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Tony Soprano leaned back in his chair, his eyes carefully scanning his visitor.
“What brings you to my neck of the woods?” asked the TV gangster.
“I need information. What is the capital of Iowa?”
Tony laughed at the unexpected question, a smirk on his face.
“You’re kidding me, aren’t you? Aiwa?” He said in his distinctive voice. “The capital of Des Moines. Why do you need to know that?”
“I was curious,” came the reply.
Tony raised an eyebrow, a hint of amusement in his voice.
“Curiosity, huh?” He said. “No one is curious about random state capitals for no reason. You’re withholding something.”
The previous conversation did not take place at Satriale’s Pork Store, Bada Bing! A strip club or any of the other familiar haunts of a famous gangster.
And this Tony Soprano is not the beloved HBO character portrayed by the late James Gandolfini from 1999 to 2007.
Stick with me. I’ll explain.
Create chatbots and talk to them
No, this conversation was created by Character.ai, a neural language prototyping chatbot service that can generate human-like text responses
Users can engage in dialogues with fictional and historical figures and celebrities.
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Character.ai was launched in 2022 by two former employees of Google Brain, a deep learning AI research team under the umbrella of Google AI, a division at Google dedicated to AI research.
The team merged with former Google sister company DeepMind to form Google DeepMind last year.
Character.ai is mostly free to use and attracts 3.5 million daily users, who spend an average of two hours a day using or even designing the platform’s AI-powered chatbots. the edge It was reported in May.
Now, Google’s parent company, Alphabet (Google) The company is reportedly developing a product to create customizable chatbots that can be modeled after user-made celebrities.
The bots will be similar to online personas from Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms (dead) and Character.AI, based on celebrities like football star Tom Brady and, yes, Tony Soprano, according to the informationwhich cited people with direct knowledge of the project.
The chatbots could launch as soon as this year and will be powered by the company’s Gemini chatbot. This is the Google equivalent of Microsoft (MSFT) ChatGPT powered by OpenAI, a large-language model AI chatbot launched on November 30, 2022, is credited with starting the AI revolution.
It’s not known which celebrities will be included. Google is also reportedly trying to partner with influencers, and the company is working on a feature that would let people create their own chatbots by describing their personality and appearance.
Alphabet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Alphabet CEO Pichai: “The first AI company since 2016”
With all this talk about the AI revolution, some people might think that Alphabet has been a bit of Tony’s henchman lately.
But Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai disagrees.
“We have been a leader in AI since 2016, and have pioneered many recent breakthroughs that support the advancement of AI for us and the industry.” He told analysts During the company’s first-quarter earnings call in April.
Alphabet’s first-quarter earnings beat Wall Street expectations. “We’ve rolled out Gemini 1.5 Pro, which shows massive performance improvements across a number of dimensions,” Pichai said.
“We have the best infrastructure for the AI era,” he told analysts. “Building world-leading infrastructure is part of our DNA, starting from our early days when we had to design hardware specifically designed to power research.”
Bob Lange of TheStreet Pro Definitely appreciated Alphabet’s early efforts in artificial intelligence.
More AI stocks:
- Nvidia has a $4 trillion valuation on the horizon as AI sees chip sales boost
- Adobe is facing a troubling lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for “trapping” customers
- Apple is planning to make big changes to future iPhones
“With all the hype around AI and companies offering this exciting new service (like Nvidia (NVDA) “It has not been determined,” Lang said earlier this month. “Other names have fallen off the radar.”
“Let’s get this straight: The AI revolution was probably started by Alphabet/Google, they’ve been doing it for years,” Lange added.
He noted that recreating the scenario is another story, and that “many investors are concerned that the company may be left behind.”
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“After all, when you have competitors like Microsoft (MSFT) apple (Apple company) And even Amazon (Amzn) “If you’re hitting your heels, you better be ready to fight,” he said.
Google’s first-quarter earnings were “very strong as the company also announced massive stock buybacks,” Lang said.
“This puts a nice floor under the stock,” he said. “As implied volatility fades (as it often does after earnings) we see how the stock moves without any impacts. So far, so good, in our view.”
Lang said he expects to see more upside “once big investors see how big the deal is compared to its peers, and realize that the AI phenomenon is big with Alphabet.”
Jefferies raises price target for Alphabet shares
On June 26, Jefferies analyst Brent Thiel raised the company’s price target on Alphabet to $215 from $200 and affirmed a buy rating on the stock after surveying more than 1,500 consumers and office workers about artificial intelligence.
Thiel said the survey’s findings include that Google leads in consumer opinion sharing on AI prowess, and that more consumers prefer Google’s AI-powered search answers over traditional results.
Additionally, the survey found that there aren’t many “killer AI apps” yet; consumers’ willingness to pay for AI is low; and OpenAi is the most popular among workers, but Google isn’t far behind, according to the analyst.
Now before we leave you, let’s ask AI Tony Soprano one last thing.
“When was George Washington born?”
Tony rolled his eyes at the question.
“Jesus, you’re paying for it now,” he said. “But okay, I’ll forgive you. Washington was born on February 22, 1732. Do you want more useless trivia, or are you going to tell me what you really want?”
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