As generative AI and its eerily human chatbots explode into the public realm -- including Google's Bard, released yesterday -- Silicon Valley looks ripe for another big era of disruption. Think about the era of personal computers, or online businesses, or social platforms, when an accessible, unpredictable new idea shakes up the establishment. But unlike earlier disruptions, the reality of the generative AI race is already looking a little … top-heavy. With AI, the big innovation isn't the kind of cheap, accessible technology that helps garage startups grow into world-changing new companies. The models that underpin the AI era can be extremely, extremely expensive to build.

STOCKHOLM/LONDON – Rapid technological advances such as the ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence (AI) app are complicating efforts by European Union lawmakers to agree on landmark AI laws, sources with direct knowledge of the matter have said. The European Commission proposed the draft rules nearly two years ago in a bid to protect citizens from the dangers of the emerging technology, which has experienced a boom in investment and consumer popularity in recent months. The draft needs to be thrashed out between EU countries and EU lawmakers, called a trilogue, before the rules can become law. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

America's Federal Trade Commission has warned it may crack down on companies that not only use generative AI tools to scam folks, but also those making the software in the first place, even if those applications were not created with that fraud in mind. Now the US government agency is wagging its finger at those using generative machine-learning tools to hoodwink victims into parting with their cash and suchlike as well as the people who made the code to begin with. Commercial software and cloud services, as well as open source tools, can be used to churn out fake images, text, videos, and voices on an industrial scale, which is all perfect for cheating marks. Picture adverts for stuff featuring convincing but faked endorsements by celebrities; that kind of thing is on the FTC's radar. "Evidence already exists that fraudsters can use these tools to generate realistic but fake content quickly and cheaply, disseminating it to large groups or targeting certain communities or specific individuals," Michael Atleson, an attorney for the FTC's division of advertising practices, wrote in a memo this week.

Goldman Sachs is experimenting with generative AI tools internally to help its developers automatically generate and test code, the company's chief information officer told CNBC. Marco Argenti, who joined Goldman as a partner from Amazon in 2019, said Tuesday that the firm's software engineers have been using the technology to automatically generate lines of code. It is currently in a "proof of concept" stage and not yet ready for production, he added. "Developers are already using some of the assisted coding technology," Argenti told CNBC's Arjun Kharpal at the Goldman Sachs technology symposium on Tuesday. Generative AI refers to a group of products that produce human-like text or images in response to written prompts from users.

Just weeks after Microsoft launched a GPT-4-powered chatbot into its Edge browser, Opera is following suit and integrating generative AI chatbots powered by ChatGPT and ChatSonic into its desktop browsers, Opera and Opera GX. These new tools are available in early access across all desktop platforms, the company said. Opera is also launching a feature that lets you generate AI prompts by highlighting text on a website or typing it in. These chatbots can also summarize articles or webpages, write social media posts for you, or help you ideate through prompts. Users have to manually switch on "AI prompts" through the settings menu to use this feature.

"Computers need to be accountable to machines," a top Microsoft executive told a roomful of reporters in Washington, DC, on February 10, three days after the company launched its new AI-powered Bing search engine. Computers need to be accountable to people!" he said, and then made sure to clarify, "That was not a Freudian slip." Slip or not, the laughter in the room betrayed a latent anxiety. Progress in artificial intelligence has been moving so unbelievably fast lately that the question is becoming unavoidable: How long until AI dominates our world to the point where we're answering to it rather than it answering to us? First, last year, we got DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, which can turn a few words of text into a stunning image. Then Microsoft-backed OpenAI gave us ChatGPT, which can write essays so convincing that it freaks out everyone from teachers (what if it helps students cheat?) to journalists (could it replace them?) to disinformation experts (will it amplify conspiracy ...

Elon Musk, who helped start OpenAI in 2015 before departing three years later, has accused ChatGPT of being "woke" and pledged to build his own version. A new crop of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence has ignited a scramble to determine whether the technology could upend the economics of the internet, turning today's powerhouses into has-beens and creating the industry's next giants. ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model from a research lab, OpenAI, has been making headlines since November for its ability to respond to complex questions, write poetry, generate code, plan vacations and translate languages. GPT-4, the latest version introduced in mid-March, can even respond to images (and ace the Uniform Bar Exam). Two months after ChatGPT's debut, Microsoft, OpenAI's primary investor and partner, added a similar chatbot, capable of having open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic, to its Bing internet search engine.

Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. The latest model developed by OpenAI, GPT-4, was trained using an unprecedented scale of compute and data. In this paper, we report on our investigation of an early version of GPT-4, when it was still in active development by OpenAI. We contend that (this early version of) GPT-4 is part of a new cohort of LLMs (along with ChatGPT and Google's PaLM for example) that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models. We discuss the rising capabilities and implications of these models. We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. In our exploration of GPT-4, we put special emphasis on discovering its limitations, and we discuss the challenges ahead for advancing towards deeper and more comprehensive versions of AGI, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction. We conclude with reflections on societal influences of the recent technological leap and future research directions.

If some of the terminology I use here is unfamiliar, I encourage you to read my earlier article on LLMs first. There are teams that are employing ChatGPT or its competitors (Anthropic, Google's Flan T5 or PaLM, Meta's LLaMA, Cohere, AI21Labs, etc.) for real rather for cutesy demos. Unfortunately, informative content about how they are doing so is lost amidst marketing hype and technical jargon. Therefore, I see folks who are getting started with generative AI take approaches that experts in the field will tell you are not going to pan out. This article is my attempt at organizing this space and showing you what's working.

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