IBL News

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  • Top Contenders Challenge ChatGPT. Google Invests $300M In Anthropic

    Top Contenders Challenge ChatGPT. Google Invests $300M In Anthropic

    IBL News | New York

    Nine weeks after ChatGPT was launched, the company behind it, OpenAI, released this week a brief technical note stating, “we’ve upgraded the ChatGPT model with improved factuality and mathematical capabilities.”

    On November 30, 2022, San Francisco-based research lab, now heavily supported by Microsoft, OpenAI described what it released as an “early demo” of a part of the GPT 3.5 series — an interactive, human-like, conversational model. Its dialogue format “makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its own mistakes, challenge incorrect information, and reject inappropriate requests.”

    ChatGPT took the world by storm and made AI the next big thing, according to experts. Since then, tech giants like Google are in “red code,” and every day seems to bring new contenders.

    At least four top players are working on “generative” A.I., technologies making moves to challenge ChatGPT:

    Google: LaMDA. Launched in 2021, Google said in a launch blog post that LaMDA’s conversational skills “have been years in the making.”

    Like ChatGPT, LaMDA is trained in dialogue. It’s built on Transformer, the neural network architecture that Google Research invented and open-sourced in 2017.

    The Transformer architecture “produces a model that can be trained to read many words (a sentence or paragraph, for example), pay attention to how those words relate to one another, and then predict what words it thinks will come next.”

    Anthropic: Claude.     Founded in 2021 by a group of people that included several researchers who left OpenAI, this San Francisco AI start-up has raised $300 million in new funding, in exchange of taking a stake of 10%.

    The deal values Anthropic at $3 billion.

    According to a report posted at The Financial Times today, Google has already made that investment.

    The British paper said that Google confirmed it had made that investment and that it had a large cloud contract with Anthropic to use the Google Cloud infrastructure, but did not provide further details. This deal would echo OpenAI’s agreement with Microsoft’s Azure.

    Anthropic developed an AI chatbot, Claude — available in closed beta through a Slack integration — that reports say is similar to ChatGPT and has even demonstrated improvements.

    Character AI. This news AI chatbot technology allows users to chat and role-play with anyone, living or dead — as it can impersonate historical figures like Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare.

    It was launched by two engineers that left Google in October 2022, Noam Shazeer, one of the authors of the original Transformer paper, and Daniel De Freitas.

    Now they are trying to raise $250 million in new funding, a striking price for a startup with a product still in beta. 

    DeepMind: Sparrow. DeepMind, the British-owned subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, introduced Sparrow in a paper in September.

    For now, Sparrow is a research-based, proof-of-concept model that is not ready to be deployed, according to Geoffrey Irving, a safety researcher at DeepMind and lead author of the paper introducing Sparrow.

    DeepMind’s CEO and cofounder Demis Hassabis said in a TIME article two weeks ago that its company is considering releasing its chatbot Sparrow in a “private beta” sometime in 2023.

    DeepMind says “Sparrow is a dialogue agent that’s useful and reduces the risk of unsafe and inappropriate answers.” The agent is designed to “talk with a user, answer questions and search the internet using Google when it’s helpful to look up evidence to inform its responses.”

    It was hailed as an important step toward creating safer, less-biased machine learning (ML) systems, thanks to its application of reinforcement learning based on input from human research participants for training.

    Axios: How ChatGPT became the next big thing

  • ChatGPT Surpasses 100 Million Users in January, with 13 Million Daily Visitors

    ChatGPT Surpasses 100 Million Users in January, with 13 Million Daily Visitors

    IBL News | New York

    ChatGPT is on track to exceed 100 million monthly active users, increasing from 57 million in December, according to UBS analyst Lloyd Walmsley. Currently, the natural language chatbot ChatGPT receives 13 million daily visitors, more than double the figure from December 2022, the analyst notes.

    The New York Times quotes other sources stating that ChatGPT has more than 30 million users and gets roughly five million visits a day.

    In a research note, Walmsley points out that it took TikTok nine months from its launch to reach 100 million users, while it took Instagram 2.5 years. “We have not seen an app grow at this rate before,” the analyst adds.

    Developed by start-up OpenAI and backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT has experienced explosive growth.

    Venture capital investors speculate that the market for generative AI applications could be worth up to $1 trillion.

    On the other hand, Microsoft continues to integrate ChatGPT capabilities into its Office products. Microsoft Team is the latest one, as shown below.

     

  • Microsoft Launches Teams Premium with Features Powered by ChatGPT

    Microsoft Launches Teams Premium with Features Powered by ChatGPT

    IBL News | New York

    Microsoft Corp rolled out a premium Teams version with features powered by Large Language Models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 yesterday.

    This way, Microsoft, which announced a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI in January, is setting the stage for more competition with rival Alphabet Inc’s Google.

    Microsoft Teams Premium, which costs $7 per user/month, is “infusing AI throughout the meeting experience,” by “generating meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights, even if you miss the meeting.”

    • “AI-generated chapters divide the meeting into sections to choose relevant content to save time spent reviewing meeting recordings. This is available today for PowerPoint Live meeting recordings. Intelligent recap will automatically generate meeting chapters based on the meeting transcript as well.”

     

    • “Microsoft Teams Premium also includes live translations for captions, with AI-powered real-time translations from 40 spoken languages.”

    • “Branded meetings to see the logo and colors of each company on calls will be available in mid-February 2023.”

    • “Advanced meeting protection permits watermarking to deter leaks and limit who can record.”

    VoiceBot.AI: New Microsoft Teams Premium Uses ChatGPT to Take Meeting Notes

  • OpenAI Announces ChatGPT Plus, a $20/Month Premium Service

    OpenAI Announces ChatGPT Plus, a $20/Month Premium Service

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI announced yesterday the launch of its premium service, ChatGPT Plus, which is available in the United States for $20 a month.

    This new subscription plan will grant users access to ChatGPT during peak times with “faster response times and priority access to new features and improvements,” according to the company.

    The premium service is currently in a pilot phase and will be available in the coming weeks. There is a waitlist. in place for now.

    Previously, OpenAI was considering introducing a plus or pro version of the service at $42 a month, but the price has been lowered to $20 a month to make it more accessible to a wider range of users, including students and businesses that require reliable access to AI-generated text.

    OpenAI also stated that it will continue to offer free access to ChatGPT “to support free access availability for as many people as possible.”

  • OpenAI Issues a Free Tool to Help Determine If Any Text Is Written by ChatGPT

    OpenAI Issues a Free Tool to Help Determine If Any Text Is Written by ChatGPT

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, released yesterday a free web tool, called AI Text Classifier, that detects if a text has been written by AI or not.

    This solution tries to address concerns, especially in higher education over plagiarism.  ChatGPT. New York schools, for example, have banned this technology on their networks.

    “The tool is a fine-tuned GPT model that predicts how likely it is that a piece of text was generated by AI from a variety of sources, such as ChatGPT,” explained OpenAI. “This classifier is available as a tool to spark discussions on AI literacy.”

    AI Text Classifier requires approximately 150 – 250 words (or a minimum of 1,000 characters) and it isn’t always accurate. The text can even be edited easily to evade the classifier and is likely to get things wrong in text written by children.

    The user simply has to paste the text that he or she would like to check in this URL after logging in. The system will determine if the text was written by a machine, offering a five-point scale of results: Very unlikely to have been AI-generated, unlikely, unclear, possible, or likely.

    • OpenAI’s View on Academic Dishonesty, Plagiarism Detection, and Education


  • China’s Baidu Will Soon Launch an AI Platform Similar to ChatGPT

    China’s Baidu Will Soon Launch an AI Platform Similar to ChatGPT

    IBL News | New York

    China’s biggest search engine Baidu said yesterday it will launch a ChatGPT-like AI bot in March, according to sources quoted by Reuters and Bloomberg.

    It will be based on a large-scale machine-learning model developed by the company and trained over several years called Ernie. It will also allow users to get conversation-style search results, similar to OpenAI’s platform.

    Beijing-based Baidu sees ChatGPT-like apps as a potential way to leapfrog rivals, according to analysts.

    It seems that Baidu — China’s Google — plans to launch the AI service as a standalone application and gradually merge it into its search engine, said a person to Reuters.

    The idea of Baidu seems to point out incorporating chatbot-generated results when users make search requests, instead of only links.

    Chatbots in China currently focus on social interaction, whereas ChatGPT performs better at more professional tasks, such as programming and essay writing.

    Baidu has been investing heavily in AI technology, including in cloud services, chips, and autonomous driving, as it looks to diversify its revenue sources.

    The news of Baidu’s plans sent shares up by 5.8%, the largest intraday gain in almost four weeks.

  • MusicML, a Research Project by Google, Generates Songs From Text Descriptions

    MusicML, a Research Project by Google, Generates Songs From Text Descriptions

    IBL News | New York

    Google researchers have created an AI system called MusicLM that can generate songs in any genre from any text. This AI was trained on a dataset of 280,000 hours of music to learn to generate coherent songs. TechCrunch reported the story first.

    However, Google, fearing the risks of copyright laws along with ethical challenges, said that it has no immediate plans to release it.

    The project was detailed in an academic paper. Creators gave MusicML instructions, such as “a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff”,  “create an enchanting jazz song with a memorable saxophone solo and a solo singer”, or “Berlin ’90s techno with a low bass and strong kick.”

    Researchers said that songs sound something like a human artist might compose, albeit not necessarily as inventive or musically cohesive. However, MusicLM managed to capture instrumental riffs, melodies, and moods.

    Google researchers showed that the system could create melodic stories fit for a movie soundtrack or generate audio played by a specific type of instrument in a certain genre.

    This AI “musician” can be set to compose music inspired by places, epochs or requirements (e.g. motivational music for workouts).

    A concern of Google is the tendency of MusicML to incorporate copyrighted material from training data into the generated songs. During an experiment, they found that about 1% of the music the system generated was directly replicated from the songs on which it trained. Deepfake music stands on murky legal ground.

    Music Publishers Association argued that AI music generators violate music copyright. Legal copyright experts say that an AI system music would be considered a derivative work, in which case only the original elements would be protected by copyright.

    Several lawsuits likely would be filed pertaining to the rights of artists whose work is used to train AI systems without their knowledge or consent.

    Before MusicML, there have been other attempts at generative music, such as Riffusion, Dance Diffusion, Google’s own AudioML, and OpenAI’s Jukebox.

  • An AI Application Allows to Ask Questions and Gain Insights About Documents

    An AI Application Allows to Ask Questions and Gain Insights About Documents

    IBL News | New York

    Businesses around large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT continue popping up.

    One of the latest is Usemeru.com, which allows people to ask questions about Documents, HTML Files, and JSON files in natural language. Large volumes of text can include recruiting call transcripts, request tickets from customers, and medical records.

    Users upload and index those documents and files and ask questions about the document. The app parses input and delivers natural language responses.

    Essentially, when a client submits a document to Usermeru’s API, the system indexes the document and stores the index on the company servers. Clients can then query the index via an LLM, such as GPT-3, and obtain a response.

    This approach is more robust than passing the document as a part of the prompt.

    In addition, because the user is querying the index, he/she doesn’t waste tokens as prompts, and can therefore build much larger and more complex queries. Documents larger than 4096 tokens can also be queried effectively.

    Usermeru.com also allows you to embed Stable Diffusion image generation into your applications with low latency, variable sizing, and automatic resolution upscaling.

    The application is available as an API for dense data retrieval at a starting price of $2.75 per concept.

    People in finance/investing, law, humanities/social science research might find this useful in order to search for documents.

     

  • BuzzFeed Will Use ChatGPT to Help Generate Online Content and Quizzes

    BuzzFeed Will Use ChatGPT to Help Generate Online Content and Quizzes

    IBL News | New York

    Online media company BuzzFeed Inc (BZFD.O) plans to use ChatGPT to create online content and quizzes. The news led to a significant increase in BuzzFeed’s share price, rising 75% on Friday.

    In a memo to employees, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti stated, “In 2023, you’ll see AI-inspired content move from an R&D stage to part of our core business, enhancing the quiz experience, informing our brainstorming, and personalizing our content for our audience.”

    He also mentioned that AI will assist workers in enhancing their content and that the breakthroughs in AI will open up a new era of creativity that will allow humans to harness creativity in new ways with endless opportunities and applications for good.

    He noted that AI-created content will move from an “R&D stage to part of our core business” this year.

    BuzzFeed hopes that this technology will help revitalize its business, as the media company has been struggling to boost growth and its stock has dropped nearly 40% over the last year. In its latest quarter, BuzzFeed reported a net loss of $27 million on revenue of $104 million, although sales did rise 15% from the year-ago period.

    ChatGPT and its generative AI technology have recently gained popularity, and companies in various industries are already testing it.

  • “Everybody is Cheating,” Says a Wharton Professor; He Has Adopted an AI Policy

    “Everybody is Cheating,” Says a Wharton Professor; He Has Adopted an AI Policy

    IBL News | New York

    Addressing concerns that ChatGPT could facilitate cheating, Ethan Mollick, an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and an educator experienced with the usage of ChatGPT, asked his own students to be honest.

    “Everybody is cheating, it’s happening,” he said in an interview at NPR.

    Some school districts have banned access to the bot, and not without reason.

    The artificial intelligence tool from the company OpenAI can compose poetry, can write computer code, and even started to pass exams at top schools. [See IBL News’ extensive coverage.]

    The response of Professor Mollick – who teaches entrepreneurship and innovation – has required the use of ChatGPT. He has even formally adopted an AI policy that requires students to acknowledge to use the tool.

    Recently, he ran a session where students were asked to come up with ideas for their class project, warning that the tool may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information.

    “Almost everyone had ChatGPT running. The ideas so far are great, partially as a result of that set of interactions.”

    “We taught people how to do math in a world with calculators,” he said. “Now the challenge is for educators to teach students how the world has changed again, and how they can adapt to that.”

    “I don’t think human nature changes as a result of ChatGPT. I think capability did.”

    • Wired: ChatGPT Is Coming for Classrooms. Don’t Panic