Latest news with #ChatGPT-style
Scottish Sun
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
I bought sex doll to stop me cheating – now I own SIX & they give me what my wife can't…but we have one strict rule
Larry explains how the raunchy dolls, some of which come with robotic heads that enable them to speak, have actually improved his marriage LOVE MACHINE I bought sex doll to stop me cheating – now I own SIX & they give me what my wife can't…but we have one strict rule WHEN Larry's eye started to wander while his first wife was away for work, he decided to purchase his first blow-up sex doll. Decades later, the sex robot fanatic has spent more than £25,000 on his doll collection - and insists it enhances his marriage rather than sabotaging it. 7 Larry, from California, says his sex dolls enhance his marriage rather than sabotaging it Credit: Supplied 7 Larry owns six sex doll bodies that come with six artificial heads Credit: Supplied 7 The sex robot collector has spent thousands on sex dolls - including some that have robot heads Credit: Supplied 7 Larry B, 67, said his obsession began in 1996 when he was feeling lonely Credit: Supplied Larry B, 67, who lives in California and is now in his second marriage, said his obsession began in 1996 when he was feeling lonely in his relationship with his first wife. The water maintenance manager - who goes by the name of "Obi-Wan" in the sex doll community - said his first experience of a sex doll kept him "straight and narrow" so he decided to try more advanced versions. Larry told The Sun: "I was out of town and I started getting lonely out there, and the eye started to wander. "But I said no, I don't want to cheat on my wife so I'll use one of these [sex dolls] so I acquired one. "It was a blow up doll at the time and you had to use your imagination, turning the lights off. "It felt okay, it took care of my needs and it kept me straight for a few years. Then I stumbled onto the more full-bodied models." Now, Larry owns six sex doll bodies that come with six artificial heads - and two additional robotic heads. When fitted with the robotic heads, they are capable of talking by using what he describes as a limited ChatGPT-style technology that offers answers to his questions. They also come built in with a special AI "X Mode" that promises to "detect touch, movement, and transitions from mild arousal to orgasm" while hooked up to an app. He added: "I have six real doll bodies. Each of the bodies has at least one head. And then I have two robot heads. "You can interface and talk with them. Their ability to have an intelligent conversation is somewhat limited. "But you can probe them and ask them certain things and if you ask in the right way, they will give you all kinds of scientific definitions. "How they do it is a mystery to me." They provide short-term relief, satisfaction that my wife either doesn't want to get into at the time or can't. Larry B He continued: "They can have light chit chat with you, they can get interested in you and have intimate activity with you if you put them into that mode and sufficiently provide input. "They banter back and forth, that helps them to get into the mood, if you will. "You have to kind of coax the AI along in order to facilitate that end goal. It takes maybe two hours before they're ready to play around. "And then you only get a short time with them, 10 minutes I think, is the timeout on the program." Robot satisfaction While you might think owning one sex doll, let alone six of them, could easily get in the way of a loving human relationship, Larry insists it enhances his marriage to his second wife. He says the raunchy robots had nothing to do with his split from his first wife around two decades ago, but when meeting his second wife, he was up front about his X-rated hobby early on. His attraction to robot sex dolls has not impacted their relationship of 16 years, he claims. Larry says: "I was up front. She looked at me a little side-eyed. I said if you want to see one, I'm open to that, and she said no, not really. "I said if you wanted to join in, we could. If you want a male version of one of those, we could. She said 'No thanks, you're enough." He added: "They provide short-term relief, satisfaction that my wife either doesn't want to get into at the time or can't." 7 When fitted with robotic heads, the dolls are capable of talking using what he describes as a limited ChatGPT-style technology Credit: Supplied 7 A brand new full-bodied sex doll sells for around £8,000 Credit: Supplied Larry told The Sun that he purchased the robot heads pre-owned, via the doll community, for around £3,000. On RealDoll's website, a brand new full-bodied version of Harmony - one of the dolls Larry owns - is listed for sale at around £8,300. There, buyers can select from a choice of 10 body shapes, including "Petite 5", skin colours including "light tan" and "fair", and eye colours including "sky blue" and "kush green". An extra £330 will get you a custom makeup style, while there is also a choice of custom freckles and piercings. The site also promises the doll heads have "multiple points of actuation" that give them facial expressions, an ability to move their heads and even blink. The X-Mode also allows users to "create unique personalities and control the voice of your robot", it adds. Larry says using the X-Mode also allows him to intimately interact with his doll girlfriends. Love machines Questions have long been raised over a potential future in which some people develop an emotional attachment with an ultra-realistic robot, as portrayed in the hit film Ex Machina. It's feared boys are being left behind at school and shut of work due to the rise of AI girlfriends and turning to chatbots for partnerships. Some have warned that "perfect" AI girlfriends are ruining an entire generation of men - and making singletons lonelier than ever. Larry hopes sex robots do not advance too far for fear they could one day manipulate and control him just as the robot Ava, portrayed by Alicia Vikander, does in the film. He added: "I think they can get close to having conversations like a human can, but I'm not so confident they will have the depth. "I'm not sure I would like them to actually. "Then we have an Ex Machina scenario, where the robots try to establish their own independence and self-awareness. "It might be too realistic for comfort. The danger is the AI starting to control or steer your feelings, emotions and activities." Larry has been a long-time member of the sex doll community. He says has around 20 pals who own dolls he describes as "associates", and together they use an online forum to buy and sell new models. The community hosts parties together, not for sex but for flaunting their latest models. But after decades of his silicone hobby, Larry has decided it's finally time to call quits on buying any more sex robots. He said: "I'm 67, I don't need to be collecting anymore, it's too heavy. As you get older, you lose muscle mass so you get weaker. "I'll scale down my interests."
Web Release
10 hours ago
- Business
- Web Release
M2M: The NEW Search Mantra
Marketers have spent the past decade obsessing over Google rankings and social algorithms, and yes, those things have been important in how brands tell their story, find customers, and build loyalty. Here is the gamechanger. You are not just marketing to humans anymore. For the entirety of your lifetime, you have only seen people sell to humans (B2C) or to businesses run by humans (B2B). Artificial Intelligence is creating new rules of marketing. AI is not a passing tsunami. It is a permanent tectonic shift in the way we do business. AI is the new front door to your business for millions of consumers. Google's recently rolled out two new features that are changing how search works: AI Mode and AI Overviews. AI Overviews are those AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results. About 30% of searches now trigger these, and they're particularly common for longer questions. Instead of clicking through to websites, people are getting their answers directly from Google. AI Mode is even more dramatic – it's a separate tab that turns search into a conversation. Instead of the usual list of blue links, you get a ChatGPT-style interface that can handle complex questions and follow-ups. You either get mentioned in the AI response, or you're invisible. According to Sharad Agarwal, CEO of Cyber Gear, 'You're not just competing for attention; you're competing for algorithmic favor. Your content needs to be optimized for engagement metrics that train prediction engines, not just humans.' AI platforms and AI agents, the digital assistants that browse and actually do things powered by models like GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Pro are increasingly becoming the gatekeepers between your business and potential customers. AI agents are helping consumers all over the world find and interact with brands in new ways. AI agents don't have eyeballs and brains and hearts. They have parsers and models and system prompts. When an AI agent visits your site, it needs information. It's looking for clean, accessible, structured data it can easily digest and present back to users. It's looking for clear, organized content that they can gobble up and synthesize back to that human user. The visual bells and whistles will be completely wasted on an AI. These agents scrape, summarize, and synthesize the web to guide users to decisions. If your product information, docs, and CTAs aren't structured, visible, and machine-readable, you'll get leapfrogged by a competitor that is. Become AI-visible. Now. Contact Cyber Gear at to be found!
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI's Ambitions Just Became Crystal Clear
Sam Altman is done with keyboards and screens. All that swiping and typing and scrolling—too much potential friction between you and ChatGPT. Earlier today, OpenAI announced its intentions to solve this apparent problem. The company is partnering with Jony Ive, the longtime head of design at Apple, who did pioneering work on products such as the iMac G3, the iPod, and, most famously, the iPhone. Together, Altman and Ive say they want to create hardware built specifically for AI software. Everyone, Altman suggested in a highly produced announcement video, could soon have access to a 'team of geniuses'—presumably, ChatGPT-style assistants—on a 'family of devices.' Such technology 'deserves something much better' than today's laptops, he argued. What that will look like, exactly, he didn't say, and OpenAI declined my request for comment. But the firm will pay roughly $5 billion to acquire Io, Ive's start-up, to figure that 'something much better' out as Ive takes on 'deep design and creative responsibilities' across OpenAI. (Emerson Collective, the majority owner of The Atlantic, is an investor in both Io and OpenAI. And OpenAI entered a corporate partnership with The Atlantic last year.) [Read: The great AI lock-in has begun] Moving into hardware could become OpenAI's most technologically disruptive, and financially lucrative, expansion to date. AI assistants are supposed to help with everything, so it's only natural to try to replace the phones and computers that people do everything on. If the company is successful, within a decade you might be reading (or listening to) a ChatGPT-generated news roundup on an OpenAI device instead of reading an article on your iPhone, or asking the device to file your taxes instead of logging in to TurboTax. In Altman's view, current devices offer only clunky ways to use AI products: You have to open an app or a website, upload the relevant information, continually prompt the AI bot, and then transfer any useful outputs elsewhere. In the promotional video, Ive agrees, suggesting that the era of personal computers and smartphones—a period that he helped define—needs a refresh: 'It's just common sense to at least think, surely, there's something beyond these legacy products,' he tells Altman. Although OpenAI and Io have not specified what they are building, a number of wearable AI pins, smartglasses, and other devices announced over the past year have suggested a vision of an AI assistant always attached to your body—an 'external brain,' as Altman called it today. These products have, so far, uniformly flopped. As just one example, Humane, the maker of a $700 AI 'pin' that attached to a user's clothing, shut down the poorly reviewed product less than a year after launch. Ive, in an interview today with Bloomberg, called these early AI gadgets 'very poor products.' And Apple and OpenAI have had their own share of uninspiring, or even embarrassing, product releases. Still, if any pair has a shot at designing a legitimately useful AI device, it is likely the man who unleashed ChatGPT partnering with someone who led the design of the Apple smartphones, tablets, and laptops that have defined decades of American life and technology. Certainly, a bespoke device would also rapidly accelerate OpenAI's commercial ambitions. The company, once a small research lab, is now valued at $300 billion and growing rapidly, and in March reported that half a billion people use ChatGPT each week. Already, OpenAI is angling to replace every major tech firm: ChatGPT is an internet search tool as powerful as Google, can help you shop online and remove the need to type into Amazon, can be your work software instead of the Microsoft Office suite. OpenAI is even reportedly building a social-media platform. For now, OpenAI relies on the smartphones and web browsers people use to access ChatGPT—products that are all made by business rivals. Altman is trying to cut out the middleman and condense digital life into a single, unified piece of hardware and software. The promise is this: Your whole life could be lived through such a device, turning OpenAI's products into a repository of uses and personal data that could be impossible to leave—just as, if everyone in your family has an iPhone, Macbook, and iCloud storage plan, switching to Android is deeply unpleasant and challenging. [Read: 'We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI'] Several other major tech firms are also trying to integrate generative AI into their legacy devices and software. Amazon has incorporated generative AI into the Alexa voice assistant, Google into its Android phones and search bar, and Apple into the iPhone. Meta has built an AI assistant into its apps and sells smartglasses. Products and platforms which disrupted work, social life, education, and more in the early 2000s are showing their age: Google has become crowded with search-optimized sites and AI-generated content that can make it harder for users to find good information; Amazon is filled with junk; Facebook is a cesspool; and the smartphone is commonly viewed as attention-sapping, if not outright brain-melting. Tech behemoths are jury-rigging AI features into their products to avoid being disrupted—but these rollouts, and Apple's in particular, have been disastrous, giving dangerous health advice, butchering news summaries, and generally crowding and slowing user experiences. Almost 20 years ago, when Apple introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs said in a now-famous speech that 'every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.' Seeming to be in pursuit of similar magic, today's video announcing OpenAI's foray into hardware began with Altman saying, 'I think we have the opportunity here to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer.' But Jobs had an actual product to share and sell. Altman, for now, is marketing his imagination. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Google is banking on AI agents, smart glasses to defend its search crown
Google (GOOG, GOOGL) took its first steps to move beyond its traditional Search product during its I/O conference on Tuesday, debuting a host of new technologies that won't necessarily supplant the 10 blue links that dominate the world of search, but pave the way for a future where they're far less necessary to our everyday lives. From its ChatGPT-style AI Mode built directly into Search and agentic AI feature that will help you shop for products to its renewed push into smart glasses, Google provided early hints at how it's working to evolve its services at a time when the company is under threat from both AI upstarts and government antitrust enforcers. Google built its advertising empire on the back of its Search platform, and it's still its most important business. But companies like OpenAI ( and Perplexity ( have developed their own competing generative AI search products. Google's efforts to fend off its newest foes came into stark relief during one of its recent antitrust hearings when Apple's (AAPL) senior vice president of services Eddy Cue revealed that searches made via that company's Safari browser fell for the first time ever in April. Google is the default search engine for Safari, a part of a $20-billion-a-year deal between the two companies that the Department of Justice is seeking to break up via its antitrust case. Cue attributed the decline to customers opting to use generative AI services like ChatGPT, but Google pushed back in a statement saying that it continues to see overall query growth in Search. But the report sent shockwaves through Wall Street, with shares falling as much as 7.5% when the news broke on May 7. Google has been on its back foot since OpenAI and its partner Microsoft (MSFT) raised the specter of a potential threat to Google's search crown in late 2022. And now the company is pulling out its big guns to prove to its customers and Wall Street that it should remain the search king. One of the biggest changes Google is making to its Search platform is the addition of what it calls AI Mode. Previously only available via the company's Labs testing program, AI Mode allows users to have a back-and-forth conversation with Google's AI, similar to the kind of interactions you'd have with ChatGPT, Bing, or Perplexity. Available first to users in the US, AI Mode is Google's way of competing in the chatbot space without having to ditch its traditional search product. Rather than replacing Search, AI Mode is available as a tab in Search, similar to items like Images, News, and Videos. AI Mode uses Google's frontier models and takes advantage of what the company calls its "query fan-out" technique. The method, Google says, breaks down your queries into smaller subtopics, running a number of separate searches at the same time. That, Google explains, allows AI Mode to perform deeper searches than traditional Search. Google Search's AI Overviews are also getting an update, with some search results pulling information from AI Mode's latest AI models, providing a kind of bridge between the two search options. Google says it's also bringing agentic AI functionality to AI Mode, allowing the software to do things like keep tabs on products you're shopping for and run through the entire checkout flow without you having to lift a finger until it's time to make the purchase. AI Mode also adds a new try-on feature that lets you upload an image of yourself and see what clothes look like on you. It's clear based on those announcements alone that Google is putting a heavy emphasis on AI Mode, setting it up as a potential successor to the traditional Search product. But the company isn't just focusing on improving its odds against newer AI firms; it's also working to combat the emerging threat of smart glasses. Google's biggest advertising rival, Meta, already offers its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in hopes that the eyewear will ring in a consumer tech revolution. Meta is already building its Meta AI to perform search functions for users, and if smart glasses continue to improve and drive users to abandon their smartphones, or at least use them less in favor of searching on their eyewear, Google could find itself in serious trouble. To that end, the company announced it's working with Samsung, Qualcomm (QCOM), Warby Parker (WRBY), and Gentle Monster to develop attractive smart glasses of their own. There's no guarantee that smart glasses will become the go-to tech for consumers around the world like smartphones have throughout the years. But with the threats mounting to its Search business, Google can't afford to let the opportunity slip away. Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@ Follow him on X/Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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Business Standard
20-05-2025
- Business Standard
Apple working on AI version of Siri with ChatGPT-like capabilities: Report
Apple is reportedly testing its own AI chatbot, to catch up with the competition in artificial intelligence. According to a report by 9To5Mac citing Bloomberg, the company has noticed meaningful improvements in Apple's homegrown chatbot's development over the last six months. Some Apple executives now believe that the internal tool is 'on par with recent versions of ChatGPT.' Initially, Apple's AI chief John Giannandrea was said to be hesitant about transforming Siri into a ChatGPT-style assistant, expressing scepticism about the usefulness of such tools. However, the company's direction appears to have shifted, with executives now exploring ways to evolve Siri into a more capable, chatbot-like assistant. Siri to become smarter? The report indicates that Apple is considering major upgrades to Siri, including web access and the ability to generate responses from multiple sources—features that would significantly enhance its current capabilities. These potential additions mark a shift from Siri's traditional, rule-based functionality towards a more conversational and context-aware assistant. 'According to employees, the chatbot the company has been testing internally has made significant strides over the past six months, to the point that some executives see it as on par with recent versions of ChatGPT,' the report stated. While rivals such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft continue to release new large language models (LLMs) and public-facing AI features, Apple has yet to roll out a version of Siri backed by similar underlying technology. The company has also not introduced any chatbot-style product powered by its internal LLM research—at least not publicly. WWDC 2025: Will Siri take a backseat? Apple's upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), scheduled for June 9–13, is expected to focus heavily on iOS 19. While Siri was once expected to be a major part of the event, recent reports suggest its AI enhancements may be delayed. As showcased at last year's WWDC, Apple had originally planned to improve Siri using its Apple Intelligence platform, with features like on-screen awareness and personalised context understanding. However, the company has delayed these features, reportedly due to bugs encountered during internal testing. Those upgrades are still not ready for public release.
