OpenAI introduced its flagship GPT-4o model at the Spring Update event and made it free for everyone. Just after a day, at the Google I/O 2024 event, Google debuted the Gemini 1.5 Pro model for consumers via Gemini Advanced. Now that two flagship models are available for consumers, let’s compare ChatGPT 4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro and see which one does a better job. On that note, let’s begin.

We have performed many commonsense reasoning and multimodal tests on both ChatGPT 4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. ChatGPT 4o performs much better than Gemini 1.5 Pro in a variety of tasks including reasoning, code generation, multimodal understanding, and more. — Read More

If you’re using the free version of ChatGPT, you’re about to get a boost. On Monday, OpenAI debuted a new flagship model of its underlying engine, called GPT-4o, along with key changes to its user interface.

The chatbot, which sparked a whole new wave of consumer-friendly AI, comes in two flavors: the free version, ChatGPT 3.5, and a version that costs $20 per month, ChatGPT 4.0. With that subscription fee, you get access to a large language model that can handle a lot more data as it generates responses to your prompts.

GPT-4o should close that gap, at least somewhat. Your interactions with ChatGPT will also become more conversational. — Read More

Teens are opening up to AI chatbots as a way to explore friendship. But sometimes, the AI’s advice can go too far.

Early last year, 15-year-old Aaron was going through a dark time at school. He’d fallen out with his friends, leaving him feeling isolated and alone.

… “I’m not going to lie,” Aaron said. “I think I may be a little addicted to it.” 

Aaron is one of many young users who have discovered the double-edged sword of AI companions. Many users like Aaron describe finding the chatbots helpful, entertaining, and even supportive. But they also describe feeling addicted to chatbots, a complication which researchers and experts have been sounding the alarm on. It raises questions about how the AI boom is impacting young people and their social development and what the future could hold if teenagers — and society at large — become more emotionally reliant on bots. — Read More

Hume AI has introduced a conversational AI named Empathic Voice Interface (EVI), with emotional intelligence. EVI sets itself apart by comprehending the user’s tone of voice, adding depth to every interaction and tailoring its responses accordingly. 

Interestingly, it almost feels like you are talking to a human. 

Click here to check it out for yourself. — Read More

ChatGPT rival Pi, from Inflection, now performs “neck and neck with” OpenAI’s GPT-4 thanks to a new model, according to data first shared with Axios.

Why it matters: Inflection faces a crowded field in the market for AI-based assistants, competing against better-heeled rivals including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, among others.

Driving the news: Inflection is announcing Thursday that Pi has been using a new model, version 2.5, in recent weeks and that the updated engine is now “powering Pi for the majority of users.” — Read More

Today, we’re announcing the Claude 3 model family, which sets new industry benchmarks across a wide range of cognitive tasks. The family includes three state-of-the-art models in ascending order of capability: Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus. Each successive model offers increasingly powerful performance, allowing users to select the optimal balance of intelligence, speed, and cost for their specific application.

Opus and Sonnet are now available to use in claude.ai and the Claude API which is now generally available in 159 countries. Haiku will be available soon. — Read More

Today, OpenAI announced it is adding a major upgrade to its signature web-based chatbot application, ChatGPT: persistent memory.

Rolling out slowly for selected users of ChatGPT’s free tier and paid subscription ChatGPT Plus ($20 per month) to start, the feature will allow users to ask ChatGPT to remember information they give it, which the app can then recall later, even across new, unrelated chat sessions.  – Read More

Artificial intelligence seems more powerful than ever, with chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT capable of producing uncannily humanlike text. But for all their talents, these bots still leave researchers wondering: Do such models actually understand what they are saying? “Clearly, some people believe they do,” said the AI pioneer Geoff Hinton in a recent conversation with Andrew Ng, “and some people believe they are just stochastic parrots.”

This evocative phrase comes from a 2021 paper co-authored by Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington. It suggests that large language models (LLMs) — which form the basis of modern chatbots — generate text only by combining information they have already seen “without any reference to meaning,” the authors wrote, which makes an LLM “a stochastic parrot.”

These models power many of today’s biggest and best chatbots, so Hinton argued that it’s time to determine the extent of what they understand. The question, to him, is more than academic. “So long as we have those differences” of opinion, he said to Ng, “we are not going to be able to come to a consensus about dangers.”

New research may have intimations of an answer. A theory developed by Sanjeev Arora of Princeton University and Anirudh Goyal, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, suggests that the largest of today’s LLMs are not stochastic parrots. The authors argue that as these models get bigger and are trained on more data, they improve on individual language-related abilities and also develop new ones by combining skills in a manner that hints at understanding — combinations that were unlikely to exist in the training data. – Read More

A Theory for Emergence of Complex Skills in Language Models

Skill-Mix: a Flexible and Expandable Family of Evaluations for AI models

OpenAI says it is investigating complaints about ChatGPT having become “lazy”.

In recent days, more and more users of the latest version of ChatGPT – built on OpenAI’s GPT-4 model – have complained that the chatbot refuses to do as people ask, or that it does not seem interested in answering their queries.

If the person asks for a piece of code, for instance, it might just give a little information and then instruct users to fill in the rest. Some complained that it did so in a particularly sassy way, telling people that they are perfectly able to do the work themselves, for instance.  – Read More