A frenzy of activity from tech giants and startups alike is reshaping what people want from search—for better or worse.
It’s a good time to be a search startup. When I spoke to Richard Socher, the CEO of You.com, last week he was buzzing: “Man, what an exciting day—looks like another record for us,” he exclaimed. “Never had this many users. It’s been a whirlwind.” You wouldn’t know that two of the biggest firms in the world had just revealed rival versions of his company’s product.
In back-to-back announcements last week, Microsoft and Google staked out their respective claims to the future of search, showing off chatbots that can respond to queries with fluid sentences rather than lists of links. Microsoft has upgraded its search engine Bing with a version of ChatGPT, the popular chatbot released by San Francisco–based OpenAI last year; Google is working on a ChatGPT rival, called Bard. Read More
Tag Archives: ChatBots
Why *is* Bing so reckless?
And how did some prominent journalists utterly miss this initially?
Anyone who watched the last week unfold will realize that the new Bing has (or had1) a tendency to get really wild, from declaring a love that it didn’t really have to encouraging people to get divorced to blackmailing them to teaching people how to commit crimes, and so on.
A lot of us were left scratching our heads. ChatGPT tended not to do this kind of stuff (unless you used “jailbreaking” techniques to try to trick it), whereas from what I can tell, Bing went off the rails really fast. And the thing is, the two systems are basically close siblings; OpenAI built ChatGPT, and is now presumed to be working very closely with Microsoft, using the same technology. ChatGPT was, I believe, mainly powered by GPT 3.5 plus a module known as RLHF (which combines Reinforcement learning with human feedback, to put some guardrails in place). We all assumed that Bing’s Chatbot was more or less the same thing, but powered instead by a bigger, newer version of 3.5, which I’ll call GPT 3.6. (Or maybe it’s GPT-4; Microsoft has been very coy about this.) Read More
Investors and techies gather in San Francisco to bathe in generative A.I. hype sparked by ChatGPT
The tech industry may seem like it’s in a lull, plagued by widespread layoffs at major tech companies and a down economy, but that air of doom wasn’t apparent at a gathering of techies and investors in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Instead, there was an overarching feeling of optimism.
They were there to discuss the latest craze capturing the attention of the tech world: generative artificial intelligence. The technology is known to the larger world through ChatGPT, which has captivated imaginations with its ability to generate creative text via written prompts. Read More
You.com challenges Google, Microsoft with launch of ‘multimodal conversational AI’ in search
You.com, a pioneering search engine startup based in San Francisco, CA, announced today the launch of YouChat 2.0, a groundbreaking new “multimodal conversational AI” system that promises to take the internet search experience to a whole new level. This update marks a significant step forward in the evolution of web search and offers a glimpse into the future of how we interact with information and the internet.
YouChat 2.0 is the first web search that combines advanced conversational AI with community-built apps, offering a unique and interactive experience with each query. With its blended large language model known as C-A-L (Chat, Apps and Links), YouChat 2.0 is able to serve up charts, images, videos, tables, graphs, text or code embedded in its responses to user queries. That means fewer tabs open and less drifting away from your search engine. Read More
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These are Microsoft’s Bing AI secret rules and why it says it’s named Sydney
Bing AI often refers to itself as Sydney, but Microsoft says that was an internal codename for a chat experience it was previously working on.
Microsoft’s new Bing AI keeps telling a lot of people that its name is Sydney. In exchanges posted to Reddit, the chatbot often responds to questions about its origins by saying, “I am Sydney, a generative AI chatbot that powers Bing chat.” It also has a secret set of rules that users have managed to find through prompt exploits (instructions that convince the system to temporarily drop its usual safeguards).
We asked Microsoft about Sydney and these rules, and the company was happy to explain their origins and confirmed that the secret rules are genuine.
“Sydney refers to an internal code name for a chat experience we were exploring previously,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. “We are phasing out the name in preview, but it may still occasionally pop up.” Roulston also explained that the rules are “part of an evolving list of controls that we are continuing to adjust as more users interact with our technology.” Read More
ChatGPT AI passes test designed to show theory of mind in children
Comprehending that other people might think differently from you is a form of intelligence known as theory of mind – what does it mean that the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT can do as well on tests of it as a 9-year-old child?
The artificial intelligence model behind the ChatGPT chatbot can solve tasks used to test whether people can understand different perspectives, a key sign of intelligence known as theory of mind. Its ability – which seems to have spontaneously emerged rather than being something the AI was trained to do – is comparable to that of a 9-year-old child. However, whether this shows that the AI is using theory of mind …
or is finding other ways to pass the tests isn’t known
“What [it] is doing is demonstrating a young child’s capacity to pass some of these benchmark tasks, and that’s not trivial,” says Ian Apperly at the University of Birmingham, UK, who wasn’t involved in the work. Read More
ChatGPT is everywhere. Here’s where it came from
OpenAI’s breakout hit was an overnight sensation—but it is built on decades of research.
We’ve reached peak ChatGPT. Released in December as a web app by the San Francisco–based firm OpenAI, the chatbot exploded into the mainstream almost overnight. According to some estimates, it is the fastest-growing internet service ever, reaching 100 million users in January, just two months after launch. Through OpenAI’s $10 billion deal with Microsoft, the tech is now being built into Office software and the Bing search engine. Stung into action by its newly awakened onetime rival in the battle for search, Google is fast-tracking the rollout of its own chatbot, LaMDA. Even my family WhatsApp is filled with ChatGPT chat.
But OpenAI’s breakout hit did not come out of nowhere. The chatbot is the most polished iteration to date in a line of large language models going back years. This is how we got here. Read More
Bing vs Bard: Who will win? Google or Microsoft? A breakdown and analysis of the recent news
Could ChatGPT supercharge false narratives?
Many warn of the tool’s potential to be a misinformation superspreader, capable of instantly producing news articles, blogs and political speeches.
ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence application by OpenAI, has captured the imagination of the internet. Some have suggested it’s the largest technological advancement in modern history. In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky called it “basically high tech plagiarism.” Others have suggested large language models like ChatGPT spell the end for Google search, because they eliminate the user process of filtering through multiple websites to access digestible information.
The technology works by sifting through the internet, accessing vast quantities of information, processing it, and using artificial intelligence to generate new content from user prompts. Users can ask it to produce almost any kind of text-based content.
Given its clear creative power, many are warning of ChatGPT’s potential to be a misinformation superspreader, capable of instantly producing news articles, blogs, eulogies and political speeches in the style of particular politicians, writing whatever the user desires. It’s not hard to see how AI-powered bot accounts on social media could become virtually indistinguishable from humans with just slight advancements. Read More
Battle of the Behemoths
The tech giants are girding their loins for battle in the AI search space.
Microsoft announced that today, we’re launching an all new, AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser, available in preview now at Bing.com, to deliver better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to generate content. We think of these tools as an AI copilot for the web.
“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.” Read More
Meanwhile, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced Bard, a ChatGPT competitor, in a blog post today, describing the tool as an “experimental conversational AI service” that will answer users’ queries and take part in conversations. The software will be available to a group of “trusted testers” today, says Pichai, before becoming “more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”
It’s not clear exactly what capabilities Bard will have, but it seems the chatbot will be just as free ranging as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A screenshot encourages users to ask Bard practical queries, like how to plan a baby shower or what kind of meals could be made from a list of ingredients for lunch. Read More
Not to be outdone, China’s largest search engine company plans to debut a ChatGPT-style application in March, initially embedding it into its main search services, said the person, asking to remain unidentified discussing private information. The tool, whose name hasn’t been decided, will allow users to get conversation-style search results much like OpenAI’s popular platform. Read More
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