Last November, at the Stockholm University of the Arts, a human and an AI made music together. The performance began with musician David Dolan playing a grand piano into a microphone. As he played, a computer system, designed and overseen by composer and Kingston University researcher Oded Ben-Tal, "listened" to the piece, extracting data on pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Then, it added its own accompaniment, improvising just like a person would. Some sounds were transformations of Dolan's piano; some were new sounds synthesized on the fly.

Baidu, China's search engine giant, has unveiled its answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT service. It's the latest version of the company's ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration) Bot that it has been developing over the past decade and was first launched back in 2019. In a press event, Baidu CEO Robin Li said this version of ERNIE Bot has capabilities close to GPT-4, the latest iteration of OpenAI's large language model released just a couple of days ago. The chatbot apparently has 550 billion facts in its knowledge graph, but they're mostly focused on the Chinese market. So while it will be able to list Chinese idioms for you, it may not be able to answer as many questions for certain subjects outside the region. ERNIE Bot has the capability to answer a user with audio responses in different Chinese dialects, though, and it can also generate images and videos out of Chinese text.

I want to hit a history museum and an amusement park -- and then I'd like 7 p.m. dinner reservations near the hotel at a restaurant with vegan options and a great wine list." But for now, travelers using ChatGPT -- the powerful new A.I. software that is already offering creative cocktail recipes and writing college papers -- may have to temper their expectations. Oded Battat, the general manager at Traveland, a travel agency in Bridgeport, Conn., asked ChatGPT for outings he might offer his clients going to Tuscany to see if it could help him with his work. He got a list of 14 activities, including winery tours and museum visits, with a stop for gelato in the town square of the medieval hill town San Gimignano. "I knew of all these things," Mr. Battat said, but, he added, ChatGPT saved him the hassle of collecting all the information and delivered it in a format he was able to email to one of the clients.

Taipei, Taiwan – Chinese search engine giant Baidu has revealed its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot ERNIE, the latest rival to OpenAI's groundbreaking ChatGPT. Baidu Chief Executive Robin Li said on Thursday that ERNIE, known as Weixin in Chinese, was the result of "decades of Baidu's hard work and efforts" at a live streamed press conference held to show off the technology's capabilities. "In two rounds of conversation, the ERNIE bot presented its capability of mathematical logic reasoning," Li said. "It does not only know whether the question itself is correct or not, it also provided answers and specific steps to figure out the answer." At the event in Beijing, Li showed ERNIE generating a conference poster and video based on a prompt, offering advice on the best location for the event among several Chinese cities, and read material in a Sichuan dialect.

Microsoft's Bing is enjoying the spotlight for the first time in a decade after it released a GPT-powered interface last month. But the tech giant has so far been cautious about the pace at which it is making the new Bing offering -- powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 tech -- available to users. But it appears, Bing is bringing those walls down. Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, appears to have lifted the waitlist from the new Bing, ostensibly allowing anyone to gain instant access to the new experience. Windows Central, which first spotted this change, said users don't have to wait to try out the new Bing anymore.

OpenAI, the San Francisco tech company that grabbed worldwide attention when it released ChatGPT, said Tuesday it was introducing a new version of its artificial intelligence software. Called GPT-4, the software "can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem solving abilities," OpenAI said in an announcement on its website. In a demonstration video, Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, showed how the technology could be trained to quickly answer tax-related questions, such as calculating a married couple's standard deduction and total tax liability. "This model is so good at mental math," he said. "It has these broad capabilities that are so flexible."

For nearly 25 years, Google has built helpful products that people use every day -- from Search and Maps, to Gmail and Docs in Google Workspace. AI has been transformational in building products that have earned a valued place in people's lives. Across our productivity suite, advances in AI are already helping 3 billion users save more time with Smart Compose and Smart Reply, generate summaries for Docs, look more professional in meetings, and stay safe against malware and phishing attacks. We're now making it possible for Workspace users to harness the power of generative AI to create, connect, and collaborate like never before. To start, we're introducing a first set of AI-powered writing features in Docs and Gmail to trusted testers.

In January 2021, the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI gave a limited release to a piece of software called Dall-E. The software allowed users to enter a simple description of an image they had in their mind and, after a brief pause, the software would produce an almost uncannily good interpretation of their suggestion, worthy of a jobbing illustrator or Adobe-proficient designer – but much faster, and for free. Typing in, for example, "a pig with wings flying over the moon, illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry" resulted, after a minute or two of processing, in something reminiscent of the patchy but recognisable watercolour brushes of the creator of The Little Prince. A year or so later, when the software got a wider release, the internet went wild. Social media was flooded with all sorts of bizarre and wondrous creations, an exuberant hodgepodge of fantasies and artistic styles. And a few months later it happened again, this time with language, and a product called ChatGPT, also produced by OpenAI. Ask ChatGPT to produce a summary of the Book of Job in the style of the poet Allen Ginsberg and it would come up with a reasonable attempt in a few seconds. Ask it to render Ginsberg's poem Howl in the form of a management consultant's slide deck presentation and it would do that too.

The panel event will be part of a series of workshops conducted over two days at the conference. Organisers will record each of the workshops and feed the text transcripts through OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing AI to create a report of the two-day event. ChatGPT and Bing AI will also join the discussion and answer audience questions alongside human panellists. The two AI models have been ridiculed for giving false answers to search queries, but new iterations continue to improve on the nuances of human thinking. OpenAI, for instance, has just released the latest version of ChatGPT – ChatGPT-4 – which it says is more creative, less likely to make up facts and less biased than its predecessor.

As businesses grapple with how artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT will affect working practices, one Japanese fintech firm is making it compulsory for new recruits to use the technology and even testing them on it. With concerns growing about its ability to make jobs obsolete and data protection, Tokyo-based LayerX Inc., is bucking the trend, with a recent job ad for new graduates making it mandatory for recruits to be tested on their use of the chatbot made by OpenAI Inc., and another called Notion AI.