Bing, Bard, and ChatGPT: How AI is rewriting the internet

Meta announced it’s open-sourcing its large language model LLaMA 2, making it free for commercial and research use and going head-to-head with OpenAI’s free-to-use GPT-4, which powers tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing.

Meta announced the move as part of Microsoft’s Inspire event, noting its support for Azure and Windows and a “growing” partnership between the two companies. At the same time, Microsoft revealed more details about the AI tools built into its 360 platform and how much those will cost. Qualcomm also announced it is working with Meta to bring LLaMa to laptops, phones, and headsets starting from 2024 onward for AI-powered apps that work without relying on cloud services.

Template-based website builder Wix has announced that, soon, it’ll let you create entire websites by typing a description into a box and answering a few follow-up questions. Everything, from the design to text and images, will then be automatically generated for you, and from the looks of things, it’ll be pretty fast.

In the past, companies like Wix and WordPress.com have let you create websites using templates you can tweak to your liking. But Wix says its new AI Site Generator feature goes beyond templates, using AI and algorithms to create a “unique” website.

As rumors mount for a “Windows 12” release for next year, Microsoft confirmed and named a new Windows 11 23H2 update planned for the fourth quarter of 2023.

Microsoft hasn’t yet revealed what’s in it, but the company does have many unreleased features in the beta testing pipeline that could be included. One of the big new items is Windows Copilot, which takes the GPT generative AI tech being used in Bing and Microsoft (Office) 365 and gives users an OS-wide personal assistant — and is available to test now.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating ChatGPT creator OpenAI over possible consumer harm through its data collection and the publication of false information. 

First reported by The Washington Post, the FTC sent a 20-page letter to the company this week. The letter requests documents related to developing and training its large language models, as well as data security. 

Google is adding some new features to its Bard AI chatbot, including the ability for Bard to speak its answers to you and for it to respond to prompts that also include images. The chatbot is also now available in much of the world, including the EU.

In a blog post, Google is positioning Bard’s spoken responses as a helpful way to “correct pronunciation of a word or listen to a poem or script.” You’ll be able to hear spoken responses by entering a prompt and selecting the sound icon. Spoken responses will be available in more than 40 languages and are live now, according to Google.

Project Tailwind, the AI-backed note-taking tool that Google launched at this year’s I/O developer conference, is rebranding. It’s now known as NotebookLM, and it’s launching today to “a small group of users in the US,” according to a Google blog post. (The LM stands for Language Model because Google really wants to make sure you don’t forget about all the AI in here.) The product hasn’t changed, though: Google’s still trying to give users their own personal AI, trained on their data and notes and able to help them make sense of it all.

The core of NotebookLM seems to actually start in Google Docs. (“We’ll be adding additional formats soon,” the blog post says.) Once you get access to the app, you’ll be able to select a bunch of docs and then use NotebookLM to ask questions about them and even create new stuff with them.

Claude, the AI chatbot that Anthropic bills as easier to talk to, is finally available for more people to try. The company has announced that everyone in the US and UK can test out the new version of its conversational bot, Claude 2, from its website.

Its public availability allows Claude to join the ranks of ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard, all of which are available to users across numerous countries. That means we all have one more AI chatbot to play around with, but Anthropic says to “think of Claude as a friendly, enthusiastic colleague or personal assistant who can be instructed in natural language to help you with many tasks.”

Just a couple of months ago, a leaked memo said to be from a Google researcher cast doubt on the company’s future in AI, stating that it has “no moat” in the industry — and now, we seemingly have confirmation that it was real. In an interview with Decoder, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google’s DeepMind, told The Verge that although he believes the memo was legitimate, he disagrees with its conclusions.

“I think that memo was real. I think engineers at Google often write various documents, and sometimes they get leaked and go viral,” Hassabis said. “I think it’s interesting to listen to them, and then you’ve got to chart your own course. And I haven’t read that specific memo in detail, but I disagree with the conclusions from that.”

Today, I’m talking to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, the newly created division of Google responsible for AI efforts across the company. Google DeepMind is the result of an internal merger: Google acquired Demis’ DeepMind startup in 2014 and ran it as a separate company inside its parent company, Alphabet, while Google itself had an AI team called Google Brain. 

Google has been showing off AI demos for years now, but with the explosion of ChatGPT and a renewed threat from Microsoft in search, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai made the decision to bring DeepMind into Google itself earlier this year to create… Google DeepMind.

Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement.

The suits alleges, among other things, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”

Google’s Med-PaLM 2, an AI tool designed to answer questions about medical information, has been in testing at the Mayo Clinic research hospital, among others, since April, The Wall Street Journal reported this morning. Med-PaLM 2 is a variant of PaLM 2, which was announced at Google I/O in May this year. PaLM 2 is the language model underpinning Google’s Bard.

WSJ reports that an internal email it saw said Google believes its updated model can be particularly helpful in countries with “more limited access to doctors.” Med-PaLM 2 was trained on a curated set of medical expert demonstrations, which Google believes will make it better at healthcare conversations than generalized chatbots like Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT.

On Monday, Gizmodo spotted that Google updated its privacy policy to disclose that its various AI services, such as Bard and Cloud AI, may be trained on public data that the company has scraped from the web.

“Our privacy policy has long been transparent that Google uses publicly available information from the open web to train language models for services like Google Translate,” said Google spokesperson Christa Muldoon to The Verge. “This latest update simply clarifies that newer services like Bard are also included. We incorporate privacy principles and safeguards into the development of our AI technologies, in line with our AI Principles.”

Elon Musk continues to blame Twitter’s new limitations on AI companies scraping “vast amounts of data” as he announced new “temporary” limits on how many posts people can read.

Now unverified accounts will only be able to see 600 posts per day, and for “new” unverified accounts, just 300 in a day. The limits for verified accounts (presumably whether they’re bought as a part of the Twitter Blue subscription, granted through an organization, or verification Elon forced on people like Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone else with more than a million followers) still allow reading only a maximum of 6,000 posts per day.

Microsoft is bringing AI-generated buying guides to Bing, the company announced on Thursday. Now when you search for things like “college supplies,” Bing will surface AI-made guides that offer comparisons between products in the same categories, such as headphones or laptops.

The link to Bing’s buying guide will appear at the very top of the search engine’s results. Clicking into the guide reveals an AI-generated summary about whatever you’re looking for, along with a list of products relevant to your search. Hit the Compare button, and you’ll see a chart that pulls specs from the product manufacturers’ websites and compares them side by side. Microsoft notes that you can access buying guides both through Bing chat and in the Edge sidebar.

People apparently find tweets more convincing when they’re written by AI language models. At least, that was the case in a new study comparing content created by humans to language generated by OpenAI’s model GPT-3.

The authors of the new research surveyed people to see if they could discern whether a tweet was written by another person or by GPT-3. The result? People couldn’t really do it. The survey also asked them to decide whether the information in each tweet was true or not. This is where things get even dicier, especially since the content focused on science topics like vaccines and climate change that are subject to a lot of misinformation campaigns online.