OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced during a live-streamed event today that the company is launching an updated version of its GPT-4 model that powers OpenAI’s popular chatbot. The new flagship AI model, GPT-4o is reportedly “much faster” and offers improved text, voice and vision capabilities. Murati said GPT-4o will be free to all users, while Plus users will enjoy “up to five times the capacity limits” available to free users. According to OpenAI, the new AI model “can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time in a conversation.” Continue reading OpenAI Unveils Faster AI Model, Desktop Version of ChatGPT

As part of its spring product release, Yelp has added Yelp Assistant, an AI feature designed to connect consumers with relevant business professionals. The chatbot leverages OpenAI language models along with Yelp data to find the right fit and can interactively quiz users to learn more about their project and needs. Available on iOS (with plans for Android later this year), Yelp’s move is part of a trend using artificial intelligence to provide operational help managing households and life tasks. For example, the California-based energy intelligence firm Bidgely is now using AI to generate individualized consumer profiles on energy usage. Continue reading Yelp Assistant Joins Movement to Add AI Consumer Services

Amazon has pulled the plug on CodeWhisperer, which has been incorporated into its Q Developer product, announced at November’s re:Invent as part of an AI-powered AWS enterprise suite called Amazon Q, which also includes Q Business. Both Q Developer, which enables natural language coding, and Q Business, a data-driven productivity tool are now in general release, and Q Apps has just been added in preview, letting employees “build generative AI-powered apps from their company’s data, without any prior coding experience.” The move comes as Amazon seeks to gain ground on the Microsoft-owned GitHub’s AI coding products. Continue reading AWS CodeWhisperer Is Rebranded as Part of Amazon Q Suite

Pursuant to his goal of “building the world’s leading AI,” Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that Meta AI is upgrading to Llama 3 concurrent with a rollout of its open-source chatbot across the company’s social platforms, integrating it into the search boxes atop WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. There is also a website, meta.ai, for those who prefer browser access. Reports of Meta upgrading its social AI capabilities began leaking out early last week, albeit on a more limited test scale than what Zuckerberg announced, which, excepting Threads, is cross-platform. Continue reading Meta AI Assistant Is Launching Across Platforms with Llama 3

Apple has developed a large language model it says has advanced screen-reading and comprehension capabilities. ReALM (Reference Resolution as Language Modeling) is artificial intelligence that can see and read computer screens in context, according to Apple, which says it advances technology essential for a true AI assistant “that aims to allow a user to naturally communicate their requirements to an agent, or to have a conversation with it.” Apple claims that in a benchmark against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the smallest ReALM model performed “comparable” to GPT-4, with its “larger models substantially outperforming it.” Continue reading Apple’s ReALM AI Advances the Science of Digital Assistants

Perplexity is a year-old AI startup whose conversational “answer engine” has gained attention as a potential challenger to conventional search. Two months ago the venture raised $73.6 million in Series B funding from investors including Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos via his Bezos Expeditions, resulting in a valuation of about $520 million. Now the company is said to be finalizing another cash infusion that is predicted to double its valuation to roughly $1 billion. The current financing round is reportedly being led by former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross through his own investment fund. Continue reading AI Startup Perplexity Targets $1B Valuation with New Funding

GitHub Copilot Enterprise is being released for general availability for $39 per month. Calling the tool GitHub’s “most advanced AI offering to date,” the company says it can be customized to an organization’s knowledge and codebase, placing “the institutional knowledge of your organization at your developers’ fingertips.” Infusing GitHub Copilot Enterprise throughout a company’s software development lifecycle lets team members “ask questions about public and private code, get up to speed quickly with new codebases and build greater consistencies across engineering teams” while ensuring everyone access to the same standard codebase. Continue reading GitHub Copilot Enterprise in General Release at $39 Monthly

Amazon’s net sales for Q4 were $170 billion, a 14 percent increase year-over-year. For the full year 2023, net sales were up by 12 percent to $574.8 billion. “This Q4 was a record-breaking holiday shopping season and closed out a robust 2023 for Amazon,” CEO Andy Jassy said in the recent earnings release. The results included October Prime Day and holiday season shopping. Outstanding Q4 performers included ad sales, up 27 percent to $14 billion, and Amazon Web Services, which brought in $24.2 billion, growing 13 percent.”What we’re most pleased with is the continued invention and customer experience improvements across our businesses,” Jassy added. Continue reading Growth in Ad Sales, AWS Drive Amazon Profit Up 200 Percent

In a Threads post last week, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company’s new frontier is open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI). Meta has united its FAIR and GenAI research teams behind the goal of developing such a platform, which Zuckerberg described as part of the company’s “long-term vision.” “The next generation of services required is building full general intelligence, building the best AI assistants, AIs for creators, AIs for businesses and more,” Zuckerberg said, explaining that will require “advances in every area of AI from reasoning to planning to coding to memory and other cognitive abilities.” Continue reading Meta Combines Research Units to Develop Open-Source AGI

Microsoft is introducing a dedicated AI Copilot hotkey on Windows 11 laptops and PCs. The move, announced at CES 2024, heralds “the year of the AI PC,” according to Microsoft Executive VP and Consumer CMO Yusuf Mehdi, who said the keyboard enhancement will “not only simplify people’s computing experience but also amplify it.” The addition of the Copilot key is the first big change to the Windows PC keyboard since the four-paned Windows key was introduced in 1994. When pressed, the new key will open Copilot for seamless engagement with artificial intelligence. Continue reading CES: Microsoft Rolling Out a Copilot Hotkey for Windows PCs

Google personalized AI assistant NotebookLM is an experimental product that has been in early access since July. Now the company is integrating its new Gemini Pro LLM with NotebookLM and making it available to U.S. residents 18 and older. NotebookLM is engineered “to help you do your best thinking,” Google says, with documents uploaded to the service making it “an instant expert in the information you need,” allowing it to answer questions about your data. Unlike generic chatbots, NotebookLM draws responses from the documents you feed it, meaning it will be hyper-focused — a lite version of a custom trained model. Continue reading Google’s NotebookLM is a Personalized Lite Language Model

Bill Gates has published his thinking about the future of computing, and fascinatingly, it’s the same as his prediction from decades ago: agents. No mere bots — and certainly not anthropomorphized paperclips — agents (to Gates) will abstract almost all HCI to a natural language conversation with systems that have our permission to take meaningful actions. Gates makes a highly specific prediction: within five years, the very idea of an app itself will seem as outdated as a rotary phone dial does next to an iPhone. A conversational UI will sit on top of a language model that has access to as much of our private data as we wish to give it. Continue reading Bill Gates Imagines Agents as the Human-Computer Interface

GitHub Copilot Chat for enterprise becomes generally available in December, and the GitHub site is integrating the artificial intelligence assistant across its entire platform, promising that AI will infuse every step of the developer lifecycle. “Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot,” the Microsoft-owned company announced this month. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, the new configuration will offer inline Copilot Chat for code questions, contextual guidance and “slash commands” for /fix and /test. The AI tool is designed to assist coders with their everyday workflows with a series of “one-click” assists and other shortcuts. Continue reading GitHub Copilot Brings AI-Powered Coding Tool to Enterprise

Samsung Electronics has unveiled a generative AI model called Samsung Gauss designed specifically for artificial intelligence apps on mobile devices. If Samsung deploys Gauss to its smartphones anytime soon it would be among the first handset makers to natively integrate generative AI, putting it ahead of Apple. Gauss was revealed at the Samsung AI Forum 2023 in Korea, held by Samsung Research. Gauss is a large language model that facilitates tasks such as composing emails, summarizing documents and translating content. Samsung says it also enables smarter device control when integrated into products. Continue reading Samsung Is an Early Mover in Mobile LLM Space with Gauss

Startup Reka AI is releasing in preview its first artificial intelligence assistant, Yasa-1. The multimodal AI is described as “a language assistant with visual and auditory sensors.” The year-old company says it “trained Yasa-1 from scratch,” including pretraining foundation models “from ground zero,” then aligning them and optimizing to its training and server infrastructures. “Yasa-1 is not just a text assistant, it also understands images, short videos and audio (yes, sounds too),” said Reka AI co-founder and Chief Scientist Yi Tay. Yasa-1 is available via Reka’s APIs and as docker containers for on-site or virtual private cloud deployment. Continue reading Yasa-1: Startup Reka Launches New AI Multimodal Assistant