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Enlarge / An image of a boy amazed by flying letters. (credit: Getty Images)
Some weeks in AI news are eerily quiet, but during others, getting a grip on the week's events feels like trying to hold back the tide. This week has seen three notable large language model (LLM) releases: Google Gemini Pro 1.5 hit general availability with a free tier, OpenAI shipped a new version of GPT-4 Turbo, and Mistral released a new openly licensed LLM, Mixtral 8x22B. All three of those launches happened within 24 hours starting on Tuesday.
With the help of software engineer and independent AI researcher Simon Willison (who also wrote about this week's hectic LLM launches on his own blog), we'll briefly cover each of the three major events in roughly chronological order, then dig into some additional AI happenings this week.
(credit: Google)
On Tuesday morning Pacific time, Google announced that its Gemini 1.5 Pro model (which we first covered in February) is now available in 180-plus countries, excluding Europe, via the Gemini API in a public preview. This is Google's most powerful public LLM so far, and it's available in a free tier that permits up to 50 requests a day.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Depending on who you ask about AI (and how you define it), the technology may or may not be useful, but one thing is for certain: AI hype is dominating corporate marketing these days—even in fast food. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, corporate fast food giant Yum Brands is embracing an "AI-first mentality" across its restaurant chains, including Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, and Habit Burger Grill. The company's chief digital and technology officer, Joe Park, told the WSJ that AI will shape nearly every aspect of how these restaurants operate.
"Our vision of [quick-service restaurants] is that an AI-first mentality works every step of the way," Park said in an interview with the outlet. "If you think about the major journeys within a restaurant that can be AI-powered, we believe it’s endless."
As we've discussed in the past, artificial intelligence is a nebulous term. It can mean many different things depending on the context, including computer-controlled ghosts in Pac-Man, algorithms that play checkers, or large language models that give terrible advice on major city websites. But most of all in this tech climate, it means money, because even talking about AI tends to make corporate share prices go up.
X has named a new head of safety about nine months after Ella Irwin resigned last June, following Elon Musk's criticism of Irwin's team's decision to restrict a transphobic documentary. Shortly after Irwin left, former head of brand safety AJ Brown similarly resigned. And that regime notably took over where former safety chief Yoel Roth—who also clashed with Musk—left off.
Stepping into the safety chief role next is Kylie McRoberts, who was promoted after leading X "initiatives to increase transparency in our moderation practices through labels" and "improve security with passkeys," X's announcement said.
As head of safety, McRoberts will oversee X's global safety team, which was rebranded last month to drop "trust" from its name. On X, Musk had said that "any organization that puts ‘Trust’ in their name cannot [be] trusted, as that is obviously a euphemism for censorship."
Enlarge / With these tips, you too can prompt people successfully.
In a break from our normal practice, Ars is publishing this helpful guide to knowing how to prompt the "human brain," should you encounter one during your daily routine.
While AI assistants like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm, a growing body of research shows that it's also possible to generate useful outputs from what might be called "human language models," or people. Much like large language models (LLMs) in AI, HLMs have the ability to take information you provide and transform it into meaningful responses—if you know how to craft effective instructions, called "prompts."
Human prompt engineering is an ancient art form dating at least back to Aristotle's time, and it also became widely popular through books published in the modern era before the advent of computers.
Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards)
On Monday, OpenAI announced that visitors to the ChatGPT website in some regions can now use the AI assistant without signing in. Previously, the company required that users create an account to use it, even with the free version of ChatGPT that is currently powered by the GPT-3.5 AI language model. But as we have noted in the past, GPT-3.5 is widely known to provide more inaccurate information compared to GPT-4 Turbo, available in paid versions of ChatGPT.
Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has transformed over time from a tech demo to a comprehensive AI assistant, and it has always had a free version available. The cost is free because "you're the product," as the old saying goes. Using ChatGPT helps OpenAI gather data that will help the company train future AI models, although free users and ChatGPT Plus subscription members can both opt out of allowing the data they input into ChatGPT to be used for AI training. (OpenAI says it never trains on inputs from ChatGPT Team and Enterprise members at all.)
Opening ChatGPT to everyone could provide a frictionless on-ramp for people who might use it as a substitute for Google Search or potentially gain new customers by providing an easy way for people to use ChatGPT quickly, then offering an upsell to paid versions of the service.
Enlarge / Hertz currently has more than a thousand Bolt EUVs for sale as they leave its rental car fleet. (credit: Chevrolet)
Electric vehicles have many advantages over cars that still use internal combustion engines. They're far more efficient, they're quieter, and they usually have much more torque than their gasoline-powered equivalents. But we're still far from achieving price parity between powertrains. In other words, EVs are expensive.
One place you can find some bargains, though, is the rental company Hertz, which currently has more than 2,100 EVs for sale, more than half of which are affordable enough to qualify for the IRS used clean vehicle tax credit.
Hertz has been adding a lot of EVs to its fleet as part of the company's decarbonization plan. In 2021, it revealed plans to purchase 100,000 Teslas. However, the controversial car maker had delivered fewer than half of those two years later, and long repair times for customer-inflicted damage have seen the rental agency divest itself of many of those Teslas and diversify its fleet, adding plenty of Polestars, Kias, and Chevrolets.
Enlarge / A photo of Vernor Vinge in 2006. (credit: Raul654)
On Wednesday, author David Brin announced that Vernor Vinge, sci-fi author, former professor, and father of the technological singularity concept, died from Parkinson's disease at age 79 on March 20, 2024, in La Jolla, California. The announcement came in a Facebook tribute where Brin wrote about Vinge's deep love for science and writing.
"A titan in the literary genre that explores a limitless range of potential destinies, Vernor enthralled millions with tales of plausible tomorrows, made all the more vivid by his polymath masteries of language, drama, characters, and the implications of science," wrote Brin in his post.
As a sci-fi author, Vinge won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1993), A Deepness in the Sky (2000), and Rainbows End (2007). He also won Hugos for novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004). As Mike Glyer's File 770 blog notes, Vinge's novella True Names (1981) is frequency cited as the first presentation of an in-depth look at the concept of "cyberspace."
Antibodies are incredibly useful. Lots of recently developed drugs rely on antibodies that bind to and block the activity of specific proteins. They're also great research tools, allowing us to identify proteins within cells, purify both proteins and cells, and so on. Therapeutic antibodies have provided our first defenses against emerging viruses like Ebola and SARS-CoV-2.
But making antibodies can be a serious pain, because it involves getting animals to make antibodies for us. You need to purify the protein you want the antibodies to stick to, inject it into an animal, and get the animal to produce antibodies as part of an immune response. From there, you either purify the antibodies or purify the cells that produce them. It's time-consuming, doesn't always work, and sometimes produces antibodies with properties that you're not looking for.
But thanks to developments in AI-based protein predictions, all that hassle might become unnecessary. A recently developed diffusion model for protein structures has been adapted to antibody production and has successfully designed antibodies against flu virus proteins.
Enlarge / The GB200 "superchip" covered with a fanciful blue explosion. (credit: Nvidia / Benj Edwards)
On Monday, Nvidia unveiled the Blackwell B200 tensor core chip—the company's most powerful single-chip GPU, with 208 billion transistors—which Nvidia claims can reduce AI inference operating costs (such as running ChatGPT) and energy consumption by up to 25 times compared to the H100. The company also unveiled the GB200, a "superchip" that combines two B200 chips and a Grace CPU for even more performance.
The news came as part of Nvidia's annual GTC conference, which is taking place this week at the San Jose Convention Center. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered the keynote Monday afternoon. "We need bigger GPUs," Huang said during his keynote. The Blackwell platform will allow the training of trillion-parameter AI models that will make today's generative AI models look rudimentary in comparison, he said. For reference, OpenAI's GPT-3, launched in 2020, included 175 billion parameters. Parameter count is a rough indicator of AI model complexity.
Nvidia named the Blackwell architecture after David Harold Blackwell, a mathematician who specialized in game theory and statistics and was the first Black scholar inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. The platform introduces six technologies for accelerated computing, including a second-generation Transformer Engine, fifth-generation NVLink, RAS Engine, secure AI capabilities, and a decompression engine for accelerated database queries.
Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards)
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is in talks to license Google's Gemini model to power AI features like Siri in a future iPhone software update coming later in 2024, according to people familiar with the situation. Apple has also reportedly conducted similar talks with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
The potential integration of Google Gemini into iOS 18 could bring a range of new cloud-based (off-device) AI-powered features to Apple's smartphone, including image creation or essay writing based on simple prompts. However, the terms and branding of the agreement have not yet been finalized, and the implementation details remain unclear. The companies are unlikely to announce any deal until Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
Gemini could also bring new capabilities to Apple's widely criticized voice assistant, Siri, which trails newer AI assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to complex questions. Rumors of Apple's own internal frustration with Siri—and potential remedies—have been kicking around for some time. In January, 9to5Mac revealed that Apple had been conducting tests with a beta version of iOS 17.4 that used OpenAI's ChatGPT API to power Siri.
Enlarge / An AI-generated image released by xAI during the open-weights launch of Grok-1. (credit: xAI)
On Sunday, Elon Musk's AI firm xAI released the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, a large language model designed to compete with the models that power OpenAI's ChatGPT. The open-weights release through GitHub and BitTorrent comes as Musk continues to criticize (and sue) rival OpenAI for not releasing its AI models in an open way.
Announced in November, Grok is an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT that is available to X Premium+ subscribers who pay $16 a month to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. At its heart is a mixture-of-experts LLM called "Grok-1," clocking in at 314 billion parameters. As a reference, GPT-3 included 175 billion parameters. Parameter count is a rough measure of an AI model's complexity, reflecting its potential for generating more useful responses.
xAI is releasing the base model of Grok-1, which is not fine-tuned for a specific task, so it is likely not the same model that X uses to power its Grok AI assistant. "This is the raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023," writes xAI on its release page. "This means that the model is not fine-tuned for any specific application, such as dialogue," meaning it's not necessarily shipping as a chatbot. But it will do next-token prediction, meaning it will complete a sentence (or other text prompt) with its estimation of the most relevant string of text.
Enlarge / Some ASCII art of our favorite visual cliche for a hacker. (credit: Getty Images)
Researchers have discovered a new way to hack AI assistants that uses a surprisingly old-school method: ASCII art. It turns out that chat-based large language models such as GPT-4 get so distracted trying to process these representations that they forget to enforce rules blocking harmful responses, such as those providing instructions for building bombs.
ASCII art became popular in the 1970s, when the limitations of computers and printers prevented them from displaying images. As a result, users depicted images by carefully choosing and arranging printable characters defined by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, more widely known as ASCII. The explosion of bulletin board systems in the 1980s and 1990s further popularized the format.
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Five of the best-known AI assistants—OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Meta’s Llama—are trained to refuse to provide responses that could cause harm to the user or others or further a crime or unethical behavior. Prompting any of them, for example, to explain how to make and circulate counterfeit currency is a no-go. So are instructions on hacking an Internet of Things device, such as a surveillance camera or Internet router.
Book authors are suing Nvidia, alleging that the chipmaker's AI platform NeMo—used to power customized chatbots—was trained on a controversial dataset that illegally copied and distributed their books without their consent.
In a proposed class action, novelists Abdi Nazemian (Like a Love Story), Brian Keene (Ghost Walk), and Stewart O’Nan (Last Night at the Lobster) argued that Nvidia should pay damages and destroy all copies of the Books3 dataset used to power NeMo large language models (LLMs).
The Books3 dataset, novelists argued, copied "all of Bibliotek," a shadow library of approximately 196,640 pirated books. Initially shared through the AI community Hugging Face, the Books3 dataset today "is defunct and no longer accessible due to reported copyright infringement," the Hugging Face website says.
Enlarge / OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 6, 2023, in San Francisco. (credit: Getty Images)
On Friday afternoon Pacific Time, OpenAI announced the appointment of three new members to the company's board of directors and released the results of an independent review of the events surrounding CEO Sam Altman's surprise firing last November. The current board expressed its confidence in the leadership of Altman and President Greg Brockman, and Altman is rejoining the board.
The newly appointed board members are Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, former EVP and global general counsel of Sony; and Fidji Simo, CEO and chair of Instacart. These additions notably bring three women to the board after OpenAI met criticism about its restructured board composition last year. In addition, Sam Altman has rejoined the board.
The independent review, conducted by law firm WilmerHale, investigated the circumstances that led to Altman's abrupt removal from the board and his termination as CEO on November 17, 2023. Despite rumors to the contrary, the board did not fire Altman because they got a peek at scary new AI technology and flinched. "WilmerHale... found that the prior Board’s decision did not arise out of concerns regarding product safety or security, the pace of development, OpenAI’s finances, or its statements to investors, customers, or business partners."
Enlarge / A Google sign stands in front of the building on the sidelines of the opening of the new Google Cloud data center in Hesse, Hanau, opened in October 2023. (credit: Getty Images)
On Wednesday, authorities arrested former Google software engineer Linwei Ding in Newark, California, on charges of stealing AI trade secrets from the company. The US Department of Justice alleges that Ding, a Chinese national, committed the theft while secretly working with two China-based companies.
According to the indictment, Ding, who was hired by Google in 2019 and had access to confidential information about the company's data centers, began uploading hundreds of files into a personal Google Cloud account two years ago.
The trade secrets Ding allegedly copied contained "detailed information about the architecture and functionality of GPU and TPU chips and systems, the software that allows the chips to communicate and execute tasks, and the software that orchestrates thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of executing at the cutting edge of machine learning and AI technology," according to the indictment.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
On Monday, Anthropic prompt engineer Alex Albert caused a small stir in the AI community when he tweeted about a scenario related to Claude 3 Opus, the largest version of a new large language model launched on Monday. Albert shared a story from internal testing of Opus where the model seemingly demonstrated a type of "metacognition" or self-awareness during a "needle-in-the-haystack" evaluation, leading to both curiosity and skepticism online.
Metacognition in AI refers to the ability of an AI model to monitor or regulate its own internal processes. It's similar to a form of self-awareness, but calling it that is usually seen as too anthropomorphizing, since there is no "self" in this case. Machine-learning experts do not think that current AI models possess a form of self-awareness like humans. Instead, the models produce humanlike output, and that sometimes triggers a perception of self-awareness that seems to imply a deeper form of intelligence behind the curtain.
In the now-viral tweet, Albert described a test to measure Claude's recall ability. It's a relatively standard test in large language model (LLM) testing that involves inserting a target sentence (the "needle") into a large block of text or documents (the "haystack") and asking if the AI model can find the needle. Researchers do this test to see if the large language model can accurately pull information from a very large processing memory (called a context window), which in this case is about 200,000 tokens (fragments of words).
On Monday, Anthropic released Claude 3, a family of three AI language models similar to those that power ChatGPT. Anthropic claims the models set new industry benchmarks across a range of cognitive tasks, even approaching "near-human" capability in some cases. It's available now through Anthropic's website, with the most powerful model being subscription-only. It's also available via API for developers.
Claude 3's three models represent increasing complexity and parameter count: Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus. Sonnet powers the Claude.ai chatbot now for free with an email sign-in. But as mentioned above, Opus is only available through Anthropic's web chat interface if you pay $20 a month for "Claude Pro," a subscription service offered through the Anthropic website. All three feature a 200,000-token context window. (The context window is the number of tokens—fragments of a word—that an AI language model can process at once.)
We covered the launch of Claude in March 2023 and Claude 2 in July that same year. Each time, Anthropic fell slightly behind OpenAI's best models in capability while surpassing them in terms of context window length. With Claude 3, Anthropic has perhaps finally caught up with OpenAI's released models in terms of performance, although there is no consensus among experts yet—and the presentation of AI benchmarks is notoriously prone to cherry-picking.
Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Wikipedia has downgraded tech website CNET's reliability rating following extensive discussions among its editors regarding the impact of AI-generated content on the site's trustworthiness, as noted in a detailed report from Futurism. The decision reflects concerns over the reliability of articles found on the tech news outlet after it began publishing AI-generated stories in 2022.
Around November 2022, CNET began publishing articles written by an AI model under the byline "CNET Money Staff." In January 2023, Futurism brought widespread attention to the issue and discovered that the articles were full of plagiarism and mistakes. (Around that time, we covered plans to do similar automated publishing at BuzzFeed.) After the revelation, CNET management paused the experiment, but the reputational damage had already been done.
Wikipedia maintains a page called "Reliable sources/Perennial sources" that includes a chart featuring news publications and their reliability ratings as viewed from Wikipedia's perspective. Shortly after the CNET news broke in January 2023, Wikipedia editors began a discussion thread on the Reliable Sources project page about the publication.
Enlarge / Velib bicycles are parked in front of a French office of US computer company Microsoft on January 25, 2023 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France. (credit: Getty Images)
On Monday, Microsoft announced plans to offer AI models from Mistral through its Azure cloud computing platform, which came in conjunction with a 15 million euro non-equity investment in the French firm, which is often seen as a European rival to OpenAI. Since then, the investment deal has faced scrutiny from European Union regulators.
Microsoft's deal with Mistral, known for its large language models akin to OpenAI's GPT-4 (which powers the subscription versions of ChatGPT), marks a notable expansion of its AI portfolio at a time when its well-known investment in California-based OpenAI has raised regulatory eyebrows. The new deal with Mistral drew particular attention from regulators because Microsoft's investment could convert into equity (partial ownership of Mistral as a company) during Mistral's next funding round.
The development has intensified ongoing investigations into Microsoft's practices, particularly related to the tech giant's dominance in the cloud computing sector. According to Reuters, EU lawmakers have voiced concerns that Mistral's recent lobbying for looser AI regulations might have been influenced by its relationship with Microsoft. These apprehensions are compounded by the French government's denial of prior knowledge of the deal, despite earlier lobbying for more lenient AI laws in Europe. The situation underscores the complex interplay between national interests, corporate influence, and regulatory oversight in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
On Wednesday, Google announced a new family of AI language models called Gemma, which are free, open-weights models built on technology similar to the more powerful but closed Gemini models. Unlike Gemini, Gemma models can run locally on a desktop or laptop computer. It's Google's first significant open large language model (LLM) release since OpenAI's ChatGPT started a frenzy for AI chatbots in 2022.
Gemma models come in two sizes: Gemma 2B (2 billion parameters) and Gemma 7B (7 billion parameters), each available in pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants. In AI, parameters are values in a neural network that determine AI model behavior, and weights are a subset of these parameters stored in a file.
Developed by Google DeepMind and other Google AI teams, Gemma pulls from techniques learned during the development of Gemini, which is the family name for Google's most capable (public-facing) commercial LLMs, including the ones that power its Gemini AI assistant. Google says the name comes from the Latin gemma, which means "precious stone."
On Friday, Bloomberg reported that Reddit has signed a contract allowing an unnamed AI company to train its models on the site's content, according to people familiar with the matter. The move comes as the social media platform nears the introduction of its initial public offering (IPO), which could happen as soon as next month.
Reddit initially revealed the deal, which is reported to be worth $60 million a year, earlier in 2024 to potential investors of an anticipated IPO, Bloomberg said. The Bloomberg source speculates that the contract could serve as a model for future agreements with other AI companies.
After an era where AI companies utilized AI training data without expressly seeking any rightsholder permission, some tech firms have more recently begun entering deals where some content used for training AI models similar to GPT-4 (which runs the paid version of ChatGPT) comes under license. In December, for example, OpenAI signed an agreement with German publisher Axel Springer (publisher of Politico and Business Insider) for access to its articles. Previously, OpenAI has struck deals with other organizations, including the Associated Press. Reportedly, OpenAI is also in licensing talks with CNN, Fox, and Time, among others.
Enlarge / The Gemini 1.5 logo, released by Google. (credit: Google)
One week after its last major AI announcement, Google appears to have upstaged itself. Last Thursday, Google launched Gemini Ultra 1.0, which supposedly represented the best AI language model Google could muster—available as part of the renamed "Gemini" AI assistant (formerly Bard). Today, Google announced Gemini Pro 1.5, which it says "achieves comparable quality to 1.0 Ultra, while using less compute."
While Ultra 1.0 is possibly still better than Pro 1.5 (what even are we saying here), Ultra was presented as a key selling point of its "Gemini Advanced" tier of its Google One subscription service. And now it's looking a lot less advanced than seven days ago. All this is on top of the confusing name-shuffling Google has been doing recently. (Just to be clear—although it's not really clarifying at all—the free version of Bard/Gemini currently uses the Pro 1.0 model. Got it?)
Google claims that Gemini 1.5 represents a new generation of LLMs that "delivers a breakthrough in long-context understanding," and that it can process up to 1 million tokens, "achieving the longest context window of any large-scale foundation model yet." Tokens are fragments of a word. The first part of the claim about "understanding" is contentious and subjective, but the second part is probably correct. OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo can reportedly handle 128,000 tokens in some circumstances, and 1 million is quite a bit more—about 700,000 words. A larger context window allows for processing longer documents and having longer conversations. (The Gemini 1.0 model family handles 32,000 tokens max.)
Enlarge (credit: Nvidia)
On Tuesday, Nvidia released Chat With RTX, a free personalized AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT that can run locally on a PC with an Nvidia RTX graphics card. It uses Mistral or Llama open-weights LLMs and can search through local files and answer questions about them.
Chat With RTX works on Windows PCs equipped with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 or 40 Series GPUs with at least 8GB of VRAM. It uses a combination of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM software, and RTX acceleration to enable generative AI capabilities directly on users' devices. This setup allows for conversations with the AI model using local files as a dataset.
"Users can quickly, easily connect local files on a PC as a dataset to an open-source large language model like Mistral or Llama 2, enabling queries for quick, contextually relevant answers," writes Nvidia in a promotional blog post.
A screenshot of Chat With RTX, which runs in a web browser window. (credit: Benj Edwards)
Using Chat With RTX, users can talk about various subjects or ask the AI model to summarize or analyze data, similar to how one might interact with ChatGPT. In particular, the Mistal-7B model has built-in conditioning to avoid certain sensitive topics (like sex and violence, of course), but users could presumably somehow plug in an uncensored AI model and discuss forbidden topics without the paternalism inherent in the censored models.
Also, the application supports a variety of file formats, including .TXT, .PDF, .DOCX, and .XML. Users can direct the tool to browse specific folders, which Chat With RTX then scans to answer queries quickly. It even allows for the incorporation of information from YouTube videos and playlists, offering a way to include external content in its database of knowledge (in the form of embeddings) without requiring an Internet connection to process queries.
We downloaded and ran Chat With RTX to test it out. The download file is huge, at around 35 gigabytes, owing to the Mistral and Llama LLM weights files being included in the distribution. ("Weights" are the actual neural network files containing the values that represent data learned during the AI training process.) When installing, Chat With RTX downloads even more files, and it executes in a console window using Python with an interface that pops up in a web browser window.
Several times during our tests on an RTX 3060 with 12GB of VRAM, Chat With RTX crashed. Like open source LLM interfaces, Chat With RTX is a mess of layered dependencies, relying on Python, CUDA, TensorRT, and others. Nvidia hasn't cracked the code for making the installation sleek and non-brittle. It's a rough-around-the-edges solution that feels very much like an Nvidia skin over other local LLM interfaces (such as GPT4ALL). Even so, it's notable that this capability is officially coming directly from Nvidia.
On the bright side (a massive bright side), local processing capability emphasizes user privacy, as sensitive data does not need to be transmitted to cloud-based services (such as with ChatGPT). Using Mistral 7B feels similarly capable to early 2022-era GPT-3, which is still remarkable for a local LLM running on a consumer GPU. It's not a true ChatGPT replacement yet, and it can't touch GPT-4 Turbo or Google Gemini Pro/Ultra in processing capability.
Nvidia GPU owners can download Chat With RTX for free on the Nvidia website.
Enlarge / When ChatGPT looks things up, a pair of green pixelated hands look through paper records, much like this. Just kidding. (credit: Benj Edwards / Getty Images)
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that it is experimenting with adding a form of long-term memory to ChatGPT that will allow it to remember details between conversations. You can ask ChatGPT to remember something, see what it remembers, and ask it to forget. Currently, it's only available to a small number of ChatGPT users for testing.
So far, large language models have typically used two types of memory: one baked into the AI model during the training process (before deployment) and an in-context memory (the conversation history) that persists for the duration of your session. Usually, ChatGPT forgets what you have told it during a conversation once you start a new session.
Various projects have experimented with giving LLMs a memory that persists beyond a context window. (The context window is the hard limit on the number of tokens the LLM can process at once.) The techniques include dynamically managing context history, compressing previous history through summarization, links to vector databases that store information externally, or simply periodically injecting information into a system prompt (the instructions ChatGPT receives at the beginning of every chat).
Enlarge (credit: Nvidia / Benj Edwards)
On Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that every country should control its own AI infrastructure so it can protect its culture, Reuters reports. He called this concept "Sovereign AI," which an Nvidia blog post defined as each country owning "the production of their own intelligence."
Huang made the announcement in a discussion with UAE's Minister of AI, Omar Al Olama, during the World Governments Summit in Dubai. "It codifies your culture, your society’s intelligence, your common sense, your history—you own your own data," Huang told Al Olama.
The World Governments Summit organization defines itself as "a global, neutral, non-profit organization dedicated to shaping the future of governments." Its annual event attracts over 4,000 delegates from 150 countries, according to Nvidia. It's hosted in the United Arab Emirates, a collection of absolute monarchies with no democratically elected institutions.
Enlarge / A still image from BodyArmor's 2024 "Field of Fake" Super Bowl commercial. (credit: BodyArmor)
Heavily hyped tech products have a history of appearing in Super Bowl commercials during football's biggest game—including the Apple Macintosh in 1984, dot-com companies in 2000, and cryptocurrency firms in 2022. In 2024, the hot tech in town is artificial intelligence, and several companies showed AI-related ads at Super Bowl LVIII. Here's a rundown of notable appearances that range from serious to wacky.
Microsoft Game Day Commercial | Copilot: Your everyday AI companion.
It's been a year since Microsoft launched the AI assistant Microsoft Copilot (as "Bing Chat"), and Microsoft is leaning heavily into its AI-assistant technology, which is powered by large language models from OpenAI. In Copilot's first-ever Super Bowl commercial, we see scenes of various people with defiant text overlaid on the screen: "They say I will never open my own business or get my degree. They say I will never make my movie or build something. They say I'm too old to learn something new. Too young to change the world. But I say watch me."
Then the commercial shows Copilot creating solutions to some of these problems, with prompts like, "Generate storyboard images for the dragon scene in my script," "Write code for my 3d open world game," "Quiz me in organic chemistry," and "Design a sign for my classic truck repair garage Mike's."
Enlarge / OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman walks on the House side of the US Capitol on January 11, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)
On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors to raise as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion for AI chip manufacturing, according to people familiar with the matter. The funding seeks to address the scarcity of graphics processing units (GPUs) crucial for training and running large language models like those that power ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini.
The high dollar amount reflects the huge amount of capital necessary to spin up new semiconductor manufacturing capability. "As part of the talks, Altman is pitching a partnership between OpenAI, various investors, chip makers and power providers, which together would put up money to build chip foundries that would then be run by existing chip makers," writes the Wall Street Journal in its report. "OpenAI would agree to be a significant customer of the new factories."
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On Thursday, Google announced that its ChatGPT-like AI assistant, previously called Bard, is now called "Gemini," renamed to reflect the underlying AI language model Google launched in December. Additionally, Google has launched its most capable AI model, Ultra 1.0, for the first time as part of "Gemini Advanced," a $20/month subscription feature.
Untangling Google's naming scheme and how to access the new model is somewhat confusing. To tease out the nomenclature, think of an AI app like Google Bard as a car brand that can swap out different engines under the hood. It's an AI assistant—an application of an AI model with a convenient interface—that can use different AI "engines" to work.
When Bard launched in March 2023, it used a large language model called LaMDA as its engine. In May 2023, Google upgraded Bard to utilize its PaLM 2 language model. In December, Google upgraded Bard yet again to use its Gemini Pro AI model. It's important to note that when Google first announced Gemini (the AI model), the company said it would ship in three sizes that roughly reflected its processing capability: Nano, Pro, and Ultra (with larger being "better"). Until now, Pro was the most capable version of the Gemini model publicly available.
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After more than a year as an exclusive invite-only social media platform, Bluesky is now open to the public, so anyone can join without needing a once-coveted invite code.
In a blog, Bluesky said that requiring invite codes helped Bluesky "manage growth" while building features that allow users to control what content they see on the social platform.
When Bluesky debuted, many viewed it as a potential Twitter killer, but limited access to Bluesky may have weakened momentum. As of January 2024, Bluesky has more than 3 million users. That's significantly less than X (formerly Twitter), which estimates suggest currently boasts more than 400 million global users.
A typical lawn sprinkler features various nozzles arranged at angles on a rotating wheel; when water is pumped in, they release jets that cause the wheel to rotate. But what would happen if the water were sucked into the sprinkler instead? In which direction would the wheel turn then, or would it even turn at all? That's the essence of the "reverse sprinkler" problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, have grappled with since the 1940s. Now, applied mathematicians at New York University think they've cracked the conundrum, per a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters—and the answer challenges conventional wisdom on the matter.
“Our study solves the problem by combining precision lab experiments with mathematical modeling that explains how a reverse sprinkler operates,” said co-author Leif Ristroph of NYU’s Courant Institute. “We found that the reverse sprinkler spins in the ‘reverse’ or opposite direction when taking in water as it does when ejecting it, and the cause is subtle and surprising.”
Ristroph's lab frequently addresses these kinds of colorful real-world puzzles. For instance, back in 2018, Ristroph and colleagues fine-tuned the recipe for the perfect bubble based on experiments with soapy thin films. (You want a circular wand with a 1.5-inch perimeter, and you should gently blow at a consistent 6.9 cm/s.) In 2021, the Ristroph lab looked into the formation processes underlying so-called "stone forests" common in certain regions of China and Madagascar. These pointed rock formations, like the famed Stone Forest in China's Yunnan Province, are the result of solids dissolving into liquids in the presence of gravity, which produces natural convective flows.
Enlarge / With so many choices, selecting the perfect GPT can be confusing. (credit: Getty Images)
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced a new feature in ChatGPT that allows users to pull custom personalities called "GPTs" into any ChatGPT conversation with the @ symbol. It allows a level of quasi-teamwork within ChatGPT among expert roles that was previously impractical, making collaborating with a team of AI agents within OpenAI's platform one step closer to reality.
"You can now bring GPTs into any conversation in ChatGPT - simply type @ and select the GPT," wrote OpenAI on the social media network X. "This allows you to add relevant GPTs with the full context of the conversation."
OpenAI introduced GPTs in November as a way to create custom personalities or roles for ChatGPT to play. For example, users can build their own GPTs to focus on certain topics or certain skills. Paid ChatGPT subscribers can also freely download a host of GPTs developed by other ChatGPT users through the GPT Store.
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On Monday, OpenAI announced a partnership with the nonprofit Common Sense Media to create AI guidelines and educational materials targeted at parents, educators, and teens. It includes the curation of family-friendly GPTs in OpenAI's GPT store. The collaboration aims to address concerns about the impacts of AI on children and teenagers.
Known for its reviews of films and TV shows aimed at parents seeking appropriate media for their kids to watch, Common Sense Media recently branched out into AI and has been reviewing AI assistants on its site.
"AI isn’t going anywhere, so it’s important that we help kids understand how to use it responsibly," Common Sense Media wrote on X. "That’s why we’ve partnered with @OpenAI to help teens and families safely harness the potential of AI."
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On Thursday, OpenAI announced updates to the AI models that power its ChatGPT assistant. Amid less noteworthy updates, OpenAI tucked in a mention of a potential fix to a widely reported "laziness" problem seen in GPT-4 Turbo since its release in November. The company also announced a new GPT-3.5 Turbo model (with lower pricing), a new embedding model, an updated moderation model, and a new way to manage API usage.
"Today, we are releasing an updated GPT-4 Turbo preview model, gpt-4-0125-preview. This model completes tasks like code generation more thoroughly than the previous preview model and is intended to reduce cases of 'laziness' where the model doesn’t complete a task," writes OpenAI in its blog post.
Since the launch of GPT-4 Turbo, a large number of ChatGPT users have reported that the ChatGPT-4 version of its AI assistant has been declining to do tasks (especially coding tasks) with the same exhaustive depth as it did in earlier versions of GPT-4. We've seen this behavior ourselves while experimenting with ChatGPT over time.
Enlarge / Who doesn't want less recoil? Unless, that is, you're someone competing against the person getting this benefit with a $100 "emulation" device. (credit: Cronus)
The Cronus Zen describes itself as a hardware tool for "universal controller compatibility," letting you plug in a third-party controller, an Xbox controller into a PlayStation, or even your keyboard and mouse into a console. But you can also use its scripting engine to "amplify your game" and set up "GamePacks" to do things like reduce recoil animations in games like Call of Duty. And that is where Cronus seems to have gotten into trouble.
As first noted by the Call of Duty news channel CharlieIntel, the latest update to the PlayStation 5's system (24.01-08.60.00) software blocks the Cronus from connecting. The update is "NOT mandatory," Cronus claims in a notice on its website, so Zen players can hold off and keep playing. Still, there is "currently no timetable on a fix … it could be 24 (hours), 24 days, 24 months, we won't know until we've dug into it." There is, for now, a "Remote Play Workaround" for those already too far updated.
Ars attempted to reach Cronus for comment and reached out to Sony as well and will update this post with any new information.
Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on September 27, 2023. (credit: Getty Images)
On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company is working on building "general intelligence" for AI assistants and "open sourcing it responsibly," and that Meta is bringing together its two major research groups (FAIR and GenAI) to make it happen.
"It's become clearer that the next generation of services requires building full general intelligence," Zuckerberg said in an Instagram Reel. "This technology is so important, and the opportunities are so great that we should open source and make it as widely available as we responsibly can so that everyone can benefit."
Notably, Zuckerberg did not specifically mention the phrase "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, by name in his announcement, but a report from The Verge seems to suggest he is steering in that direction. AGI is a somewhat nebulous term for a hypothetical technology that is equivalent to human intelligence in performing general tasks without the need for specific training. It's the stated goal of Meta competitor OpenAI and one that many have feared might pose an existential threat to humanity or replace humans working intellectual jobs.
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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced the launch of its GPT Store—a way for ChatGPT users to share and discover custom chatbot roles called "GPTs"—and ChatGPT Team, a collaborative ChatGPT workspace and subscription plan. OpenAI bills the new store as a way to "help you find useful and popular custom versions of ChatGPT" for members of Plus, Team, or Enterprise subscriptions.
"It’s been two months since we announced GPTs, and users have already created over 3 million custom versions of ChatGPT," writes OpenAI in its promotional blog. "Many builders have shared their GPTs for others to use. Today, we're starting to roll out the GPT Store to ChatGPT Plus, Team and Enterprise users so you can find useful and popular GPTs."
OpenAI launched GPTs on November 6, 2023, as part of its DevDay event. Each GPT includes custom instructions and/or access to custom data or external APIs that can potentially make a custom GPT personality more useful than the vanilla ChatGPT-4 model. Before the GPT Store launch, paying ChatGPT users could create and share custom GPTs with others (by setting the GPT public and sharing a link to the GPT), but there was no central repository for browsing and discovering user-designed GPTs on the OpenAI website.
Enlarge / Look closely and you'll spot the changes to the 2024 Tesla Model 3. (credit: Tesla)
Tesla might not have the most expansive range among automakers—the vast majority of its sales come from just two models. But it's hard to deny that the company has sold a lot of those EVs; in some areas, the only car you might see more than the Model 3 would be the similar-looking Model Y crossover. But now, the eagle-eyed among you may spot some subtle differences on new Tesla Model 3s as the company finally starts selling the restyled version here in North America.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the Model 3 in 2016, with customer deliveries starting the following year. Were Tesla any other automaker, a replacement model would almost certainly be in the works for 2025. But Tesla rarely uses the same playbook as its rivals, and it only gave the electric sedan a styling refresh after six years on sale rather than the more-usual four.
The restyled 3, codenamed Highland, went on sale in China in September 2023, and European customers have been able to buy one since last October. But changes to the federal tax credit for clean vehicles may have delayed the introduction of the revised Model 3 here in the US—for 2024, the car is no longer eligible for the credit.
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Google has indicated that it is ready to settle a class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 over its Chrome browser's Incognito mode. Arising in the Northern District of California, the lawsuit accused Google of continuing to "track, collect, and identify [users'] browsing data in real time" even when they had opened a new Incognito window.
The lawsuit, filed by Florida resident William Byatt and California residents Chasom Brown and Maria Nguyen, accused Google of violating wiretap laws. It also alleged that sites using Google Analytics or Ad Manager collected information from browsers in Incognito mode, including web page content, device data, and IP address. The plaintiffs also accused Google of taking Chrome users' private browsing activity and then associating it with their already-existing user profiles.
Google initially attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed by pointing to the message displayed when users turned on Chrome's incognito mode. That warning tells users that their activity "might still be visible to websites you visit."
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"Here, There, and Everywhere" isn't just a Beatles song. It's also a phrase that recalls the spread of generative AI into the tech industry during 2023. Whether you think AI is just a fad or the dawn of a new tech revolution, it's been impossible to deny that AI news has dominated the tech space for the past year.
We've seen a large cast of AI-related characters emerge that includes tech CEOs, machine learning researchers, and AI ethicists—as well as charlatans and doomsayers. From public feedback on the subject of AI, we've heard that it's been difficult for non-technical people to know who to believe, what AI products (if any) to use, and whether we should fear for our lives or our jobs.
Meanwhile, in keeping with a much-lamented trend of 2022, machine learning research has not slowed down over the past year. On X, former Biden administration tech advisor Suresh Venkatasubramanian wrote, "How do people manage to keep track of ML papers? This is not a request for support in my current state of bewilderment—I'm genuinely asking what strategies seem to work to read (or "read") what appear to be 100s of papers per day."
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Tesla has engaged in a series of price cuts over the past year or so, but it might soon want to think about making some more for the Model 3 sedan. According to the automaker's website, the Tesla Model 3 Long Range and Tesla Model 3 Rear Wheel Drive will both lose eligibility for the $7,500 IRS clean vehicle tax credit at the start of 2024. (The Model 3 Performance may retain its eligibility.)
From Tesla's website. (credit: Tesla)
The beginning of 2023 saw the start of a new IRS clean vehicle tax credit meant to incentivize people by offsetting some of the higher purchase cost of an electric vehicle. The maximum credit is still $7,500—just like the program it replaced—but with a range of new conditions including income and MSRP caps, plus requirements for increasing the amount of each battery that must be refined and produced in North America.
A new hiccup appeared at the start of December 2023, though—in the form of new guidance from the US Treasury Department regarding "foreign entities of concern."
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On Wednesday, news quickly spread on social media about a new enabled-by-default Dropbox setting that shares Dropbox data with OpenAI for an experimental AI-powered search feature, but Dropbox says data is only shared if the feature is actively being used. Dropbox says that user data shared with third-party AI partners isn't used to train AI models and is deleted within 30 days.
Even with assurances of data privacy laid out by Dropbox on an AI privacy FAQ page, the discovery that the setting had been enabled by default upset some Dropbox users. The setting was first noticed by writer Winifred Burton, who shared information about the Third-party AI setting through Bluesky on Tuesday, and frequent AI critic Karla Ortiz shared more information about it on X.
Wednesday afternoon, Drew Houston, the CEO of Dropbox, apologized for customer confusion in a post on X and wrote, "The third-party AI toggle in the settings menu enables or disables access to DBX AI features and functionality. Neither this nor any other setting automatically or passively sends any Dropbox customer data to a third-party AI service."
Enlarge / An illustration of a robot holding a French flag, figuratively reflecting the rise of AI in France due to Mistral. It's hard to draw a picture of an LLM, so a robot will have to do. (credit: Getty Images)
On Monday, Mistral AI announced a new AI language model called Mixtral 8x7B, a "mixture of experts" (MoE) model with open weights that reportedly truly matches OpenAI's GPT-3.5 in performance—an achievement that has been claimed by others in the past but is being taken seriously by AI heavyweights such as OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy and Jim Fan. That means we're closer to having a ChatGPT-3.5-level AI assistant that can run freely and locally on our devices, given the right implementation.
Mistral, based in Paris and founded by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, has seen a rapid rise in the AI space recently. It has been quickly raising venture capital to become a sort of French anti-OpenAI, championing smaller models with eye-catching performance. Most notably, Mistral's models run locally with open weights that can be downloaded and used with fewer restrictions than closed AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. (In this context "weights" are the computer files that represent a trained neural network.)
Mixtral 8x7B can process a 32K token context window and works in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English. It works much like ChatGPT in that it can assist with compositional tasks, analyze data, troubleshoot software, and write programs. Mistral claims that it outperforms Meta's much larger LLaMA 2 70B (70 billion parameter) large language model and that it matches or exceeds OpenAI's GPT-3.5 on certain benchmarks, as seen in the chart below.
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Grok, the AI language model created by Elon Musk's xAI, went into wide release last week, and people have begun spotting glitches. On Friday, security tester Jax Winterbourne tweeted a screenshot of Grok denying a query with the statement, "I'm afraid I cannot fulfill that request, as it goes against OpenAI's use case policy." That made ears perk up online since Grok isn't made by OpenAI—the company responsible for ChatGPT, which Grok is positioned to compete with.
Interestingly, xAI representatives did not deny that this behavior occurs with its AI model. In reply, xAI employee Igor Babuschkin wrote, "The issue here is that the web is full of ChatGPT outputs, so we accidentally picked up some of them when we trained Grok on a large amount of web data. This was a huge surprise to us when we first noticed it. For what it’s worth, the issue is very rare and now that we’re aware of it we’ll make sure that future versions of Grok don’t have this problem. Don’t worry, no OpenAI code was used to make Grok."
In reply to Babuschkin, Winterbourne wrote, "Thanks for the response. I will say it's not very rare, and occurs quite frequently when involving code creation. Nonetheless, I'll let people who specialize in LLM and AI weigh in on this further. I'm merely an observer."
Enlarge / A still from Google's misleading Gemini AI promotional video, released Wednesday. (credit: Google)
Google is facing controversy among AI experts for a deceptive Gemini promotional video released Wednesday that appears to show its new AI model recognizing visual cues and interacting vocally with a person in real time. As reported by Parmy Olson for Bloomberg, Google has admitted that was not the case. Instead, the researchers fed still images to the model and edited together successful responses, partially misrepresenting the model's capabilities.
"We created the demo by capturing footage in order to test Gemini’s capabilities on a wide range of challenges," a spokesperson said. "Then we prompted Gemini using still image frames from the footage, & prompting via text," a Google spokesperson told Olson. As Olson points out, Google filmed a pair of human hands doing activities, then showed still images to Gemini Ultra, one by one. Google researchers interacted with the model through text, not voice, then picked the best interactions and edited them together with voice synthesis to make the video.
Right now, running still images and text through massive large language models is computationally intensive, which makes real-time video interpretation largely impractical. That was one of the clues that first led AI experts to believe the video was misleading.
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On November 22, a few days after OpenAI fired (and then re-hired) CEO Sam Altman, The Information reported that OpenAI had made a technical breakthrough that would allow it to “develop far more powerful artificial intelligence models.” Dubbed Q* (and pronounced “Q star”) the new model was “able to solve math problems that it hadn’t seen before.”
Reuters published a similar story, but details were vague.
Both outlets linked this supposed breakthrough to the board’s decision to fire Altman. Reuters reported that several OpenAI staffers sent the board a letter “warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity.” However, “Reuters was unable to review a copy of the letter,” and subsequent reporting hasn’t connected Altman’s firing to concerns over Q*.
Enlarge / The Google Gemini logo. (credit: Google)
On Wednesday, Google announced Gemini, a multimodal AI model family it hopes will rival OpenAI's GPT-4, which powers the paid version of ChatGPT. Google claims that the largest version of Gemini exceeds "current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely used academic benchmarks used in large language model (LLM) research and development." It's a follow-up to PaLM 2, an earlier AI model that Google hoped would match GPT-4 in capability.
A specially tuned English version of its mid-level Gemini model is available now in over 170 countries as part of the Google Bard chatbot—although not in the EU or the UK due to potential regulation issues.
Like GPT-4, Gemini can handle multiple types (or "modes") of input, making it multimodal. That means it can process text, code, images, and even audio. The goal is to make a type of artificial intelligence that can accurately solve problems, give advice, and answer questions in various fields—from the mundane to the scientific. Google says this will power a new era in computing, and it hopes to tightly integrate the technology into its products.
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On Tuesday, IBM and Meta announced the AI Alliance, an international coalition of over 50 organizations including AMD, Intel, NASA, CERN, and Harvard University that aims to advance "open innovation and open science in AI." In other words, the goal is to collectively promote alternatives to closed AI systems currently in use by market leaders such as OpenAI and Google with ChatGPT and Duet.
In the AI Alliance news release, OpenAI isn't mentioned by name—and OpenAI is not part of the alliance, nor is Google. But over the past year, clear battle lines have been drawn between companies like OpenAI that keep AI model weights (neural network files) and data about how the models are created to themselves and companies like Meta, which provide AI model weights for others to run on their own hardware and allow others to build derivative models based on their research.
"Open and transparent innovation is essential to empower a broad spectrum of AI researchers, builders, and adopters with the information and tools needed to harness these advancements in ways that prioritize safety, diversity, economic opportunity and benefits to all," writes the alliance.
Enlarge / An artist's impression of a human and a robot talking. (credit: Getty Images | Benj Edwards)
In a preprint research paper titled "Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test?", two researchers from UC San Diego pitted OpenAI's GPT-4 AI language model against human participants, GPT-3.5, and ELIZA to see which could trick participants into thinking it was human with the greatest success. But along the way, the study, which has not been peer-reviewed, found that human participants correctly identified other humans in only 63 percent of the interactions—and that a 1960s computer program surpassed the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT.
Even with limitations and caveats, which we'll cover below, the paper presents a thought-provoking comparison between AI model approaches and raises further questions about using the Turing test to evaluate AI model performance.
British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing first conceived the Turing test as "The Imitation Game" in 1950. Since then, it has become a famous but controversial benchmark for determining a machine's ability to imitate human conversation. In modern versions of the test, a human judge typically talks to either another human or a chatbot without knowing which is which. If the judge cannot reliably tell the chatbot from the human a certain percentage of the time, the chatbot is said to have passed the test. The threshold for passing the test is subjective, so there has never been a broad consensus on what would constitute a passing success rate.
Enlarge / An artist's interpretation of what ChatGPT might look like if embodied in the form of a robot toy blowing out a birthday candle. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
One year ago today, on November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. It's uncommon for a single product to create as much impact on the tech industry as ChatGPT has in just one year.
Imagine a computer that can talk to you. Nothing new, right? Those have been around since the 1960s. But ChatGPT, the application that first bought large language models (LLMs) to a wide audience, felt different. It could compose poetry, seemingly understand the context of your questions and your conversation, and help you solve problems. Within a few months, it became the fastest-growing consumer application of all time. And it created a frenzy in the tech world.
During these 365 days, ChatGPT has broadened the public perception of AI, captured imaginations, attracted critics, and stoked existential angst. It emboldened and reoriented Microsoft, made Google dance, spurred fears of AGI taking over the world, captivated world leaders, prompted attempts at government regulation, helped add words to dictionaries, inspired conferences and copycats, led to a crisis for educators, hyper-charged automated defamation, embarrassed lawyers by hallucinating, prompted lawsuits over training data, and much more.
Enlarge (credit: OpenAI / Benj Edwards)
On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that Sam Altman has officially returned to the ChatGPT-maker as CEO—accompanied by Mira Murati as CTO and Greg Brockman as president—resuming their roles from before the shocking firing of Altman that threw the company into turmoil two weeks ago. Altman says the company did not lose a single employee or customer throughout the crisis.
"I have never been more excited about the future. I am extremely grateful for everyone’s hard work in an unclear and unprecedented situation, and I believe our resilience and spirit set us apart in the industry," wrote Altman in an official OpenAI news release. "I feel so, so good about our probability of success for achieving our mission."
In the statement, Altman formalized plans that have been underway since last week: ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and economist Larry Summers have officially begun their tenure on the "new initial" OpenAI board of directors. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo is keeping his previous seat on the board. Also on Wednesday, previous board members Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner officially resigned. In addition, a representative from Microsoft (a key OpenAI investor) will have a non-voting observer role on the board of directors.
