More from From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet
The phrase became an internal joke after ChatGPT’s popularity exploded right out of the gate, according to the NYT’s recap of its launch a year ago and the reaction among Big Tech companies.
Google and Meta scrambled AI teams to launch competing products — even if that meant removing some guardrails — like Bard and LLaMa. And Microsoft’s rush to beat Google had Satya Nadella saying, “We have a big order coming to you, a really big order coming to you,” to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang as he ordered $2 billion in chips.
Copilot, the AI chatbot formerly known as Bing Chat, is out of preview. That means Copilot is now available in 105 languages and 169 countries “on all modern browsers for mobile and web,” according to Caitlin Roulston, the director of communications at Microsoft.
Even though the preview label is going away today, Roulston says Microsoft will continue to “launch new features in preview while we iterate, listen to feedback, and improve the experience for our users.”
OpenAI didn’t mean to kickstart a generational shift in the technology industry. But it did. Now all we have to decide is where to go from here.
This Wall Street Journal article about the recent drama at OpenAI contains an amazing anecdote. Apparently an employee at AI rival Anthropic thought it’d be funny to send “thousands of paper clips in the shape of OpenAI’s logo” as a prank, in reference to the infamous paperclip maximizer thought experiment.
Weirdly, I think OpenAI’s logo makes for a great paperclip design. Should we be worried?
The company tested baking a cryptographic “digital signature” into photos taken by its cameras to set them apart from AI-generated or otherwise faked images. Sony says the feature will come to cameras like the Alpha 9 III via a firmware update in Spring 2024.
Microsoft says it’s using GPT-4 to garner the “most pertinent insights” from webpages and write summaries beneath Bing search results. You won’t see these summaries beneath every search result, but you can check which ones are AI-generated by clicking the little arrow next to the result’s URL. If the description is written by AI, it’ll say “AI-Generated Caption.”
Earlier this year, Google combined two AI teams into one group which is working on a new model to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4. Its leader, Demis Hassabis, discussed the combo on Decoder:
And we’re already feeling, even a couple of months in, the benefits and the strengths of that with projects like Gemini that you may have heard of, which is our next-generation multimodal large models — very, very exciting work going on there, combining all the best ideas from across both world-class research groups. It’s pretty impressive to see.
Now, The Information cites two sources saying its launch is expected in Q1 of 2024, not this month as they were previously told. It also reports Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been spending “four to five days a week” with the developers.
[The Information]
CNBC reports Airbnb bought the “stealth mode” Gameplanner.AI for almost $200 million, and notes its plans to use generative AI for trip planning help.
The article says Gameplanner.AI was founded in 2020 by former Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer, whose later work included co-founding Viv Labs, which Samsung bought to make Bixby.
In a sitdown with Verge EIC Nilay Patel on Decoder, the 44th president discussed Joe Biden’s recently-signed executive order about AI, why Obama disagrees with the idea that social networks are a “common carrier,” and which iPhone apps he uses the most, now that he’s no longer president and he can use an iPhone.
The GPT platform is a no-code way to make custom AI agents for all sorts of tasks, and it’s available exclusively for ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
Over on MKBHD’s The Studio, David Imel talked about the Leica M11-P. Or, more accurately, he used it to talk about Content Credentials, which the $9,000-plus camera attaches to photos as they’re taken so they can be verified through Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI).
It’s a good look at CAI and its potential benefits to the media using the first-ever camera to participate in an initiative intended to help onlookers identify real-world images in a sea of AI-generated ones.
Nilay, David, and Alex had a little aside on Friday’s Vergecast episode about how the combo of SEO and AI means Google thinks you can melt an egg. This morning, a listener showed what’s clearly the best way to experience this silly SEO flub.
I immediately tried it, and this was also my Nest Hub’s response to the question, “Can you melt an egg?”
Go try it before Google fixes it!
