In February, Meta Platforms set off an explosion of artificial intelligence development when it gave academics access to sophisticated machine-learning models that can understand conversational language. Within weeks, the academics turned those models into open-source software that powered free alternatives to ChatGPT and other proprietary AI software.
Free AI models are now “reasonably close” in performance to proprietary models from Google and ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and most software developers will eventually opt to use the free ones, said Ion Stoica, a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley, who helped develop a key open-source AI model using Meta’s technology. — Read More
Tag Archives: ChatBots
Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft
AI is one of the deepest platform shifts ever, says Google’s CEO, and he’s not worried about being first.
Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google and Alphabet. We spoke the day after Google I/O, the company’s big developer conference, where Sundar introduced new generative AI features in virtually all of the company’s products.
It’s an important moment for Google, which invented a lot of the core technology behind the current AI moment. The company is very quick to point out that the “T” in ChatGPT stands for transformer, the large language model technology first invented at Google, but OpenAI and others have been first to market with generative AI products, and OpenAI has partnered with Microsoft on a new version of Bing that feels like the first real competitor to Google Search in a long time. I wanted to know what Sundar thinks of this moment and, in particular, what he thinks of the future of Search, which is the heart of Google’s business. — Read More
ChatGPT vs. Bard: A realistic comparison
Let’s see how Bard does vs. ChatGPT, without preconceptions or hype. One person’s totally unscientific, anecdotal, but realistic field experiment.
… This is not a scientific study, clearly. Once upon a time, I enjoyed doing controlled, in-depth, technical comparisons of ML models, but those days are past. In this post, I’m going to take about an hour to explore a few use cases, make a decision, and move on to the rest of my long to-do list. — Read More
AI Claude: Introducing 100K Context WindowsAI Claude:
We’ve expanded Claude’s context window from 9K to 100K tokens, corresponding to around 75,000 words! This means businesses can now submit hundreds of pages of materials for Claude to digest and analyze, and conversations with Claude can go on for hours or even days.
The average person can read 100,000 tokens of text in ~5+ hours1, and then they might need substantially longer to digest, remember, and analyze that information. Claude can now do this in less than a minute. For example, we loaded the entire text of The Great Gatsby into Claude-Instant (72K tokens) and modified one line to say Mr. Carraway was “a software engineer that works on machine learning tooling at Anthropic.” When we asked the model to spot what was different, it responded with the correct answer in 22 seconds. — Read More
Enter PaLM 2 (New Bard): Full Breakdown – 92 Pages Read and Gemini Before GPT 5? Google I/O
Can AI actually write good fanfiction?
Since artificial intelligence-powered text-generation tools were made widely available to the public in the past few months, they’ve been heralded by some as the future of email, internet search, and content generation. But these AI-powered tools also have some clear shortcomings: They tend to be incorrect, and often generate answers that reinforce racial biases, for example. There are also serious ethical concerns about their unspecified training data.
It is not surprising that debates over using these tools have also been happening in fandom spaces. Excited fans almost immediately turned to them as a new way of exploring their favorite characters. With the right prompt, AI can spit out a few paragraphs of fic-like writing. But just as quickly, many fanfic writers began to speak out against the practice. Read More
India’s religious AI chatbots are speaking in the voice of god — and condoning violence
Claiming wisdom based on the Bhagavad Gita, the bots frequently go way off script.
In January 2023, when ChatGPT was setting new growth records, Bengaluru-based software engineer Sukuru Sai Vineet launched GitaGPT. The chatbot, powered by GPT-3 technology, provides answers based on the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture. GitaGPT mimics the Hindu god Krishna’s tone — the search box reads, “What troubles you, my child?”
… At least five GitaGPTs have sprung up between January and March this year, with more on the way. Experts have warned that chatbots being allowed to play god might have unintended, and dangerous, consequences. Rest of World found that some of the answers generated by the Gita bots lack filters for casteism, misogyny, and even law. Three of these bots, for instance, say it is acceptable to kill another if it is one’s dharma or duty. — Read More
PaLM2
When you look back at the biggest breakthroughs in AI over the last decade, Google has been at the forefront of so many of them. Our groundbreaking work in foundation models has become the bedrock for the industry and the AI-powered products that billions of people use daily. As we continue to responsibly advance these technologies, there’s great potential for transformational uses in areas as far-reaching as healthcare and human creativity.
… Building on this work, today we’re introducing PaLM 2, our next generation language model. PaLM 2 is a state-of-the-art language model with improved multilingual, reasoning and coding capabilities.
… At I/O today, we announced over 25 new products and features powered by PaLM 2. That means that PaLM 2 is bringing the latest in advanced AI capabilities directly into our products and to people — including consumers, developers, and enterprises of all sizes around the world. Read More
Large Language Models and Elections
Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee released a video that it claims was “built entirely with AI imagery.” The content of the ad isn’t especially novel—a dystopian vision of America under a second term with President Joe Biden—but the deliberate emphasis on the technology used to create it stands out: It’s a “Daisy” moment for the 2020s.
We should expect more of this kind of thing. The applications of AI to political advertising have not escaped campaigners, who are already “pressure testing” possible uses for the technology. In the 2024 presidential election campaign, you can bank on the appearance of AI-generated personalized fundraising emails, text messages from chatbots urging you to vote, and maybe even some deepfaked campaign avatars. Future candidates could use chatbots trained on data representing their views and personalities to approximate the act of directly connecting with people. Think of it like a whistle-stop tour with an appearance in every living room. Previous technological revolutions—railroad, radio, television, and the World Wide Web—transformed how candidates connect to their constituents, and we should expect the same from generative AI. This isn’t science fiction: The era of AI chatbots standing in as avatars for real, individual people has already begun, as the journalist Casey Newton made clear in a 2016 feature about a woman who used thousands of text messages to create a chatbot replica of her best friend after he died. Read More
There Is No Turning Back on AI
The only question is: will we learn how to live in moving history?
ChatGPT has been around for about two seconds and it’s already changing how people work, how they write, how they research, how they cheat on tests, how they profess their love, and what they make for dinner.
We didn’t have to talk about theoretical “use cases,” as people still do with cryptocurrency. ChatGPT, which 100 million people use every day, showed us its uses right away.
That is really exciting. And also really unnerving. Read More
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