The question will be simple but perpetual: Person or machine? Every encounter with language, other than in the flesh, will now bring with it that small, consuming test. For some--teachers, professors, journalists--the question of humanity will be urgent and essential. For those who operate in the large bureaucratic apparatus of boilerplate--copywriters, lawyers, advertisers, political strategists--the question will be irrelevant except as a matter of efficiency. How will they use new artificial-intelligence technology to accelerate the production of language that was already mostly automatic? For everyone, the question will now hover, quotidian and cosmic, over words wherever you find them: Who's there?

The artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI has released GPT-4, the latest version of the groundbreaking AI system that powers ChatGPT, which it says is more creative, less likely to make up facts and less biased than its predecessor. Calling it "our most capable and aligned model yet", OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman said the new system is a "multimodal" model, which means it can take images as well as text as inputs, letting users ask questions about pictures. The new version can handle massive text inputs and can remember and act on more than 20,000 words at once, letting it take an entire novella as a prompt. The new model is available today for users of ChatGPT Plus, the paid-for version of the ChatGPT chatbot, which provided some of the training data for the latest release. OpenAI has also worked with commercial partners to offer GPT-4-powered services. A new subscription tier of language learning app Duolingo, Duolingo Max, will now offer English-speaking users AI-powered conversations in French or Spanish, and can use GPT-4 to explain the mistakes language learners have made.

When Microsoft and OpenAI announced their renewed partnership in January, the two companies also revealed that Bing search would soon boast AI-enhanced lookup capabilities. Little did we know at the time, that Bing search has been powered for the past five weeks, not by the existing then-state-of-the-art GPT-3.5 model but by its even more robust successor, GPT-4. Microsoft envisions Bing -- and really Google is doing much the same with Bard -- serving as a pseudo-gatekeeper to the rest of internet's information, not unlike what AOL's early America Online service once did. Rather than direct users to other websites where they can find the information and context they seek on their own, these companies are looking to have generative AI systems (Bard and Bing) automatically summarize and display that information without ever leaving the branded search page. Any additional relevant context that the user might have stumbled across during their independent research will similarly be deigned by the algorithm.

Less than four months after releasing ChatGPT, the text-generating AI that seems to have pushed us into a science-fictional age of technology, OpenAI has unveiled a new product called GPT-4. Rumors and hype about this program have circulated for more than a year: Pundits have said that it would be unfathomably powerful, writing 60,000-word books from single prompts and producing videos out of whole cloth. Today's announcement suggests that GPT-4's abilities, while impressive, are more modest: It performs better than the previous model on standardized tests and other benchmarks, works across dozens of languages, and can take images as input--meaning that it's able, for instance, to describe the contents of a photo or a chart. Unlike ChatGPT, this new model is not currently available for public testing (although you can apply or pay for access), so the obtainable information comes from OpenAI's blog post, and from a New York Times story based on a demonstration. From what we know, relative to other programs, GPT-4 appears to have added 150 points to its SAT score, now a 1410 out of 1600, and jumped from the bottom to the top 10 percent of performers on a simulated bar exam.

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.