Bing, Bard, and ChatGPT: AI chatbots are rewriting the internet

Apple has restricted employees from using AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT over fears confidential information entered into these systems will be leaked or collected.

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Apple employees have also been warned against using GitHub’s AI programming assistant Copilot. Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman tweeted that ChatGPT had been on Apple’s list of restricted software “for months.”

OpenAI has launched an iOS app for ChatGPT, promising that an Android version is coming “soon.” The app is free to use, syncs chat history with the web, and features voice input, supported by OpenAI’s open-source speech recognition model Whisper. The app works on both iPhones and iPads and can be downloaded from the App Store here. OpenAI says it’s rolling out the app in the US first and will expand to other countries “in the coming weeks.”

OpenAI didn’t previously hint that a mobile app was coming, but it makes sense given the incredible popularity of ChatGPT. The AI chatbot launched last November but rocketed in use. Some outside estimates suggest the app attracted 100 million users by January this year, though OpenAI has never confirmed these figures.

Google is planning to use artificial intelligence to help companies create ads, according to a report from CNBC. Internal documents viewed by the outlet suggest that Google wants to use its new PaLM 2 AI language model to help advertisers generate assets that they can use in their ads.

This tracks with a report from the Financial Times in April, which similarly stated that Google could soon create ads by putting together images, video, and text supplied by the advertiser. That’s not the only way Google could use its AI language model, however. CNBC reports that Google is also looking into ways to leverage its AI model to provide video ideas to YouTubers. It could also integrate an AI chatbot within the Play Store, Gmail, and Maps to provide customer support.

Zoom is partnering with Anthropic to integrate the company’s AI assistant across its productivity platform. In a post on Tuesday, Zoom says it will first add the chatbot to its Contact Center product, which businesses can use as a channel for customer support.

Zoom says Claude, a chatbot Anthropic launched in March, should help customer support agents by creating “better self-service features” that can help guide customers toward relevant solutions. It will also soon be able to surface necessary resources for agents while they’re serving customers.

It looks like Amazon will be joining the chatbot fray. As spotted by Bloomberg, the company has posted job listings describing how it is “reimagining Amazon Search” with a new “interactive conversational experience that helps you find answers to product questions, perform product comparisons, receive personalized product suggestions, and so much more,” according to a listing for a machine learning-focused engineer. You can see another cached job listing here.

Amazon is pitching these changes to search as absolutely massive. “This will be a once in a generation transformation for Search, just like the Mosaic browser made the Internet easier to engage with three decades ago,” Amazon wrote. “If you missed the 90s—WWW, Mosaic, and the founding of Amazon and Google—you don’t want to miss this opportunity.” And we might be seeing the changes sooner rather than later, as Amazon wants to “deliver this vision to our customers right away.”

Google is launching a new AI-powered coding bot for Android developers. During its I/O event on Wednesday, Google announced that the tool, called Studio Bot, will help developers build apps by generating code, fixing errors, and answering questions about Android.

According to Google, the bot is built on Codey, the company’s new foundational coding model that stems from its updated PaLM 2 large language model (LLM). Studio Bot supports both the Kotlin and Java programming languages and will live directly in the toolbar on Android Studio. There, developers can get quick answers to their questions or even have the bot debug a portion of their code.

Google has announced PaLM 2: its latest AI language model and competitor to rival systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4.

“PaLM 2 models are stronger in logic and reasoning, thanks to broad training in logic and reasoning,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai onstage at the company’s I/O conference. “It’s also trained on multilingual text spanning over 100 languages.”

Google is adding a smorgasbord of new features to its AI chatbot Bard, including support for new languages (Japanese and Korean), easier ways to export text to Google Docs and Gmail, visual search, and a dark mode. Most significantly, the company is removing the waitlist for Bard and making the system available in English in 180 countries and territories. It’s also promising future features like AI image generation powered by Adobe and integration with third-party web services like Instacart and OpenTable.

Collectively, the news is a shot in the arm for Bard, which was released two months ago for select users in the US and UK. The chatbot — which Google still stresses is an experiment and not a replacement to its search engine — has compared poorly to rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s new Bing chatbot. Notably, Bard made a factual error in its first-ever public demo (though this problem is common to all such bots). Now, Google is adding a lot of new features as well as upgrading Bard to use its new PaLM 2 language model. This should improve its general answers and usability.

Wendy’s is partnering with Google to create an AI chatbot that can take orders at its drive-thrus, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. The fast-food chain has plans to bring its first “Wendy’s FreshAI” enabled drive-thru to a Columbus, Ohio, restaurant in June.

The chatbot will be able to take verbal orders from customers who line up at Wendy’s drive-thru kiosks, all with the hope that it will help reduce long wait times. Wendy’s worked with Google to build a tailored chatbot on top of the company’s existing large language model (LLM), which it’s bound to reveal updates about at its Google I/O event on Wednesday. This all goes along with Google’s push into AI, as its Cloud unit sells the idea of companies commissioning their own models for different purposes, built on their own data.

Google’s I/O event is less than two days away, and a new CNBC report might have just revealed some of the major AI-focused updates to be announced at the show.

One big component will be a new large language model (LLM), PaLM 2, which CNBC describes as a “general-use” LLM that is Google’s “most recent and advanced.” The LLM has apparently performed “a broad range of coding and math tests as well as creative writing tests and analysis,” according to CNBC, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google show off some of those capabilities onstage. (The first PaLM was announced in April 2022, months before the recent AI boom fueled by applications like ChatGPT.)

Microsoft has allegedly teamed up with AMD to help bolster the chipmaker’s expansion into artificial intelligence processors. According to a report by Bloomberg, Microsoft is providing engineering resources to support AMD’s developments as the two companies join forces to compete against Nvidia, which controls an estimated 80 percent market share in the AI processor market.

In turn, Bloomberg’s sources also claim that AMD is helping Microsoft to develop its own in-house AI chips, codenamed Athena. Several hundred employees from Microsoft’s silicon division are reportedly working on the project and the company has apparently already sunk around $2 billion into its development. Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw has, however, denied that AMD is involved with Athena. 

OpenAI managed to appease Italian data authorities and lift the country’s effective ban on ChatGPT last week, but its fight against European regulators is far from over. 

Earlier this year, OpenAI’s popular and controversial ChatGPT chatbot hit a big legal snag: an effective ban in Italy. The Italian Data Protection Authority (GPDP) accused OpenAI of violating EU data protection rules, and the company agreed to restrict access to the service in Italy while it attempted to fix the problem. On April 28th, ChatGPT returned to the country, with OpenAI lightly addressing GPDP’s concerns without making major changes to its service — an apparent victory.

Amazon is looking to add new AI chatbot technology to Alexa, reports Insider based on leaked documents. The voice assistant needs reanimation in a world now seemingly infatuated with generative AI like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

One example in the document describes Alexa generating a bedtime story after an eight-year-old asks it to tell a story about a “cat and a moon.” And in true ChatGPT-style, it makes up a whole story about “Mittens, the first cat to ever go to the moon.” It also describes the use of an Echo Show camera that sees the child holding an Olaf toy, so it incorporates the character into the story.

Microsoft is making its Bing GPT-4 chatbot available to everyone today, no more waitlist necessary. All you need to do is sign in to the new Bing or Edge with your Microsoft account, and you’ll now access the open preview version that’s powered by GPT-4. Microsoft is also massively upgrading Bing Chat with lots of new features and even plug-in support.

This open preview launch comes nearly two months after Microsoft experimented with removing the waitlist for its new Bing Chat feature. The chatbot originally launched in a private preview in February, and Microsoft has been gradually opening it up ever since.

Microsoft is revealing a big upgrade for its Bing chatbot today that adds image and video answers, restaurant bookings, chat history, and some smarter Microsoft Edge integration. These new features also coincide with Microsoft making Bing Chat available for anyone to try, moving from private to public preview.

Perhaps the biggest addition is a new Actions feature in Bing Chat and Edge. You’ll now be able to use Microsoft’s Bing AI to complete tasks without having to navigate back and forth between sites. So if a search result recommends a restaurant, it can then find a reservation time that works for you and help you book it all in the chat interface.

Snap has already begun experimenting with sponsored links in its My AI chatbot. During the NewFronts advertising event on Tuesday, the company announced that the bot will start surfacing paid links that are relevant to a conversation.

For example, Snap says if you’re using My AI to figure out what to have for dinner, the bot might suggest a sponsored link that leads to a local restaurant or delivery app after providing an initial response. It might even surface links for an airline or hotel if you’re chatting with My AI about planning a trip.