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

It’s the beginning of a new era of AI at Google, says CEO Sundar Pichai: the Gemini era. Gemini is Google’s latest large language model, which Pichai first teased at the I/O developer conference in June and is now launching to the public. To hear Pichai and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis describe it, it’s a huge leap forward in an AI model that will ultimately affect practically all of Google’s products. “One of the powerful things about this moment,” Pichai says, “is you can work on one underlying technology and make it better and it immediately flows across our products.” 

Gemini is more than a single AI model. There’s a lighter version called Gemini Nano that is meant to be run natively and offline on Android devices. There’s a beefier version called Gemini Pro that will soon power lots of Google AI services and is the backbone of Bard starting today. And there’s an even more capable model called Gemini Ultra that is the most powerful LLM Google has yet created and seems to be mostly designed for data centers and enterprise applications. 

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become a worldwide phenomenon and one of the fastest-growing consumer products ever, Google’s Bard has been something of an afterthought. The chatbot has steadily gained new features, including access to your data across other Google products, but its answers and information have rarely seemed to rival what you get from ChatGPT and other bots using GPT-3 and GPT-4. 

The case for Bard may have just gotten more compelling, though: as of today, for English-speaking users in 170 countries, Bard is now powered by Google’s new Gemini model, which it says matches and even exceeds OpenAI’s tech in a number of ways. (Google says Gemini is coming to more languages and countries “in the near future.”)

Microsoft is readying a new Bing feature that should take the hassle out of coming up with your own AI prompt. The GPT-4-powered capability, called Deep Search, takes your Bing query and expands on it, allowing the search engine to find answers about several topics related to your question on the web.

As an example, Microsoft shows how Bing turns a vague search for “how do points systems work in Japan” into a detailed prompt that asks Bing to:

There have been a handful of before-and-after moments in the modern technology era. Everything was one way, and then just like that, it was suddenly obvious it would never be like that again. Netscape showed the world the internet; Facebook made that internet personal; the iPhone made plain how the mobile era would take over. There are others — there’s a dating-app moment in there somewhere, and Netflix starting to stream movies might qualify, too — but not many.

ChatGPT, which OpenAI launched a year ago today, might have been the lowest-key game-changer ever. Nobody took a stage and announced that they’d invented the future, and nobody thought they were launching the thing that would make them rich. If we’ve learned one thing in the last 12 months, it’s that no one — not OpenAI’s competitors, not the tech-using public, not even the platform’s creators — thought ChatGPT would become the fastest-growing consumer technology in history. And in retrospect, the fact that nobody saw ChatGPT coming might be exactly why it has seemingly changed everything.

Sam Altman is officially OpenAI’s CEO again.

Just before Thanksgiving, the company said it had reached a deal in principle for him to return, and now it’s done. Microsoft is getting a non-voting observer seat on the nonprofit board that controls OpenAI as well, the company announced on Wednesday.

ChatGPT’s voice feature is now available to all users for free. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI announced users can now tap the headphones icon to use their voice to talk with ChatGPT in the mobile app, as well as get an audible response.

OpenAI first rolled out the ability to prompt ChatGPT with your voice and images in September, but it only made the feature available to paying users.

While OpenAI is in the middle of an existential crisis, there’s a new chatbot update from Anthropic, the Google-backed AI startup founded by former OpenAI engineers who left over disagreements about the company’s increasingly commercial direction as its Microsoft partnership went on.

Anthropic has announced that the latest update of its chatbot, Claude 2.1, can digest up to 200,000 tokens at once for Pro tier users, which it says equals over 500 pages of material.

Meta has reportedly broken up its Responsible AI (RAI) team as it puts more of its resources into generative artificial intelligence. The Information broke the news today, citing an internal post it had seen.

According to the report, most RAI members will move to the company’s generative AI product team, while others will work on Meta’s AI infrastructure. The company regularly says it wants to develop AI responsibly and even has a page devoted to the promise, where the company lists its “pillars of responsible AI,” including accountability, transparency, safety, privacy, and more.

Google is testing new generative AI features for YouTube that’ll let people create music tracks using just a text prompt or a simple hummed tune. The first, Dream Track, already seeded to a few creators on the platform, is designed to auto-generate short 30-second music tracks in the style of famous artists. The feature can imitate nine different artists, who’ve chosen to collaborate with YouTube on its development. YouTube is also showing off new tools that can generate music tracks from a hum.

The announcement comes as YouTube attempts to navigate the emerging norms and copyright rules around AI-generated music while also protecting its relationship with major music labels. The issue was brought into sharp relief when an AI-generated “Drake” song went viral earlier this year, and YouTube subsequently announced a deal to work with Universal Music as it establishes rules around AI-generated music on its platform.

Microsoft announced a plethora of changes for its Microsoft Copilot AI during Microsoft Ignite today that make the chatbot more interactive and participatory, particularly in Teams meetings. The updates expand Copilot’s role as an enterprise helper in Office apps like Teams, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

Microsoft has added some flexibility to the chatbot’s output, so users can tweak it with instructions to make its formatting and tone more to their personal liking. Word and PowerPoint will get the new personalization features to start, but the company says other Microsoft 365 apps will gain support in time.

Moments after OpenAI’s big keynote wrapped in San Francisco on Monday, the reporters in attendance made our way down to a private room to chat with CEO Sam Altman and CTO Mira Murati. During the Q&A, they elaborated on the big news that had just been shared onstage: OpenAI is launching a platform for creating and discovering custom versions of ChatGPT. 

There are natural parallels to draw between OpenAI’s GPT Store, which is set to go live in a few weeks, and the debut of the iPhone’s App Store in 2008. Like Apple way back then, OpenAI is inviting developers who are excited about this new wave of technology to hopefully help create a new, enduring platform. 

Google is rolling out new generative AI tools for creating ads, from writing the headlines and descriptions that appear along with searches to creating and editing the accompanying images. It’s pitching the tool for use by both advertising agencies as well as businesses without in-house creative staff. Using text prompts, advertisers can iterate on the text and images they generate until they find something they like.

Google also promises that it will never generate two of the same images, which can avoid the awkward possibility that two competing businesses end up with the exact same photo elements.

OpenAI announced more improvements to its large language models, GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, including updated knowledge bases and a much longer context window. The company says it will also follow Google and Microsoft’s lead and begin protecting customers against copyright lawsuits.

GPT-4 Turbo, currently available via an API preview, has been trained with information dating to April 2023, the company announced Monday at its first-ever developer conference. The earlier version of GPT-4 released in March only learned from data dated up to September 2021. OpenAI plans to release a production-ready Turbo model in the next few weeks but did not give an exact date.

With the release of ChatGPT one year ago, OpenAI introduced the world to the idea of an AI chatbot that can seemingly do anything. Now, the company is releasing a platform for making custom versions of ChatGPT for specific use cases — no coding required.

In the coming weeks, these AI agents, which OpenAI is calling GPTs, will be accessible through the GPT Store. Details about how the store will look and work are scarce for now, though OpenAI is promising to eventually pay creators an unspecified amount based on how much their GPTs are used. GPTs will be available to paying ChatGPT Plus subscribers and OpenAI enterprise customers, who can make internal-only GPTs for their employees.

One hundred million people are using ChatGPT on a weekly basis, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced at its first-ever developer conference on Monday. Since releasing its ChatGPT and Whisper models via API in March, the company also now boasts over two million developers, including over 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

OpenAI announced the figures as it detailed a range of new features, including a platform for building custom versions of ChatGPT to help with specific tasks and GPT-4 Turbo, a new model that has knowledge of world events up to April 2023 and which can fit the equivalent of over 300 pages of text in a single prompt.

Update November 6th, 10AM ET: We have all the confirmed details about the future of ChatGPT right here in our coverage of OpenAI’s developer event. The original article continues below.

Just as OpenAI is preparing for its first-ever developer conference, a significant ChatGPT update has leaked.