Amidst calls to put the brakes on large language model development, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has hit the global circuit to tout the advantages of artificial intelligence and commercial opportunities with his firm. Altman’s 17-city tour includes stops in Washington D.C., Toronto, Tokyo, Rio De Janeiro, Lagos, London, Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Munich, Tel Aviv, Singapore, Dubai, New Delhi, Jakarta, Seoul and Melbourne. On Monday, Altman met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and other government officials, vowing to collaborate on protecting user privacy and data protection. Continue reading OpenAI’s Altman Talks Up Machine Learning on Global Tour

As China’s tech giants begin releasing ChatGPT-style products, the powerful Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has issued a draft of what will become the country’s first set of restrictions for generative AI. Ground rules include limiting content created by AI to that which reflects the core values of socialism and does not subvert state power in text or image, according to the draft. Models should also be trained in a way that does not allow them to generate false information or exhibit bias as to race, ethnicity or gender. The news comes as three Chinese firms release generative AI platforms. Continue reading Chinese Government Drafts New Rules for Generative AI Tech

After many years of academia leading the way in the development of artificial intelligence, the tides have shifted and industry has taken over, according to the 2023 AI Index, a report created by Stanford University with help from companies including Google, Anthropic and Hugging Face. “In 2022, there were 32 significant industry-produced machine learning models compared to just three produced by academia,” the report says. The shift in influence is attributed mainly to the large resource demands — in staff, computing power and training data — required to create state of the art AI systems. Continue reading Report: Enterprise Supplants Academia as Driving Force of AI

Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO of New York-based Hugging Face, turned a casual invitation to meet with open-source AI stakeholders during a trip to San Francisco into what is being called the “Woodstock of AI.” In a matter of days, the event ballooned to more than 5,000 people hosted at the Exploratorium on March 31. “We just crossed 1,500 registrations for the Open-Source AI Meetup!” Delangue messaged the RSVP list days before the event. “What started with a tweet might lead to the biggest AI meetup in history.” The 8-year-old company is also making headlines for its new HuggingGPT system. Continue reading Hugging Face Rallies Open-Source AI Community at Meetup

A new Goldman Sachs report suggests artificial intelligence could trigger “significant disruption” in the global labor market. In the U.S. and Europe, as many as two-thirds of jobs could become automated at least in part, and generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work. Extrapolating the estimates globally indicates generative AI “could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation,” the report says. Among U.S. workers, of those occupations that present a natural opportunity for AI assistance, somewhere between 25-50 percent of existing duties can be replaced, the Goldman Sachs research team says. Continue reading Report: 300M Global Workers May See Jobs Impacted by AI

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai is promising Bard critics that a new and improved conversational AI model will soon be available. Although both the LaMDA-powered Bard and its rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT have been prone to a variety of errors in their early stages, Bard — following on the heels of ChatGPT’s release and meteoric popularity — has borne the brunt of less favorable reviews. Google is taking steps to maintain thought leadership in the space, so that parent company Alphabet can compete with Microsoft and OpenAI, who were quicker to move ChatGPT into the public consciousness, gaining a first-mover advantage. Continue reading Google Is Improving Its Bard AI Chatbot with PaLM Upgrade

Apple has acquired WaveOne, a Mountain View-based startup that has been developing AI algorithms for video compression. Cupertino has been mum about the purchase, but the deal reportedly closed in January, and WaveOne employees are said to have been absorbed into Apple’s machine learning groups. WaveOne’s codecs use machine learning to squeeze more picture out of less bandwidth, including optimizing for signal interruptions, so the picture doesn’t freeze or disappear, making it ideal for mobile. As Netflix and YouTube tout picture improvements, WaveOne could potentially advantage Apple TV+ and a mixed reality headset. Continue reading Apple Eyes AI Video Compression with WaveOne Acquisition

Nvidia is launching new cloud services to help businesses leverage AI at scale. Under the banner Nvidia AI Foundations, the company is providing tools to let clients build and run their own generative AI models that are custom trained on data specific to the intended task. The individual cloud offerings are Nvidia NeMo for language models and Nvidia Picasso for 3D visuals including video and images. Speaking at Nvidia’s annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) last week, CEO Jensen Huang said “the impressive capabilities of generative AI have created a sense of urgency for companies to reimagine their products and business models.” Continue reading Nvidia Introduces Cloud Services to Leverage AI Capabilities

OpenAI is adding plug-in support for ChatGPT, a major upgrade that lets the chatbot incorporate current web data, as opposed to being limited to training data ending in 2021. Initially, the company is allowing 12 external plug-ins, including those from Expedia, Instacart, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack and Zapier. The group has been invited through a waitlist. “We’re starting with a small set of users and are planning to gradually roll out larger-scale access as we learn more,” explained OpenAI, which is also introducing two plug-ins of its own: a web browser and code interpreter. Continue reading OpenAI Adds Browser, Plug-In and API Support for ChatGPT

After several months of testing, Anthropic is making its AI chatbot Claude available for general release in two configurations: the high-performace Claude and a lighter, cheaper, faster option called Claude Instant. Anthropic was launched in 2021 by a pair of former OpenAI employees, and its Claude chatbots are competitors to that firm’s ChatGPT. Accessible through a chat interface and API in Anthropic’s developer console, Claude is being marketed as the product of training designed to produce a more “helpful, honest, and harmless AI systems.” To that end, Anthropic says “Claude is much less likely to produce harmful outputs.” Continue reading Anthropic Takes Claude Chatbot Public After Months of Tests

Today’s leading AI chatbots need tremendous computing resources to train, then function, but that isn’t stopping startups from trying to get into the game, some with open-source alternatives. Clearly disadvantaged compared to market leaders like OpenAI, Meta, DeepMind and Anthropic — deep-pocketed, all — a band of independent researchers has coalesced under the name Together. Their aim: to become the first open-source challenger to the likes of ChatGPT. The industry seems undecided as to whether open-source AI is a good thing. Many are worried at the thought of a universally available AI toolkit, and what troublemakers might do with it. Continue reading Researchers Developing Open-Source Challenger to ChatGPT

Google has opened a public waitlist for its Bard AI chatbot to users in the U.S. and UK. The technology, which Google intends to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, will be made available to increments of users on a rolling basis, the company said, with more countries and languages to come. Bard was announced last month. Powered by a lightweight, optimized version of Google’s LaMDA large language model, the company calls it an “early experiment” that will eventually be updated with more sophisticated models. The same can be said for ChatGPT, which already has more than 100 million users. Continue reading Google Takes Its Bard Search Bot Public, a Rival to ChatGPT

Microsoft is giving its Office 365 productivity suite an AI update using OpenAI technology, including GPT-4, to power the new Microsoft 365 Copilot, “your copilot for work.” In February, Microsoft generated attention by adding ChatGPT to its Bing search platform, but it says Copilot is a much bigger deal. Combining the power of large language models with data in the Microsoft 365 apps, Copilot promises “more agency” via natural language, a “universal interface.” A new Business Chat feature turns prompts like “update my team on the new product strategy” into a summary of the latest meeting notes, emails and chat threads. Continue reading Microsoft Creating AI Updates for Business Productivity Apps

OpenAI has released GPT-4, which it says is a more powerful and reliable version of the artificial intelligence technology powering its viral ChatGPT chatbot. GPT-4 can analyze images and handle larger blocks of text and is generally “more creative and collaborative” than earlier iterations when it comes to things like composing songs, writing screenplays and mimicking a user’s authorial style. “GPT-4 can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem-solving abilities,” OpenAI says. GPT-4 is already driving the chatbot technology behind Microsoft’s Bing AI search engine, now in beta. Continue reading OpenAI Announces Official Launch of GPT-4 Multimodal Tech

The demand for artificial intelligence by enterprise as well as consumers is putting tremendous pressure on cloud service providers to meet the vast data center resources required to train the models and deploy the resulting apps. Microsoft recently opened up about the pivotal role it played in getting OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the release phase via its Azure cloud computing platform, linking “tens of thousands” of Nvidia A100 GPUs to train the model. Microsoft is already upgrading Azure with Nvidia’s new H100 chips and latest InfiniBand networking to accommodate the next generation of AI supercomputers. Continue reading Microsoft Believes Azure Platform Is Unlocking ‘AI Revolution’