Openai Unveils GPT-4. The biggest AI story of the day was the unveiling of Openai’s GPT-4. The company’s latest big-language model, which powers products like Chatgpt and Microsoft Bing, is the smartest version of the technology yet, capable of storing the SAT math section and the Uniform Bar Exam. It’s also smart enough to code an actual working website from a photo of a hastily drawn pencil sketch on paper, and it can suggest recipes just by looking at a photo of the ingredients in your fridge.
The launch of GPT-4 came during a noisiest week in AI , sandwiched between Google’s announcement of putting generative AI capabilities in Google Docs, Sheets, and Gmail, and Microsoft’s announcement of Microsoft 365 Copilot, which will infuse Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with ChatGpt-style capabilities.
Some experts are concerned about the relentless pace of AI development, calling it a “circus” and telling BuzzFeed News that they worry that “ Move fast and break things ” — Facebook’s one-time motto — was back in vogue in Silicon Valley.
Petitioners are calling for a pause in AI development. It wasn’t just a handful of experts, though. More than 1,000 AI experts and leaders in the field, including Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, signed a petition asking companies to pause development of AI systems for at least six months.
“In recent months, AI labs have been locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever-more powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control,” reads a letter posted on the website of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that aims to reduce the societal risks of tech.
However, it soon emerged that some of the names attached to the letter, such as Openai CEO Sam Altman, had never signed it to begin with.
AI Pope Image Broke the Internet. The guy who created the fake image of Pope Francis wearing a white blazer using Midjourney, a generative AI tool, told BuzzFeed News that he stumbled upon shrooms when he came up with the idea. The photo, which fooled a lot of people into thinking it was real, showed the potential of generative AI to wreak havoc and spread misinformation.
The AI funding craze has begun. Silicon Valley reels from layoffs, but AI startups are raking in the dollars. Character.ai, a service that lets people create their own chatbots of famous personalities like Joe Biden and Super Mario Bros., raised $150 million from top venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, at a $1 billion valuation. Another AI startup called Adept raised $150 million from investors including General Catalyst and Spark Capital. And days later, Confusion AI, an AI-powered search engine based in San Francisco, said it had raised $25.6 million from New Enterprise Associates. Among the people backing Confusion are a string of former Google AI researchers, as well as Yann Lecun, Meta’s chief AI scientist.
Bing AI-powered chatbot gets more ads. How do you make money if you shake up your search engine with AI? Microsoft is trying to figure out what it’s doing in the area. The company said in a blog post that it’s “placing ads into the chat experience.” What they’ll look like isn’t entirely clear yet, but at least one user got a glimpse of the Bing Chatbot sneaking in a sponsored quote while searching for the cheapest Honda.
