What looked to be the next step of Artificial Intelligence has now been revealed, but it’s not all it was cracked up to be. Samsung’s subsidiary STAR Labs showed off their Neon project which were working on “artificial humans” but it’s not what you think it means. They’re actually digital avatars, which are animated to have a human likeness, but at this point I very much doubt they’re much more than Google’s Assistant, Alexa, or Siri.
Doesn’t really count as a “artificial human”, does it?
Well, they are doing something new with their avatars, but they haven’t explained it all too well. Their first official press release didn’t explain the tech and was basically all hype and buzzwords.
To the point where STAR Labs CEO Pranav Mistry said:
“Neon is like a new kind of life,
“There are millions of species on our planet and we hope to add one more.” said Mistry.
Am I the only one concerned this guy thinks he’s God?
And that’s not all folks. All the promo images and leaked videos are apparently fake, so to add on to the vagueness we’ve witnessed so far, even their promo material is fake.
“Scenarios shown at our CES Booth and in our promotional content are fictionalized and simulated for illustrative purposes only.”
Essentially, we have no idea what the real project Neon avatars look like. So what do we know?
One thing is that every Neon avatar is ‘computationally generated’ and are babe to basically have a conversation with you as if it were a real human being. They’ll show emotion and intelligence (or so they say) and the likeness have been modelled after real humans. Each avatar can be customised to perform different tasks, and is able to respond to queries “with latency of less than a few milliseconds”. Here’s some uses they pointed out their NEONs would be capable of:
“In the near future, one will be able to license or subscribe to a NEON as a service representative, a financial advisor, a healthcare provider, or a concierge. Over time, NEONs will work as TV anchors, spokespeople, or movie actors; or they can simply be companions and friends.”
While it’s not what we expected it to be, it is a step into a future where AI has been able to adapt to have a physical form. Maybe you’d see a NEON at the airport, or convenience store as a hologram. It’s cool, but it’s just not what we thought it’d be.
