The past few weeks have seen major AI announcements by Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and other organizations. Tech companies are scrambling to solidify their position in the fast-expanding market for large language models (LLM) and generative AI. And as big tech continues to pour more money into the field, competition is gradually becoming polarized between Microsoft and Google. So far, Microsoft has proven to be craftier and more capable in getting LLMs generative machine learning models to work in its products. But the race is not over, and we might yet see Google (or some other company) take the lead.

I'm Mark Scott, POLITICO's chief technology correspondent, and after a week of vacation, I'm honestly struggling to get myself up and running this week. With that in mind, here's the pep song that has been keeping me going as I've written this week's newsletter. Warning: it'll get stuck in your mind. We'll tell you where to look for it. HERE'S MY PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE WEEK: let's cool the hype around OpenAI, Google's Bard and the sudden tsunami of so-called generative artificial intelligence use cases that have just popped up (looking at you, Pope in a puffer coat.)

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Eric Schmidt says the six-month moratorium on AI development supported by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and other tech leaders would "simply benefit China" and called instead for tighter regulation. The former Google CEO told the Australian Financial Review he was worried about the rapid development of AI and that "concerns could be understated." "I think ... things could be worse than people are saying," he said, noting that as large language models get bigger they have "emergent behaviour we don't understand." The use of generative AI has exploded in recent months with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, and Microsoft's AI-powered Bing, as well as image-generating platforms such as DALL-E and Midjourney. People have been using generative AI in both their personal and professional lives to write essays, think up recipes, summarize emails, publish articles, and craft résumés and cover letters.

AI Chatbots are relatively old by tech standards, but the newest crop -- led by OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard -- are vastly more capable than their ancestors, not always for positive reasons. The recent explosion in AI development has already created concerns around misinformation, disinformation, plagiarism and machine-generated malware. What problems might generative AI pose for the privacy of the average internet user? In order to replicate human-like interactions, AI chatbots are trained on mass amounts of data, a significant portion of which is derived from repositories like Common Crawl. As the name suggests, Common Crawl has amassed years and petabytes worth of data simply from crawling and scraping the open web. "These models are training on large data sets of publicly available data on the internet," Megha Srivastava, PhD student at Stanford's computer science department and former AI resident with Microsoft Research, said.

Over the last few months, AI chatbots have exploded in popularity off the surging success of OpenAI's revolutionary ChatGPT--which, amazingly, only burst onto the scene around December. But when Microsoft seized the opportunity to hitch its wagon to OpenAI's rising star for a steep $10 billion dollars, it chose to do so by introducing a GPT-4-powered chatbot under the guise of Bing, its swell-but-also-ran search engine, in a bid to upend Google's search dominance. Google quickly followed suit with its own homegrown Bard AI. Both are touted as experiments. And these "AI chatbots" are truly wondrous advancements--I've spent many nights with my kids joyously creating fantastic stuff-of-your-dreams artwork with Bing Chat's Dall-E integration and prompting sick raps about wizards who think lizards are the source of all magic, and seeing them come to life in mere moments with these fantastic tools.

Image-generating artificial intelligence models like DALL-E and Midjourney often have difficulty creating human hands, with many otherwise photorealistic pictures given away by hands with the wrong number of fingers or in impossible poses – so now researchers have created an AI dedicated to just drawing hands.

As the tech sector races to develop and deploy a crop of powerful new AI chatbots, their widespread adoption has ignited a new set of data privacy concerns among some companies, regulators and industry watchers. Some companies, including JPMorgan Chase (JPM), have clamped down on employees' use of ChatGPT, the viral AI chatbot that first kicked off Big Tech's AI arms race, due to compliance concerns related to employees' use of third-party software. It only added to mounting privacy worries when OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, disclosed it had to take the tool offline temporarily on March 20 to fix a bug that allowed some users to see the subject lines from other users' chat history. The same bug, now fixed, also made it possible "for some users to see another active user's first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date," OpenAI said in a blog post. And just last week, regulators in Italy issued a temporary ban on ChatGPT in the country, citing privacy concerns after OpenAI disclosed the breach.

ChatGPT can readily traverse the vast amounts of information on the internet to answer almost any ad-hoc question users pose. That it does so via natural language, in close to real-time, is indicative of the immense advancements of Generative Artificial Intelligence--and of Natural Language Generation, in particular. ChatGPT's practical utility spans most tasks associated with language, including creating annotated training datasets for data scientists, to creating highly specific reports, emails, or papers for almost any facet of business or academia. Not surprisingly, vendors of all types are rushing to implement this language model to improve solutions for everything from Business Intelligence to content services. "It's still got its own set of limitations," admitted Abhishek Gupta, Principal Data Scientist, and Engineer at Talentica.

In a Thursday blog post, Microsoft pitches the feature as a way to create "very specific" visuals when they're working on social media posts or slideshows and documents. While this has been possible in a variety of ways before -- you could use OpenAI's DALL-E, Microsoft's Bing image creator site, the built-in image generator in Bing Chat, or one of the many other image generators -- putting it right in Edge's sidebar makes it much easier to ask an AI to make you some pictures while you're doing something else on the web.