Hey {{first_name|Conscious Church Fam}} 👋
Morning! This week an AI avatar fooled nearly half the people who spoke to it on a video call, the US government opened an AI front door, and Claude got a new Sonnet that costs less to run.
Here's what we're covering:
Tavus' Griffin AI passes for human on video calls
America.gov, the US government's new AI chatbot
Claude Sonnet 5.5 gets close to Opus for less
Let's dive in 👇
✍️ Josh's Musings
We’ve been travelling this week.
Well, almost not.
I got food poisoning in the early hours of last Monday morning which almost derailed our Tuesday morning flight plans.
But thanks to God it was just a flash 24 hour thing.
Travelling with 4 is challenging regularly,
Let alone across the world.
ALAS, we made it and the 3 older ones loved having the Angry Birds game on the screen haha.
Cleared through my workload before a bit of time off for a family wedding, where I am the best man..
First time doing that.. any advice?
For now.. we’re adapting to the timezone and enjoying all the family in one place.
Have a great week.
Stay Conscious, Stay Wild
Josh
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Image: Tavus | The Conscious Church
Tavus has shown off Griffin, an AI that appears on a live video call as a lifelike person who can see you, hear you and react in real time. In the company's own test, 48% of people who spoke to it thought they were talking to a real human.
The Details:
Griffin watches and listens while you talk, so it can nod mid-sentence or react to something on your screen instead of waiting for its turn.
In Tavus' own study, 48% of testers were fooled by the Griffin-Lite version, up from 2.4% with its earlier models. That was 26 out of 54 people on a one-minute call, so it's a small test.
It also came within 0.09 points of real people on NVIDIA's VideoFDB benchmark for natural video chat.
For now only trusted testers get access while Tavus works on safety and disclosure features.
Conscious Take:
A patient tutor or a friendly face for someone who's lonely is a great use for this. A video call you can't trust is also a scammer's dream, so I'd want it clearly labelled as AI before it goes public.
Image: Yahoo News | The Conscious Church
The US government has launched America.gov, an AI chatbot that answers your questions using information from around 29,000 federal websites. For now it only answers questions, but the plan is for it to fill in and file forms for you too.
The Details:
It runs on a mix of Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok models, with answers drawn from official government sources.
Filing things like passport renewals and Medicare enrolment is planned for early 2027.
Marco Rubio previewed a passport flow where you upload your own photo, so no drugstore photo and no queue.
The project was led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, who is now the US chief design officer.
Conscious Take:
Anyone who has tried to renew something on a government website will get why this matters. The chatbot is the easy bit, it gets properly useful when it can file the form for you.
Image: Anthropic | The Conscious Church
Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in its new 5.5 family after last week's Opus. It runs more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and keeps the same price.
The Details:
Pricing stays at $2 and $10 per million tokens in and out, and Anthropic says jobs cost up to 30% less because it needs fewer tokens.
It scores 70.6% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, an agentic coding test, up from 10.3% for Sonnet 5.
On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index it sits behind only Opus 5.5, and it nearly ties Opus on several office-work tests.
It's the first Sonnet launched with cyber safeguards like the ones on Opus.
Conscious Take:
Kind of hard keeping up with multiple model launches under the same company umbrella. Like, which one should I pick, should we just use auto? I don’t really have a good explanation other than for regular run of the mill work and automations I use Sonnet, so a cheaper faster version is welcome.
📬 One quick ask...
If this email has been helpful, would you forward it to one person this week who might be interested? Thanks :)
"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." : Colossians 3:23
Build with the tools. But build for the right reasons.
That's all for now
Stay conscious,
Josh
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