Good morning, and happy Friday.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Thursday that Amazon will soon be unveiling an AI-driven Alexa revamp.

“We continue to re-architect the brain of Alexa with a new set of foundation models that we’ll share with customers in the near future,” he said.

— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View

In today’s newsletter:

• 👁️‍🗨️ AI for Good: Speaking without speaking

• 🤖 Physical Intelligence unveils prototype robot butler 

• 💻 ChatGPT search is here

• 📊 Amazon pops on earnings beat; Apple falls

AI for Good: Speaking without speaking

Voice disorders, vocal chord conditions and surgical operations can all make it difficult or impossible — even temporarily — for a person to speak. 

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) are working on rectifying this. 

The details: A team of bioengineers recently developed a thin, stretchy device that, when affixed to someone’s throat, enables speech. 

• The device is loaded up with sensors that analyze muscle movements, translating those movements into electronic signals which are then read and processed into speech signals by machine learning algorithms. 

• An additional component then turns those speech signals into vocal expression. 

In experiments, the device achieved an accuracy rate of nearly 95%, demonstrating that it is indeed capable of processing and translating silent, muscle-based speech intentions into audible vocalization. 

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Physical Intelligence unveils prototype robot butler

The promise of AI and robotics is far from being realized. Generative (digital) AI is one thing; combining that technology with robotic systems that can successfully navigate the real world is another thing entirely. 

It’s a massive software, hardware and engineering challenge that Physical Intelligence, for one, is undertaking. 

The startup — which recently told investors it wants to raise an additional $300 million at a $2 billion valuation — on Thursday unveiled the early days of its approach to building, well, physical intelligence. 

The details: In a lengthy blog post, the company detailed the creation of Pi-Zero, a general-purpose robot foundation model that it has been working on for the past eight months. The company called the model the “first step toward our long-term goal of developing artificial physical intelligence, so that users can simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask chatbot assistants.”

• The idea behind the model was to develop a generalist approach, rather than a specialist approach, so that one model could potentially control a variety of robots across a variety of skills. 

• The model was trained on a healthy mix of data sources, from internet-scale vision-language data to open-source robot manipulation datasets to the company’s own datasets, which featured dexterous tasks from several different robots. Models were then fine-tuned to specific tasks. 

What can it do? Physical Intelligence shared dozens of videos of the robot in action, folding laundry, bussing tables, placing eggs in a carton, placing food in a box, bagging groceries and working a microwave, to name a few. 

According to the company, the robot — which features a two-armed setup, complete with a laptop and pincer fingers — was successfully able to perform all of the above functions. These are demo videos, so they ought to be taken with a grain of salt; we don’t know what might have occurred behind the scenes. 

Acknowledging these early successes, the company said that “we have a long way to go,” adding: “We expect that the coming year will see major advances along all of these directions, but the initial results paint a promising picture for the future of robot foundation models.”

• Enterprise AI firm Sana raised $55 million at a $500 million valuation.

• Brain-computer interface company INBRAIN neuroelectronics raised $50 million in Series B funding.

• xAI has discussed raising money at a $45 billion valuation (The Information).

• Microsoft has been giving users access to a gender-detection AI years after promising to retire the technology (404 Media).

• Waze will soon let you report incidents with your voice (The Verge).

• Super Micro’s $50 billion stock collapse underscores risk of AI hype (CNBC).

• US inflation on track to meet Federal Reserve’s 2% target (Semafor).

If you want to get in front of an audience of 200,000+ developers, business leaders and tech enthusiasts, get in touch with us here.

• Head of Lifecycle Marketing: Discord, San Francisco, CA

• SVP, Head of Product: Time, New York City Metropolitan Area

• TubeBuddy: YouTube optimization and SEO tool. 

• Parallel AI: A tool to train AI employees to perform business-specific tasks using company data.

The OpenAI Corner: ChatGPT Search, but no GPT-5 

OpenAI on Thursday rolled out ChatGPT search to Plus, Team and SearchGPT waitlist users. It will roll out to enterprise and free users over the coming months. 

The launch comes a few months after OpenAI unveiled SearchGPT, a prototype of the feature. 

• OpenAI said in a post that now, ChatGPT will be capable of choosing to search the web based on a given query, returning a natural language answer complete with source links. 

• OpenAI said it partnered with a variety of news and data (such as weather) providers to fill ChatGPT search with relevant sources and information. 

OpenAI currently has “no plans” to introduce ads into the search interface, according to The Verge. The release comes amid a wide slate of ongoing copyright lawsuits, not just against the developers, but against the AI search startup Perplexity, as well. 

In other news, CEO Sam Altman participated in a Reddit AMA, during which he said that the company has “some very good releases coming later this year! Nothing that we are going to call GPT-5, though.”

He added that OpenAI believes artificial general intelligence, a hypothetically human-like AI, is “achievable with current hardware.” 

There is no evidence that this will be the case; in fact, many researchers believe that the current architecture, due to its fundamental flaws, does not represent a pathway to such a technology, if it is even achievable at all. 

Big Tech earnings: Amazon rises, Apple falls 

Big Tech took a bit of a hit following Microsoft and Meta’s earnings performance Wednesday night; despite both companies outperforming revenue and earnings expectations, both stocks retreated modestly Thursday (Microsoft dropped 6%, its worst day since Oct. 26, 2022; Meta dropped 4%).  

The primary reason behind the fall seems to be focused on capital expenditures, which both companies warned would continue to grow as they race to build out more AI infrastructure. This steady growth in AI investment is to the tune of billions of dollars, and even to companies of this size, such levels of spending could very well begin to hurt profitability, a fact that is not lost on Wall Street. 

Indeed, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said that the company expects to take a $1.5 billion hit to income this quarter, mainly due to anticipated losses from OpenAI. 

The theme of massive, ongoing AI investments continued on Thursday night, when Apple and Amazon delivered their own third-quarter results. 

Here’s how they did.

Amazon: 

• Amazon brought in $158.9 billion in revenue, an 11% year-over-year increase that came in above analyst expectations of $157.2 billion. 

• The company reported earnings of $1.43 per share, above the $1.14 expected by analysts. 

Similar to Google and Microsoft, however, a key number for Amazon involved its Amazon Web Services metric; the unit brought in $27.5 billion, a 19% year-over-year increase. 

CEO Andy Jassy — like his Magnificent 7 peers — mentioned new cloud “infrastructure and AI capabilities” that the company plans to share soon. The company reported an 81% year-over-year increase in capital expenditures — from $12.48 billion to $22.62 billion — as, like its peers, it works to build out more AI infrastructure. 

On Amazon’s earnings call, Jassy said the company plans to spend about $75 billion on capex this year, adding that Amazon will likely spend more in 2025. “The increase bumps here are really driven by generative AI,” Jassy said. “It is a really unusually large, maybe once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity,” he said, adding that investors “will feel good about this long term, that we’re aggressively pursuing it.”

Closing the day down 3%, the stock popped around 6% in after-hours trading. 

Deepwater’s Gene Munster said that the stock surged because “they gave investors confidence that AWS growth can continue to accelerate and they can expand margins at the same time.”

Apple: 

• Apple brought in $94.93 billion in total revenue, a 6% year-over-year increase that came in slightly below analyst expectations of $94.58 billion. 

• The company reported earnings of $1.64 per share, slightly above the $1.60 that analysts were expecting. 

iPhone sales drove $46.22 billion in revenue, and Apple’s services unit drove $24.97 billion in revenue. 

The AI segue for Apple is Apple Intelligence, the new line of AI-powered features that have begun to roll out to iPhones and Macs. CEO Tim Cook said in a statement that Apple Intelligence “sets a new standard for privacy in AI and supercharges our lineup heading into the holiday season.”

Cook said on the call that the AI features will be "rolling out in the coming months,” a “subtle reminder that patience will be a virtue for Apple investors,” according to Munster.  

Closing the day down 1.8%, the stock fell another 1.5% in after-hours trading. 

And that’s it until Nvidia reports later this month. (Shares of Nvidia closed the day down nearly 5%, but rose 1% in after-hours trading). 

Based on the levels of capex reported by the Big Tech giants that we looked at this week, I imagine Nvidia will have a very healthy quarter. 

It’s interesting, though — the spend on AI infrastructure is happening, period, whether Wall Street likes it or not. The Big Tech sector is all-in on the idea of productizing AI. But that is no guarantee that these companies will actually see returns that match the size of these investments. 

And, in any case, these levels of capex likely can’t continue forever, especially if they’re not driving sensible returns. Plus, at some point, the infrastructure will be built. Then we’ll see if the returns start rolling in.

🤔 Your thought process:

Selected Image 1 (Left):

• “the creepy kids in the second picture don't have the correct anatomy to be real kids in costumes, or the balance in structure to be props.”

Selected Image 2 (Right):

• “Fooled by the little boy in the foreground, thought sure he was a fake. Sorry, buddy! 🙂”

💭 A poll before you go

Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!

We’ll see you in the next one.

Here’s your view on Halloween candy:

Reeces are the favorite candy, both of our wonderful readers (and their Editor-in-Chief). Nearly 30% for Reeces. Well done.

Milky Way, Snickers and Junior Mints tied for second place, each with 12.5% of the vote.

Tied for third place, with 10% of the vote each, were Kit-Kats and “all of them.”