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Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, AI is causing a sea change in nearly every facet of life that technology touches. Bing wants to know you intimately, Bard wants to reduce websites to easy-to-read cards, and ChatGPT has infiltrated nearly every part of our lives. At The Verge, we’re exploring all the good AI is enabling and all the bad it’s bringing along.

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Are science journals prepared to deal with AI-generated glurge?

So far, the obvious giveaway phrases (“As of my last knowledge update in September 2021,” and “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic”) are appearing primarily in low-tier journals. But after Penis Rat, I am somewhat concerned about the quality of peer review.


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OpenAI’s custom chatbots are easier to make than market.

The Information reports on GPT Store developers disappointed by a lack of customers for their ChatGPT-style products and limited analytics support. One developer claims his role-playing chatbot “could have gotten more traffic by partnering with a small influencer on TikTok” after being featured for two weeks.

Verge reporter Emilia David had questions about the value of the GPT Store after struggling to “find a use” for chatbots made by other users, and it’s not clear if there are any great answers yet.


From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet

How we use the internet is changing fast thanks to the advancement of AI-powered chatbots that can find information and redeliver it as a simple conversation.

Companies love to say “AI.”

You figured it was true, now we’ve got earnings-call data from the largest 500 companies to back it up, thanks to Factset. “AI” mentions began to spike in late 2022 just as OpenAI announced ChatGPT. Nvidia cited “AI” the most in Q4 2023 as it rode the brain-replacement wave to a record market cap. Apple — the company rumored to be partnering with Google or OpenAI — didn’t even make the top ten list.


<em>ChatGPT was announced in November 2022.</em>

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ChatGPT was announced in November 2022.
Image: Factset

ChatGPT is winning the future — but what future is that?

OpenAI didn’t mean to kickstart a generational shift in the technology industry. But it did. Now all we have to decide is where to go from here.

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Grok goes open-source.

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has open-sourced the “base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1,” the model that underpins the Grok chatbot on X. xAI’s blog says Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter pre-training model that’s “not fine-tuned for any particular task.”

VentureBeat notes that while the model’s Apache license 2.0 means it can be freely used (with some minor conditions), it won’t have live access to X content by default.


Is YouTube Music testing Google’s Hum to Search feature?

A Reddit commenter posted a screenshot today showing what they said is the Hum to Search option in the YouTube Music on iOS

Google has let you search by humming a tune for years and started testing it in the Android YouTube app in August. Like 9to5Google, I’m not seeing it on my own iOS or Android devices. Are you?


A screenshot showing a new icon of a waveform next to the search field
Is Hum to Search coming to YouTube Music?
Image: Izmir_Stinger / Reddit
Anthropic just released the smallest and fastest Claude 3 model.

Claude 3 Haiku can now be accessed through claude.ai, Amazon Bedrock, and Perplexity Labs. It will be available on Google’s Vertex AI soon.

Anthropic previously said that even though Haiku was smaller than Claude 3 Opus and Sonnet, it still reads dense research papers “in less than three seconds.”


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Apple has acquired an AI startup called DarwinAI.

That’s according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who says Apple acquired the Canadian firm earlier this year. DarwinAI makes AI systems that visually inspect components for manufacturers, but, as pointed out by Bloomberg, the startup also aims to “make neural network models smaller and faster.”

This tech might prove useful to Apple, which is working to optimize large language models for phones.


Inside Google’s big AI shuffle — and how it plans to stay competitive, with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis

Google invented a lot of core AI technology, and now the company’s turning to Demis to get back in front of the AI race for AI breakthroughs.

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Copilot upgrade.

Windows Central points out that a switch to GPT-4 Turbo on the free tier of Microsoft’s AI assistant means searches on Copilot will be more current, and answers can be more thought out. GPT-4 Turbo was trained on data until April 2023 and can understand more complex questions.

However, for those who prefer the older model, Pro accounts can toggle between GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4.


Pinterest launched an AI tool that lets users filter search results by body type.

The filter starts with “a visual cue to select between four body type ranges.” It’s only available in the U.S. for women’s fashion and wedding-related items, but it will expand to men’s fashions later this year.

Pinterest says this will make its site a more “inclusive” place, but with 16 choices, it’s hard to represent every body type, even with the power of AI, and a prompt to save your selection didn’t appear in our tests.


Pinterest’s new body range tool shows row rows of different body types
Image: Pinterest
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“I’m just not going to go into the details about the data that was used.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern has a deep look at Sora, OpenAI’s new text-to-video generator — and with it, an interview with CTO Mira Murati, who steadfastly refuses to clarify what data was used to train the system. No wonder, since the explosion of copyright lawsuits against AI companies is quickly becoming an existential risk to them all. 4:25 in the video below:


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No, this isn’t CG.

This is Figure’s humanoid robot, which can now use OpenAI’s large vision language model (VLM) to provide reasoning and language understanding. The video shows how the bot can identify and interact with the objects on the counter in front of it when given a prompt, like “Can I have something to eat?”


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The EU has officially adopted its sweeping AI law.

After two years of debate and revisions, European Parliament members gave the Artificial Intelligence Act their final approval on Wednesday.

While the law officially comes into force 20 days after it’s published in the Official Journal (likely happening in May), some rules — like those impacting general-purpose AI systems like chatbots — will take effect 12 months later to give AI providers time to comply.


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TIL song-slaying AI sensation “There I Ruined It” starts with a real person’s voice.

I can’t get enough of ad agency creative Dustin Ballard’s AI hijinks: he made The Red Hot Chili Peppers sing a grocery list, turned Lil Jon’s “Get Low” into a time-honored Christmas classic, and showed up a congressional hearing on AI. That’s just a taste.

Recently, he revealed the process — it starts with his own voice!


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Midjourney is testing a highly requested “consistent characters” feature.

The generative AI service’s new algorithm can now use the same character across multiple images and styles without deviating too far from their original design.

Instructions on how to use “consistent characters” can be found on Midjourney’s Discord channel. The feature isn’t designed to replicate real people from photographs, and works best on characters generated via Midjourney.


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OpenAI says there is no “agreement at all” with Elon Musk.

The company’s legal response to Musk’s lawsuit was just made public and, as we expected, OpenAI refutes the crux of Musk’s argument: that it violated a founding contract with him when it became a commercial entity.

From OpenAI’s court filing, which is really just an official version of its public response to Musk last week:

Were this case to proceed to discovery, the evidence would show that Musk supported a for-profit structure for OpenAI, to be controlled by Musk himself, and dropped the project when his wishes were not followed. Seeing the remarkable technological advances OpenAI has achieved, Musk now wants that success for himself.


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Checking in on the Rabbit R1’s note-taking prowess.

This quick demo from Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu certainly helps make the case for the Rabbit R1 as a little AI helper gadget as it records audio and transcribes and summarizes it for you.

Yes, there are already smartphones with on-device AI capabilities like this. But look at the little reel-to-reel animation! So charming!