Artificial intelligence (AI) always appealed to me as a way of saving time on boring tasks, such as filling administrative forms, scheduling events or managing trips. But most recently, it occurred to me that if I had a reliable AI avatar trained on my podcast interviews and writings, I could be employing it to answer questions in time-consuming interviews. The saved time would then be available to creative writing and scientific research, which will remain unpredictable as the trademark of my biological self. Sounds like a fantasy?
This week, I arrived one step closer to fulfilling my wish. A new AI company named Cicero trained an AI avatar on my public appearances and emailed me the message:
Hi Avi,
I hope all is well! After many updates, we have produced your replica.
New features in the works include: phone call, text message, whatsapp message, debate mode, group conversation mode, and full visual replica mode. We will have over 100 replicas to be deployed within a week, featuring some amazing minds dead and alive.
The design of the interface, the latency, the voice, and the features noted above are not production level. This module is just for testing quality. Our timeline for a full release is 2 weeks, so your replica and the website will look even more beautiful, sound more realistic (without bugs), and work even faster in due time.
I hope you like the V1 of your replica. It is truly exciting and our beta testers have loved it. A few have actually begun reading your blogs I have been told. Let me know how you like it and if you have any questions.
Jared Zelman
Founder, Cicero
The “persona” that Cicero listed so far in their beta-testing site include Dan Arieli, Joe Biden, Napoleon Bonaparte, Yaron Brook, Warren Buffett, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Kamala Harris, Xi Jinping, Steve Jobs, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, Richard Wrangham, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Mark Zuckerberg, and … Avi Loeb.
I had forwarded the link of my AI avatar to my research group with the message:
Dear friends and colleagues,
Please test my avatar link below and let me know if you notice any red flags.
Does it sound at all like me?
Thank you so much.
Avi
Alex Delacroix, the Chief Engineer of the Galileo Project, wrote back:
Dear Avi,
I think your Avatar answered my three questions just as you would have.
Now, let’s see what else it might reveal about you, LOL.
Alex
Not bad for version 1.0 of my AI avatar. I will keep creating new materials until other people will not be able to distinguish my AI avatar from my biological brain. Call it my personal Turing Test.
There is a bigger benefit to perfecting my AI avatar, as it will maintain my narrative in conversations long after I die. I wish Cicero existed before my parents passed away, because I would have loved to inform their AI replicas about the latest developments in my life and hear their plausible responses.
Currently, the number of parameters in Large Language Models is still 2–3 orders of magnitude lower than the nearly quadrillion synapses which connect neurons in the human brain. But within a decade or two, when the exponential growth inherent in Moore’s Law will bring artificial neural networks close to the number of parameters in the human brain, we might have a similar experience interacting with AI avatars as we have with people.
AI avatars would allow us to interact more frequently with rare, wise biological brains which we otherwise have no chance of meeting, because they lived at a different time or place. Consider the following example.
As a result of competition, jealousy or tribalism, most biological brains promote toxic critical thinking against those who think differently. This is particularly true for innovation in academia where the stakes are often lower than in politics, allowing mobs to violate common sense over long periods of time. I would have loved to converse about my personal experience as a scientist with an AI avatar of the politician Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt who said on April 23, 1910 in a speech at the Sorbonne: “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Unfortunately, Cicero did not replicate the wisdom of Teddy Roosevelt yet, and for now we have to interact with less wise biological brains that are far more common in daily life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. His new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2023.
