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

Microsoft’s 365 Copilot AI assistant will be available starting on November 1st for Microsoft 365 customers on certain business and enterprise plans. But the add-on isn’t free: the company announced in July it would be charging a $30 per month premium per user for access to the feature, which almost doubles the total price of a subscription for businesses on some lower-end plans.

Copilot is like a modern-day Clippy sans anthropomorphic animated paperclip. With it, business users can sum up documents or outsource email creation to their AI helper. It can also create wholly new Word projects using information from other files or offer real-time highlights from Teams meetings. It can even tell you how it did something in Excel after you ask it to visualize data for you or make projections.

OpenAI announced the third version of its generative AI visual art platform DALL-E, which now lets users use ChatGPT to create prompts and includes more safety options. 

DALL-E converts text prompts to images. But even DALL-E 2 got things wrong, often ignoring specific wording. The latest version, OpenAI researchers said, understands context much better.

Yeah, so Toyota Research Institute (TRI) used generative AI in a “kindergarten for robots” to teach robots how to make breakfast — or at least, the individual tasks needed to do so — and it didn’t take hundreds of hours of coding and errors and bug fixing. Instead, researchers accomplished this by giving robots a sense of touch, plugging them into an AI model, and then, as you would a human being, showing them how.

The sense of touch is “one key enabler,” researchers say. By giving the robots the big, pillowy thumb (my term, not theirs) that you see in the video below, the model can “feel” what it’s doing, giving it more information. That makes difficult tasks easier to carry out than with sight alone.

Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to pulling answers from just the web — it can now scan your Gmail, Docs, and Drive to help you find the information you’re looking for. With the new integration, you can ask Bard to do things like find and summarize the contents of an email or even highlight the most important points of a document you have stored in Drive.

There’s a whole range of use cases for these integrations, which Google calls extensions, but they should save you from having to sift through a mountain of emails or documents to find a particular piece of information. You can then have Bard use that information in other ways, such as putting it into a chart or creating a bulleted summary. This feature is only available in English for now.

A coalition of environmental, tech, and anti-hate speech groups sent a letter to Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today demanding that the Democratic leader craft policy to address the growing impact AI could have on climate change.

Companies should be required to disclose the environmental impact of developing energy-intensive AI models, the letter says. And legislation aimed at curtailing the misuse of AI should include measures to prevent disinformation about climate change from spreading with the help of AI, the coalition writes.

Anthropic, the AI company backed by Google, has launched a paid version of its Claude chatbot in the US and UK. Priced at $20 (or £18) per month, the new Claude Pro option offers priority access when the bot is busy, early access to new features, and the ability to send more messages.

The main draw is that you’ll get five times more usage with Claude Pro when compared to the free tier, which means you can send more messages in a shorter period of time. Anthropic says the typical user will get at least 100 messages every eight hours depending on Claude’s capacity. The company says it will warn you when you have 10 messages remaining, with its limits resetting every eight hours.

Apple is investing millions of dollars per day into artificial intelligence, according to a new report from The Information. The company is reportedly working on multiple AI models across several teams.

Apple’s unit that works on conversational AI is called “Foundational Models,” per The Information’s reporting. It has “around 16” members, including several former Google engineers. It’s helmed by John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of AI, who was hired in 2018 to help improve Siri. (Giannandrea has reportedly “expressed skepticism to colleagues about the potential usefulness of chatbots powered by AI language models.”)

Gizmodo owner G/O Media laid off editors of its Spanish-language site Gizmodo en Español and is now using AI to translate articles.

Matías S. Zavia, a writer at Gizmodo en Español, posted that the publication was shut down on August 29th and that it would now publish automatically translated articles. Gizmodo en Español previously had a small staff who wrote original stories and created Spanish-language adaptations of pieces from the English-language Gizmodo.

Chinese giant Baidu officially launched its chatbot, Ernie Bot, after the government approved its application, alongside that of several other AI companies. 

Ernie Bot is now available for download from app stores or Baidu’s website. Much like its main rival, ChatGPT, users can ask Ernie Bot questions or prompt it to help write market analysis, give marketing slogan ideas, and summarize documents. The company told The Verge Ernie Bot is available globally, but users need a Chinese number to register and log in. The Baidu app is available on US Android and iOS app stores but is only in Chinese.

After releasing its My AI chatbot earlier this year, Snapchat is now jumping on the AI selfie bandwagon with a new feature called Dreams.

Located in the camera roll section of Snapchat called Memories, Dreams are the company’s own take on the generative AI selfies that one-off apps like Lensa have already popularized. After uploading a series of real-life selfies in the app specifically for Dreams, Snapchat displays a series of eight-photo packs to choose from with themes like doppelgangers or back-to-school.

The Google DeepMind team has believed for years that building great generative AI tools also requires building great tools to detect what has been created by AI. There are plenty of obvious, high-stakes reasons why, says Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. “Every time we talk about it and other systems, it’s, ‘What about the problem of deepfakes?’” With another contentious election season coming in 2024 in both the US and the UK, Hassabis says that building systems to identify and detect AI imagery is more important all the time.

Hassabis and his team have been working on a tool for the last few years, which Google is releasing publicly today. It’s called SynthID, and it’s designed to essentially watermark an AI-generated image in a way that is imperceptible to the human eye but easily caught by a dedicated AI detection tool. 

OpenAI finally released a version of ChatGPT that promises to protect business data as more companies consider using the platform but worry about privacy and security. 

In a blog post, OpenAI said ChatGPT Enterprise offers better security and privacy, unlimited high-speed access to GPT-4, more powerful data analysis so companies understand information much faster, and the ability to ask more complicated questions to ChatGPT.

Poe, the AI chatbot platform created by Quora, has added a slew of updates, including a Mac app, the ability to have multiple simultaneous conversations with the same AI bot, access to Meta’s Llama 2 model, and more. It’s also planning an enterprise tier so that companies can manage the platform for their employees, according to an email that was recently sent to Poe users.

As my colleague David Pierce wrote in April, Poe’s ambition is to be the web browser for AI chatbots. Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of Poe’s parent company Quora, also sits on the board of OpenAI and thinks that the number of AI bots will keep increasing. Poe wants to be the one place where you can find them all.

OpenAI has announced that businesses can now fine-tune GPT-3.5 Turbo using their own data — OpenAI claims the resulting custom model can match or exceed the abilities of GPT-4 for certain tasks. Later this fall, the company says it will open up the arguably more advanced GPT-4 for the same purpose.

Fine-tuning lets businesses essentially hone ChatGPT to a more focused model that’s especially efficient for certain tasks. The supervised training would make a bot that’s unique to the client company so that it offers, say, reliable responses in a specific language or with more concise wording. Until now, business customers were limited to GPT-3 variants for this, like davinci-002 or babbage-002.

The New York Times has blocked OpenAI’s web crawler, meaning that OpenAI can’t use content from the publication to train its AI models. If you check the NYT’s robots.txt page, you can see that the NYT disallows GPTBot, the crawler that OpenAI introduced earlier this month. Based on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, it appears NYT blocked the crawler as early as August 17th.

The change comes after the NYT updated its terms of service at the beginning of this month to prohibit the use of its content to train AI models. New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander spokesperson declined to comment. OpenAI didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the Creativity Machine algorithm he’d created.

Thaler had tried multiple times to copyright the image “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,” which would have listed the author as the creator of the work and Thaler as the artwork’s owner, but he was repeatedly rejected.

A Microsoft travel guide for Ottawa, Canada, prominently recommended tourists visit the Ottawa Food Bank, as spotted by Paris Marx until it was removed after this article was originally published. (You can see the article in full here.) The food bank was the No. 3 recommendation on the list, sitting behind the National War Memorial and above going to an Ottawa Senators hockey game.

We reported in 2020 about Microsoft laying off journalists at Microsoft News and MSN to replace them with artificial intelligence. However, the company says its content is not generated by the AI we’re now used to in the form of large language models powering tools like the Bing chatbot or ChatGPT. Instead, the content in Microsoft’s story was generated through “a combination of algorithmic techniques with human review,” according to the company. As explained in a statement to The Verge from Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft:

Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is getting a major new feature: it will be able to summarize articles you’re reading on the web, according to a Google blog post. SGE can already summarize search results for you so that you don’t have to scroll forever to find what you’re looking for, and this new feature is designed to take that further by helping you out after you’ve actually clicked a link.

You probably won’t see this feature, which Google is calling “SGE while browsing,” right away.

The most sought-after resource in the tech industry right now isn’t a specific type of engineer. It’s not even money. It’s an AI chip made by Nvidia called the H100. 

Securing these GPUs is “considerably harder to get than drugs,” Elon Musk has said. “Who’s getting how many H100s and when is top gossip of the valley rn,” OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy posted last week.

Zoom has updated its terms of service and reworded a blog post explaining recent terms of service changes referencing its generative AI tools. The company now explicitly states that “communications-like” customer data isn’t being used to train artificial intelligence models for Zoom or third parties. What is covered by communications-like? Basically, the content of your videoconferencing on Zoom.

Here’s the key passage from the newly-revised terms: