial intelligence would look like, there is a good chance that the image in your head would look more like a Boston Dynamics robot than ChatGPT on your computer screen. The three-decade-old company that was spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has captured widespread attention in recent years with “Spot,” its robotic dog and “Atlas,” its humanoid robot. Spot’s unveiling in 2016 was impressive in itself—a highly mobile robot that could move almost as fluidly and naturally as an actual dog. But after Spot went on sale in 2020, Atlas has been hogging a lot of the limelight with its dancing and parkour skills. Now, it seems like it is time for Spot to come back into the limelight since an engineer seems to have integrated it with ChatGPT. Santiago Valdarrama is a director of computer visions solutions at machine learning-based visual inspection company Levatas. Valdarrama shared a video on YouTube where a team from Levatas seems to have integrated ChatGPT into a Spot robot. In the video, Valdarrama can be seen asking the robot questions like “What is your battery level” and “how many inspections do you have in your next mission.” The robot seems to answer these questions correctly. Valdararama also seems to give the robot a command in the video. “You are crowding my space. Spot, walk backwards.” Spot begins moving backwards almost immediately. While this may look like the engineers have created a dog that can understand and respond to natural language commands, that is not necessarily the case. Since the edited video only shows bits and pieces of what is actually happening, it is possible that the combined Spot and ChatGPT system has only been trained to work on a few commands. This is because even if ChatGPT were to “understand” commands, translating it into programs to be executed by the robot accurately is a non-trivial task to say the least.
