AI ASSISTANT REVOLUTION

Today, we have ChatGPT, Bard, Alexa, Siri, and a thousand others. Nearly a half-century ago, there was GUS. GUS, which stood for the Genial Understander System, came out of a project at Xerox PARC in the 1970s that hoped to find ways to teach computers to understand human language.

Enterprising engineers, researchers, linguists, and even users have been longing for a way to talk to their computers pretty much since computers first became a thing. You shouldn’t have to communicate with your device by writing code, they figured, or by clicking in the right boxes in the right order.

You should simply be able to talk to your computer like you’d talk to a person. Virtual assistants are a staple of science fiction, a decades-long startup pitch, and to many people, just an obviously good idea.

To help us navigate the state and future of AI assistants, we enlisted Richard Socher, the CEO of You.com. You.com started out calling itself a search engine, but it doesn’t do that anymore. Now, it’s an AI assistant that can help you find information online but also write emails, create images, calculate your exact mortgage payment, and much more.