no one has been able keep quiet about artificial intelligence since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the world in November. But this week there was a lot AI talk that even people working in the field have been struggling to keep up.
Google First Announced which was spraying AI dust in Gmail, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. When the changes are finally implemented, you’ll be able to have Google Docs write you a full essay, cover letter, sales pitch, job description, or basically anything else you want. Gmail will be able to automatically summarize email threads and compose replies on your behalf, and you’ll be able to ask Presentations to create an entire presentation with a few simple words. google too Opened access to a system that will allow other companies to use their AI model to create their own tools similar to ChatGPT.
Hours later, Anthropic, an AI startup in which Google recently invested more than $300 million, Announced a new rival to ChatGPT, a chatbot named Claude that it was making available to businesses.
Soon after, Open AI, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, loudly Announced GPT-4, the next version of the technology that powers ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, the company’s imager. OpenAI claimed that GPT-4 is significantly more powerful, accurate and intelligent than its previous version. The company said GPT-4 is capable of feats like doing your taxes, building entire websites simply by looking at a rough design scribbled on a piece of paper, and passing a series of standardized tests, including the Uniform Bar Exam.
This was just on TUESDAY.
On Thursday, Microsoft made an eye-catching advertisement, saying it would infuse boring old Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams) with shiny new AI capabilities thanks to the company’s partnership with OpenAI. Like Google’s offering, the new Office will let you take the drudgery out of writing, create slick PowerPoint presentations in seconds, and make sense of complex Excel spreadsheets in answer to your questions.
Meanwhile, there were other miscellaneous announcements: Midjourney, a competitor to DALL-E 2, announced a new version that is said to be “more advanced” and “higher resolution”. Stanford University launched its own AI model based on the technology developed by Meta, and dozens of companies, large and small, sent out a series of press releases declaring that they were jumping on the AI bandwagon.
“This week is all about an AI arms race,” Neil Sahota, a professor at the University of California at Irvine and a United Nations adviser on AI, told BuzzFeed News. “Everyone knows that it will be the first one or two companies in the market that will really see the competitive advantage, because probably in four or five years, all of this will be a commodity. Everyone wants to outperform the competition right now, and no one wants to be left behind.”
