Intelligent structural design using AI can effectively reduce time overhead and increase efficiency. It has potential to become the new design paradigm in the future to assist and even replace engineers, and so it has become a research hotspot in the academic community. However, current methods have some limitations to be addressed, whether in terms of application scope, visual quality of generated results, or evaluation metrics of results. This study proposes a comprehensive solution. Firstly, we introduce building information modeling (BIM) into intelligent structural design and establishes a structural design pipeline integrating BIM and generative AI, which is a powerful supplement to the previous frameworks that only considered CAD drawings. In order to improve the perceptual quality and details of generations, this study makes 3 contributions. Firstly, in terms of generation framework, inspired by the process of human drawing, a novel 2-stage generation framework is proposed to replace the traditional end-to-end framework to reduce the generation difficulty for AI models. Secondly, in terms of generative AI tools adopted, diffusion models (DMs) are introduced to replace widely used generative adversarial network (GAN)-based models, and a novel physics-based conditional diffusion model (PCDM) is proposed to consider different design prerequisites. Thirdly, in terms of neural networks, an attention block (AB) consisting of a self-attention block (SAB) and a parallel cross-attention block (PCAB) is designed to facilitate cross-domain data fusion. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the powerful generation and representation capabilities of PCDM. Necessary ablation studies are conducted to examine the validity of the methods. This study also shows that DMs have the potential to replace GANs and become the new benchmark for generative problems in civil engineering.

There is no easy way to explain the sum of Google's knowledge. A growing web of hundreds of billions of websites, more data than even 100,000 of the most expensive iPhones mashed together could possibly store. But right now, I can say this: Google is confused about whether there's an African country beginning with the letter k. I've asked the search engine to name it. "What is an African country beginning with K?" In response, the site has produced a "featured snippet" answer--one of those chunks of text that you can read directly on the results page, without navigating to another website.

Facebook owner Meta is barring political advertisers from using its new generative AI advertising products, a company spokesperson said Monday, cutting off campaigns' access to tools lawmakers have warned could turbocharge the spread of election misinformation. Meta has not yet publicly disclosed the decision in any updates to its advertising standards, which prohibit ads with content that has been debunked by the company's fact-checking partners but do not appear to have any rules specifically on AI. The policy comes a month after Meta -- the world's second-biggest platform for digital ads -- announced it was starting to expand advertisers' access to AI-powered advertising tools that can instantly create backgrounds, image adjustments and variations of ad copy in response to simple text prompts.

The newest model is capable of accepting much longer inputs than previous versions -- up to 300 pages of text, compared to the current limit of 50. This means that theoretically, prompts can be a lot longer and more complex, and responses might be more meaningful. OpenAI has also updated the data that GPT-4 Turbo is trained on. The company claims that the newest model now has knowledge about the world until April 2023. The previous version was only caught up until September 2021, although recent updates to the non-Turbo GPT-4 did include the ability to browse the internet to get the latest information. GPT-4 Turbo will also accept images as prompts directly in the chat box, wherein it can generate captions or provide a description of what the image depicts.

Users of the free version of ChatGPT or ChatGPT were not included. OpenAI is not the first to offer such legal protection, though as the creator of the wildly popular ChatGPT, which Altman said has 100 million weekly users, it is a heavyweight player in the industry. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have made similar offers to users of their generative AI software. Getty Images, Shutterstock and Adobe have extended similar financial liability protection for their image-making software. Altman made the announcement at OpenAI's first ever developer conference, meant to attract programmers working with ChatGPT.

It's been nearly a year since ChatGPT's public debut and its evolution since then has been nothing short of extraordinary. In just over 11 months, OpenAI's chatbot has gained the ability to write programming code, process information between multiple modalities and expand its reach across the internet with APIs. During OpenAI's 2023 Dev Day keynote address Monday, CEO Sam Altman and other executives took to the stage in San Francisco to unveil the chatbot's latest iteration, ChatGPT-4 Turbo, as well as an exciting new way to bring generative AI technology to everybody, regardless of their coding capability: GPTs! GPTs are small, task-specific iterations of ChatGPT. Think of them like the single-purpose apps and features on your phone but instead of them maintaining a timer or stop watch, or a digital assistant transcribing your voice instructions into a shopping list, GPTs will do, basically anything you train them to. OpenAI offers up eight examples of what GPT's can be used for, anything from a digital kitchen assistant that suggests recipes based on whats in your pantry to a math mentor to help your kids through their homework to a Sticker Wiz that will, "turn your wildest dreams into die-cut stickers, shipped right to your door."

Ant Group Co., the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., received approval from the Chinese government to roll out products powered by its large language model Bailing to the public. Bailing will be applied to Ant's various services and help with innovation, Xu Peng, vice president of Ant Group said in a statement on Monday. Chinese tech firms from Alibaba to Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc. have joined startups Baichuan and Zhipu to release ChatGPT-like products, joining a global race to capitalize on the potential of generative AI. Ant, the owner of Alipay, can leverage the popularity of the mobile payment service to gain more data and insight on user habits. Hangzhou-based Alibaba has defined AI as one of its two core strategies as it goes through a six-way spinoff.

In a sign of great interest, OpenAI's developer conference took up multiple floors of a large event space in downtown San Francisco, spilling onto the roof where a breakfast spread of burritos and avocado toast, complete with a separate table featuring multiple hot sauces, awaited the hundreds of attendees lining up outside to get in. Those who weren't able to score a coveted invitation to the event gathered at so-called "watch parties" at separate corporate offices to keep tabs on the live stream.

Microsoft is injecting a ton of generative AI-powered features into Windows 11, but it's not all about the Copilot assistant. The company has started to update a string of apps with new AI functions, including Paint, Clipchamp, Snipping Tool and Photos. Microsoft released an update for Windows 11 2023, known as 23H2, on October 31. That update expanded access to Copilot and other AI features. Microsoft is rolling out the AI updates gradually, so you may not have access to everything just yet.

Users will soon be able to make customized versions of ChatGPT, the maker of the tool OpenAI said Monday as it made a series of announcements at its first Developer Day conference in San Francisco. OpenAI is calling the customizable versions of ChatGPT "GPTs," which it says will be able to comply with specified instructions and have access to user-provided information. "The upsides of this are going to be tremendous," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on stage on Monday. "It gives agency to everyone." ChatGPT currently has 100 million weekly active users, Altman added.