More than 3 million users are now using the $3.99-per-month Snapchat+ subscription service that launched last June. The premium offering got a boost when the company added early access to its AI chatbot, called My AI. Snap will soon make My AI available free to Snapchat’s 750 million monthly users, the company announced Wednesday at its annual partner summit in Santa Monica, California. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told attendees the company is targeting 10 million users as a “medium-term goal” for Snapchat+, which in addition to the U.S. is available in the UK, Germany and United Arab Emirates. Continue reading ‘My AI’ Will Be Free for All as Snapchat+ Hits 3M Paying Subs

Generative AI is expected to play a big role in video game production, increasing development speed, reducing costs, and helping to come up with new ways for players to interact with characters. Major firms including Epic Games, Unity, Ubisoft and Roblox have all announced generative AI integrations for their development kits. Nonplayable characters — foils that act and speak independently — are soon to be wholly AI-powered rather than preprogrammed options. Publicly available AI tools are already commonly used by players creating user-generated game content. However, use of AI to create commercial games is not without controversy. Continue reading Use of AI to Build Video Games is Popular, But Controversial

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has formed a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI Corp., which was reportedly incorporated in Nevada on March 9. Analysts are suggesting that Musk will use the new company to help launch the “everything app” called X that he’s referred to numerous times. Most media reports have also focused on the startup as a potential rival to OpenAI, a company Musk helped found. For now, X.AI has a handful of staff and 10,000 Nvidia GPUs, but the joint chief of Tesla and Twitter is said to be busy assembling investors and recruiting AI researchers and engineers. Continue reading Elon Musk Announces New Artificial Intelligence Venture X.AI

Agencies across the federal government are actively exploring steps to regulate artificial intelligence, seeking to ensure it is safe now while minimizing future harms. The Commerce Department this week issued a public request for comment to be accepted within the next 60 days, then used by U.S. policymakers as they consider new rules for a consumer technology sector that has exploded globally in 2023. The move by Commerce comes on the heels of a scathing advisory by the Federal Trade Commission, which has been examining ways generative AI could be misused for scams or fraud. Continue reading Federal Government Continues to Grapple with AI Guidelines

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

Respected members of the advanced tech community are going on record opposing the faction calling for a “pause” in large-model artificial intelligence development. Meta Platforms chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and DeepLearning.AI founder and CEO Andrew Ng, formerly at Alphabet where he helped launch Google Brain, were joined this past week by Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in opposing the proposed six-month halt to development of AI models more advanced than OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is said to train on a trillion parameters — more than 500 times that of GPT-3. Continue reading Mixed Reactions to ‘Pause’ on AI Models Larger than GPT-4

Popular social platform Snapchat is improving its AI chatbot as part of a larger set of updates (that includes an age filter and parental insights) and recently launched premium features (such as generative AI profiles backgrounds). The chatbot, My AI, was launched in February for Snapchat+ subscribers. Snap says it has since received feedback of inappropriate responses from My AI, which was built using OpenAI’s GPT technology, but claims the problems have been due in large part to users trying to “trick the chatbot into providing responses that do not conform to our guidelines.” The new tools are designed to keep My AI’s responses in check. Continue reading Snapchat Adds Safety Moderation Tools to Improve Chatbot

Walmart has rolled out a new online look in a bid to catch up with Amazon, simultaneously advancing its conversational AI capabilities using OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s BERT. Starting last year, generative AI has reportedly been a major initiative of the Arkansas-based retailer in key areas including search, supply chain management and virtual shopping, although it is only now that the company is emphasizing the tools to customers by expanding its offerings like Text to Shop. The text- or voice-activated way to add items to Walmart.com shopping carts is one of nearly two dozen conversational AI experiences at Walmart. Continue reading Walmart Leans into AI, Retools Site to Compete with Amazon

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

Google has teamed with San Francisco startup Replit in a bid to challenge Microsoft’s GitHub and the Github Copilot code generator launched in conjunction with OpenAI. Under the new partnership, Replit developers will get access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Replit’s software development AI, called Ghostwriter, while Google Cloud and Workspace developers will get access to Replit’s collaborative code editing platform. Replit, which says 20 million developers use its platform, launched Ghostwriter in the fall and in January added a conversational AI interface for generating code and debugging. Continue reading Google Cloud Partners with Replit to Develop AI Coding Tools

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