Sign up to receive our twice-weekly News & Politics newsletter. Kyle Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of the Infinite Scroll column, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the latest ChatGPT release--which uses a voice that sounds, suspiciously, like that of Scarlett Johansson's character in the dystopian sci-fi movie "Her." Chayka has reported extensively on artificial intelligence, and he describes some recent blunders that tech companies, including OpenAI and Google, have made in trying to push their products through. Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

As more people use OpenAI's ChatGPT and other chatbots to find information, AI companies are trying to find ways to get the most up-to-date, helpful and accurate information into their products. AI models still often make up false information, so relying on news content from third parties is a way to increase the trustworthiness of AI answers.

In the last few months, news organizations have leapt into bed with OpenAI, hatching Faustian bargains where the cash-strapped media industry exchanges a monetary pittance for OpenAI's right to scrape and integrate their content into things like ChatGPT. Those that have signed in blood include News Corp (publisher of the Wall Street Journal), the Financial Times, People magazine publisher Dotdash Meredith, the AP, and now, The Atlantic and Vox Media. The Atlantic and Vox Media quickly confirmed these new deals shortly after Axios first published the news. The Atlantic says that it'll be a "premium news source" in OpenAI and that all its citations will be clearly attributed to The Atlantic with links back to the original content. There are concerns from publishers that users of AI chatbots don't actually need to go to the original sources; perhaps the calculus is that, for an industry in the twilight of its lifespan, some inbound link traffic is better than none.

"As applications move to the cloud, more and more opportunities are getting unlocked," says Vinod Mamtani, vice president and general manager of generative AI services for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. "For example, the application of AI and generative AI are transforming businesses in deep ways." No longer simply a software and infrastructure upgrade, cloud is now a powerful technology capable of accelerating innovation, improving agility, and supporting emerging tools. In order to capitalize on cloud's competitive advantages, however, businesses must ask for more from their cloud transformations. Every business operates in its own context, and so a strong cloud solution should have built-in support for industry-specific best practices.

Preparing an organization's data for AI, however, unlocks a new set of challenges and opportunities. This MIT Technology Review Insights survey report investigates whether companies' data foundations are ready to garner benefits from generative AI, as well as the challenges of building the necessary data infrastructure for this technology. In doing so, it draws on insights from a survey of 300 C-suite executives and senior technology leaders, as well on in-depth interviews with four leading experts. Data integration is the leading priority for AI readiness. In our survey, 82% of C-suite and other senior executives agree that "scaling AI or generative AI use cases to create business value is a top priority for our organization."

OpenAI says it's setting up a safety and security committee and has begun training a new AI model to supplant the GPT-4 system that underpins its ChatGPT chatbot. The San Francisco startup said in a blog post Tuesday that the committee will advise the full board on "critical safety and security decisions" for its projects and operations. The safety committee arrives as debate swirls around AI safety at the company, which was thrust into the spotlight after a researcher, Jan Leike, resigned and leveled criticism at OpenAI for letting safety "take a backseat to shiny products." OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever also resigned, and the company disbanded the "superalignment" team focused on AI risks that they jointly led. Leike said Tuesday he's joining rival AI company Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders, to "continue the superalignment mission" there.

It was clear that OpenAI was on to something. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around with a new version of OpenAI's text-to-image model, DALL-E, an AI that converts short written descriptions into pictures: a fox painted by Van Gogh, perhaps, or a corgi made of pizza. Now they just had to figure out what to do with it. Nobody could have predicted just how big a splash this product was going to make. The rapid release of other generative models has inspired hundreds of newspaper headlines and magazine covers, filled social media with memes, kicked a hype machine into overdrive--and set off an intense backlash from creators.

At a time when people worry they could be replaced by AI in their jobs, some are using that same tech to help guide them at work. People already turn to generative AI for the kind of advice provided by professionals -- things like dating tips, trip planning and how to deal with toxic people.

The 2024 Index is our most comprehensive to date and arrives at an important moment when AI's influence on society has never been more pronounced. This year, we have broadened our scope to more extensively cover essential trends such as technical advancements in AI, public perceptions of the technology, and the geopolitical dynamics surrounding its development. Featuring more original data than ever before, this edition introduces new estimates on AI training costs, detailed analyses of the responsible AI landscape, and an entirely new chapter dedicated to AI's impact on science and medicine. The AI Index report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). Our mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data in order for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI. The AI Index is recognized globally as one of the most credible and authoritative sources for data and insights on artificial intelligence. Previous editions have been cited in major newspapers, including the The New York Times, Bloomberg, and The Guardian, have amassed hundreds of academic citations, and been referenced by high-level policymakers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, among other places. This year's edition surpasses all previous ones in size, scale, and scope, reflecting the growing significance that AI is coming to hold in all of our lives.

Announced on February 15, 2024, it instantly caught the public's attention by demonstrating the ability to generate dynamic and realistic video clips from text prompts, similar to how OpenAI's DALL-E generates images from text. While Sora is still in a pre-release phase, its potential to revolutionize content creation and disrupt various industries be it media, entertainment, or advertising, has already ignited discussions across online communities. Subreddits such as r/OpenAI, r/technology and r/ChatGPT have emerged as epicentres for technology enthusiasts and critics to openly discuss and share narratives about the latest advancements in AI technologies. Previous studies have explored public perceptions of large language models like ChatGPT and image generators such as DALL-E through analysing online forums. For instance, Talafidaryani and Mora (2024) employed topic modeling techniques on Reddit data to uncover dominant themes surrounding ChatGPT, including its capabilities, limitations, and ethical considerations. Similarly, Zhou and Nabus (2023) investigated discussions on DALL-E, revealing discourse on creative applications, risks of misuse, and comparisons to human artists. However, due to Sora's relatively recent emergence, there is still a lack of research on the narratives and themes emerging from Reddit conversations about this novel technology. By conducting topic modeling analysis on a large corpus of Reddit comments, the study aims to feel that gap and uncover the main topics and themes users are discussing about Sora. These narratives can provide valuable insights into public perceptions, areas of excitement, as well as societal and ethical concerns surrounding around the advent of new generative AI technologies.