Last week was big for OpenAI: instant access to ChatGPT, DALL-E image editor launched, and Stargate supercomputer announced.
✱ Top news of the week!
Tallied Up
Here’s what you might have missed last week!
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- Users can now experience the benefits of AI, such as learning something new, finding creative inspiration, and getting answers to their questions, without the need to create an account.
- OpenAI has introduced additional content safeguards for this experience, such as blocking prompts and generations in a wider range of categories.
- Creating an account offers additional benefits, including the ability to save and review chat history, share chats, and unlock features like voice conversations and custom instructions.
Perplexity plans to sell ads.
- The company believes generative AI will eventually help it build better targeting for advertisers to bid on high-value traffic.
- Brand safety will be “a paramount priority” for Perplexity as it implements this advertising strategy.
- While Perplexity has a smaller user base compared to Google, Microsoft Bing, and ChatGPT, it will be interesting to see if other companies follow its path in monetizing AI search.
X’s Grok chatbot will soon get an upgraded model, Grok-1.5.
- Grok-1.5 boasts improved reasoning capabilities, particularly in coding and math-related tasks, as evidenced by its performance on popular benchmarks like MATH and HumanEval.
- The new model can process contexts of up to 128,000 tokens, allowing it to utilize information from substantially longer documents and handle more complex prompts while maintaining its instruction-following capability.
- Grok-1.5 will soon be available to early testers on X, accompanied by several new features, with plans to expand access to more users, specifically those paying for X’s Premium plan.
Microsoft and OpenAI plan supercomputer project worth $100 billion called ‘Stargate’.
- The project, dubbed “Stargate,” could cost up to $100 billion and is expected to be financed by Microsoft, with a targeted launch as early as 2028.
- Stargate is part of a series of five installations Microsoft and OpenAI aim to develop over the next six years, with the next AI upgrade from OpenAI expected in early 2025 and a Microsoft-developed supercomputer slated for 2026.
- The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI has come under scrutiny from E.U. and U.K. regulators, while Tesla CEO and OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk has sued over the collaboration.
Gas Station Convenient Store Now has Robot Fry Cooks.
- The convenience store chain Re-Up is installing a robotic fry cook called “The Wingman” from Nala Robotics in its gas stations.
- The AI-powered robot can cook customizable fried chicken, french fries, and other menu items around the clock, aiming to improve quality and save on labor costs.
- Re-Up, which currently has nine stores with plans to expand, is harnessing AI to provide customers with convenient, personalized, and safe shopping and dining experiences at its gas stations.
Apple Aims to make Siri way faster and smarter with ReALM.
- Apple has unveiled ReALM (Reference Resolution As Language Modeling), a new small language model designed to run on phones and enhance voice assistants like Siri by improving contextual understanding and handling ambiguous references.
- ReALM is part of Apple’s growing AI research efforts, which include new models, tools for efficient AI on small devices, and partnerships.
- Despite being smaller and faster, ReALM performs as well as GPT-4 on several key metrics and could potentially be integrated into Siri for the launch of iOS 18 at WWDC 2024, contributing to a smarter and more capable Siri 2.0.
Google’s AI-Powered Search Will Most Likely Be Behind a Paywall…So, Perplexity?
- Google is exploring the idea of introducing premium features powered by generative AI to its search engine, potentially placing AI-generated elements behind a paywall for the first time.
- This shift marks a significant pivot from Google’s traditional ad-supported model, driven by competitive pressure from ChatGPT and the advent of generative AI technologies.
- Google is considering incorporating these premium AI search features into its existing subscription services while maintaining the free availability of its traditional search engine and ad display.
DALL-E Can Now Turn Water into Wine.
- OpenAI has launched a new version of the DALL-E editor, an AI image generator included in ChatGPT’s paid tiers, based on the DALL-E 3 model released last September.
- The update makes it easier for users to edit generated images by selecting specific sections and providing natural language instructions for desired changes.
- DALL-E 3, trained on a large dataset of images and captions, generates higher-quality images and follows user instructions more accurately compared to its predecessors.
Meta study says it hosted a special event that shifted opinion on AI.
- Meta and Stanford University conducted a study on a forum where participants discussed AI chatbot policy proposals and received information from experts and stakeholders.
- The study found that after participating in the forum, a higher percentage of participants believed AI had a positive impact, with the shift being more pronounced in countries other than the United States.
- Despite the positive shift in opinion, participants maintained concerns over AI bias, misinformation, and potential human rights violations, while expressing a desire for transparency regarding the artificial nature of chatbots.
AI is Uncovering Underground Caves on Mars.
- Researchers Thomas Watson and James Baldini from Durham University have developed an artificial neural network to automate the process of identifying potential cave entrances (PCEs) on Mars.
- These PCEs are often formed by the collapse of lava tubes, which are hollow tunnels left behind by flowing lava streams.
- The AI system was trained using examples of already-identified PCEs and can now process images of the Martian surface to locate these caves, which could serve as promising locations for human habitats and the search for simple Martian life.
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