America is short over 3 million homes. People are pouring billions into 3D construction companies because machines can build homes twice as fast as stick-built homes. But 98% of homes are still built on-site, mostly out of wood. And in 2023, only about 100 out of 1.2 million completed homes in the US were made with a 3D printer.
In the following video, from Business Insider, we hear from multiple 3D construction companies to find out what it will take to build more, how the cost compares to stick-built homes, and find out whether it can help solve our housing shortage.
Generative AI, especially the products released or announced by tech corporations like Microsoft, Alphabet or Meta and the current forerunner in the field, OpenAI, has attracted widespread attention and investments in the billions over the past two years. However, as a recent survey by YouGov conducted for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism suggests, publicity and venture capital influx doesn’t translate into actual usage.
Data from the survey conducted in six countries in March and April of 2024 shows that even respondents in the youngest age group, ranging from 18 to 24 years old, are not using OpenAI’s flagship product ChatGPT regularly. Nine percent claimed to use it daily, while an additional 18 percent use it at least once a week. Monthly users make up 12 percent of all respondents, while 17 percent used it once or twice. This shows that, at least among survey participants, 44 percent have never used ChatGPT even once.
The difference between casual, heavy and no usage is more pronounced in older age brackets. While 84 percent of respondents over the age of 55 have never used OpenAI‘s chatbot, which produces answers sourced from its training material by calculating the statistical probability of every next word in a sentence, between 13 and 15 percent of the remaining age groups have at least used it once or twice. Heavy usage, as in at least weekly consultation of ChatGPT, drops from 19 percent for 25- to 34-year-olds to nine percent for 45- to 54-year-olds.
While every major tech corporation is working on their version of a large language model, companies like Microsoft and most recently Apple also partnered with the Sam Altman-led OpenAI to enhance their products. According to data from CB Insights, OpenAI has recently become the world’s third-highest-valued unicorn, a moniker describing private companies with a market valuation of more than $1 billion, at $80 billion. It trails behind Chinese tech company ByteDance ($225 billion) and Elon Musk’s SpaceX ($150 billion).
More than one and a half years after OpenAI released ChatGPT, starting a craze around large language models and generative AI, Apple has officially boarded the AI hype train. On Monday, the iPhone maker unveiled a whole suite of AI features that will be baked into the upcoming versions of iOS, iPadOS and macOS. Apple of course wouldn’t be Apple if it didn’t have its own take on the matter, so it didn’t just call those features AI features but a “personal intelligence system” called Apple Intelligence.
With a focus on privacy, as most tasks will be completed on-device, Apple Intelligence showcases the wide-ranging capabilities of AI, as it will help users craft texts, create images, take actions across app and make everyday tasks easier by understanding context and drawing appropriate conclusions.
The wide range of new features Apple announced on Monday highlights not only the many strengths of AI at its current stage, but also one weakness. While AI is a jack of all trades, doing a lot of things quite well, a true killer feature has yet to emerge, perhaps explaining the limited usage of ChatGPT and other AI tools so far. While it’s great to play around with these novel tools, few users really rely on AI in their everyday routines, which of course, Apple’s entrance into the field could change.
According to a recent survey conducted by YouGov on behalf of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, “playing around or experimenting” is in fact one of the most popular use cases for generative AI tools so far and even so, just 11 percent of more than 12,000 adults surveyed across six countries have used an AI tool for that purpose. Answering factual questions is another widespread use case, although “widespread” is a bit of a stretch at 11 percent. Summing up several activities, 28 percent of respondents had used an AI tool to create media in some way, while 24 percent had used artificial intelligence to get information. With writing tools, an ”Image Playground” and deep Siri integration, Apple is addressing both these use cases with Apple Intelligence – but only time will tell what will emerge as the killer feature.
