Hot on the heels of Google's Workspace AI announcement Tuesday, and ahead of Thursday's Microsoft Future of Work event, OpenAI has released the latest iteration of its generative pre-trained transformer system, GPT-4. Whereas the current generation GPT-3.5, which powers OpenAI's wildly popular ChatGPT conversational bot, can only read and respond with text, the new and improved GPT-4 will be able to generate text on input images as well. "While less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios," the OpenAI team wrote Tuesday, it "exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks." OpenAI, which has partnered (and recently renewed its vows) with Microsoft to develop GPT's capabilities, has reportedly spent the past six months retuning and refining the system's performance based on user feedback generated from the recent ChatGPT hoopla. What's more, the new GPT has outperformed other state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in a variety of benchmark tests.

Google has been scrambling to catch up to to OpenAI for months, ever since the latter dropped its conversational bot, ChatGPT, and took the generative AI industry by storm. Google's first attempted response with the release of its Bard AI (which immediately misquoted easily verifiable stats about the JWST) was tepid at best so the company has announced a new tact: they're packing every single product they can with AI -- just like they did in the Google era with social features. The new features will be coming to virtually all of Google's Workspace products. According to the company users will be able to "draft, reply, summarize, and prioritize" emails, "brainstorm, proofread, write, and rewrite" text documents, autogenerate images and even video with Slides, have Sheets create formulas autonomously, automate transcription notes in Meet and "enable workflows for getting things done" in Chat. For example, in Docs, users will simply need to type the subject of their assignment into the page to have Google's generative AI suite quickly gin up additional text.

Google and Microsoft are locked in a head-to-head competition to bring as much generative AI to their productivity services as possible. Only days ahead of Microsoft's "Future of Work" event, Google today announced a sweeping update to Workspace that will bring its generative AI models to virtually every part of its productivity suite, in addition to new developer solutions that will make Google's foundation models, including its 540 billion-parameter PaLM large language model for multiturn chats, available to developers through an API and new low-code tools. The caveats worth mentioning up front: For the time being, these new features will only be available for what Google calls "Trusted Testers." It's unclear when they will roll out to a wider audience. There's also no pricing information available yet, though it sounds like at least a subset of these features will be available to consumers -- including those on Google One plans. Basically, this is akin to Google's LaMDA announcements a few weeks ago: they sound great, but it'll be a while before you can try any of this in practice.

This morning, Google announced a laundry list of new generative AI capabilities and features for developers, through a PaLM API and in Google Cloud, as well as new integrations for users of Google Workspace, including in Gmail and Google Docs. The announcements come just a month after Google unveiled its search chatbot Bard and less than a week after Bloomberg reported that a new internal Google directive "requires generative AI to be incorporated into all of its biggest products within months." The news also appears in advance of Microsoft's highly-anticipated virtual'Future of Work with AI' event this Thursday. Thanks to comments last week by Microsoft Germany CTO Andreas Braun, that event is rumored to include the release a multimodal GPT-4, as well as a ChatGPT upgrade for Microsoft 365 applications such as Word and Outlook. During a virtual press briefing yesterday, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that the AI announcements "represent the culmination" of many years of work, including bringing together Transformer technology advances in reinforcement learning and advances in parallelism and orchestrating large training workloads.

At the risk of stating the obvious, AI-powered chatbots are hot right now. The tools, which can write essays, emails and more given a few text-based instructions, have captured the attention of tech hobbyists and enterprises alike. OpenAI's ChatGPT, arguably the progenitor, has an estimated more than 100 million users. Via an API, brands including Instacart, Quizlet and Snap have begun building it into their respective platforms, boosting the usage numbers further. But to the chagrin of some within the developer community, the organizations building these chatbots remain part of a well-financed, well-resourced and exclusive club.

Google comes in a far second to Microsoft Office when it comes to workplace productivity tools, according to market research firm Gartner. Open AI created a lot of buzz last year after rolling out its text-based generative AI tool ChatGPT, which Microsoft integrated into its search engine Bing this year. Since then, workers have been experimenting with whether ChatGPT can aid with work tasks. But experts advise people to be cautious when using the tech for work, as generative AI can produce content that's factually incorrect, doesn't make sense, is similar or almost identical to an unknown source, or, in the case of images, is visibly contorted.

Generative AI has clearly made an impression on the world in the past few months with the release of large language models like ChatGPT. Generative AI has several uses inside and outside the enterprise that I would love to discuss in this article. In simple terminology, generative AI is a class of artificial intelligence models that can create new data, such as images, music, or text, that resembles and often expands upon the patterns present in the training data it was trained on. ChatGPT's case contains content from across the web in many different file types, such as audio, text, video, images, 3D models, code, and so on. The model learns patterns from this data and data that is input by the 100 million users the system accounted for in the beginning of January 2023 – tallying about 13 million unique visitors per day in the same month.

Some 540 million years ago, diverse life forms suddenly began to emerge from the muddy ocean floors of planet Earth. This period is known as the Cambrian Explosion, and these aquatic critters are our ancient ancestors. All complex life on Earth evolved from these underwater creatures. Scientists believe all it took was an ever-so-slight increase in ocean oxygen levels above a certain threshold. We may now be in the midst of a Cambrian Explosion for artificial intelligence (AI). In the past few years, a burst of incredibly capable AI programs like Midjourney, DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT have showcased the rapid progress we've made in machine learning.

Generative AI is an artificial intelligence model that, when trained on massive datasets, can generate text, images, audio, and video by predicting the next word or pixel. The simplest input (called a prompt) to generative AI is a text description. Based on that text description, a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) can write a paragraph, a text-to-image model such as Stable Diffusion can create a picture, MusicLM can create music, and Imagen Video can create a video. This technology will democratize all kinds of content creation. For video creation it could level the playing field more than smartphones and social video platforms have already done.

Generative AI is an artificial intelligence model that, when trained on massive datasets, can generate text, images, audio, and video by predicting the next word or pixel. The simplest input (called a prompt) to generative AI is a text description. Based on that text description, a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) can write a paragraph, a text-to-image model such as Stable Diffusion can create a picture, MusicLM can create music, and Imagen Video can create a video. This technology will democratize all kinds of content creation. For video creation it could level the playing field more than smartphones and social video platforms have already done.