Each week we’ll gather headlines and tips to keep you current with how generative AI affects PR and the world at large. If you have ideas on how to improve the newsletter, let us know!

What You Should Know

Sam Altman Describes ‘The Intelligence Age’

If you’re having trouble articulating the impact of AI advancements on society, you’re not alone. In a new blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote about how deep learning has unlocked algorithms that are helping people solve complex problems. 

“I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this,” Altman wrote, “I can never really internalize how consequential it is.”

According to Altman, we’re on the cusp of “The Intelligence Age,” in which AI can provide expertise to create almost anything and teach students in any language and at any pace. His optimistic view of the future included a prediction that superintelligence or artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the nebulous goal of OpenAI — will be possible in “a few thousand days.”

He also said, in an interview with Axios yesterday, that OpenAI will have more “big news” this year. With more AI advancements just around the corner, communicators need to quickly grasp their implications and learn how they can support more personalized, more resonant, and more effective storytelling. Communicators led the charge with experimentation when ChatGPT came onto the scene in November 2022, and we’re still best positioned to re-think how AI can help us tell stories in the Intelligence Age.

Elsewhere …

• PODCAST: What AI Means for Marketing, Healthcare, Cybersecurity, and More
• Jony Ive and OpenAI’s Sam Altman Are Working on a Top-Secret AI Device
• Cloudflare’s New Marketplace Will Let Websites Charge AI Bots for Scraping
• Spotify’s AI Playlist Builder Now Available in the US

Tips and Tricks

 A taste of Apple Intelligence

What’s happening: Apple released iOS 18 last week, the long-awaited operating system that was supposed to include the tech giant’s own brand of AI. Alas, many features, including Writing Tools, will be released next month.

Just a taste: Despite the continued wait for some of Apple Intelligence’s main features, one capability that may help communicators is already available: audio transcription. 

How it works: First, use the Voice Memos app to record the audio. Once it’s complete, click on the sound-wave icon, then the speech bubble in the lower-left corner to generate a transcript. You’ll be able to select all or a portion of the transcript and copy the text so you can paste it into another app.

This will get easier next month when Apple releases iOS 18.1. In that software update, users will be able to record, transcribe, and summarize audio using the Notes and Phone apps. When users start recording a call, anyone else on the line will hear a message notifying them, kind of like the pop-up you get when a Zoom or Google Meet call is recorded. 

Quote of the Week

“Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.

“If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.”

— Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI in a blog post titled “The Intelligence Age”

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