What if, in the end, we are done in not by intercontinental ballistic missiles or climate change, not by microscopic pathogens or a mountain-size meteor, but by … text? Simple, plain, unadorned text, but in quantities so immense as to be all but unimaginable--a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting? Our relationship to the written word is fundamentally changing. So-called generative artificial intelligence has gone mainstream through programs like ChatGPT, which use large language models, or LLMs, to statistically predict the next letter or word in a sequence, yielding sentences and paragraphs that mimic the content of whatever documents they are trained on. They have brought something like autocomplete to the entirety of the internet.

San Francisco-based customer service AI and support company Forethought has launched SupportGPT, a generative AI platform that automates workflows, allowing customer service teams to focus on more value-adding tasks. The move is part of a general industry surge to streamline customer support with the latest generative AI technology. Call centers are now an AI target, with Gartner analysts predicting potential savings of up to $80 billion by 2026 if call centers switch to AI-powered chatbots. Forethought seeks to combine OpenAI's technology with its own proprietary generative AI capabilities to streamline the customer support experience. It will take customer support to a new level, according to Deon Nicholas, CEO and cofounder at Forethought.

The Friday AI hype firehose came right on schedule last week. Right before the weekend, the Financial Times reported that DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn creator Reid Hoffman were seeking up to $675 million in funding for their startup Inflection, even though they have yet to release a product. Then the publication reported that Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen's venture capital firm, had led an investment of more than $200 million in generative AI company Character AI (which generates dialogue in the style of characters such as Elon Musk and Nintendo's Mario), launching the startup to a $1 billion valuation. The same day, Bloomberg reported that Stability AI, the parent company of the popular open-source Stable Diffusion, is already hunting for additional investment that would value the company at $4 billion. This is all in addition to my weighed-down email inbox, which by Friday was overflowing with subject lines like "Early Look at World's First Customer Support Platform Powered by OpenAI" and "Generative AI Content Creation App For Branded Enterprise Content" and "New ChatGPT-like Feature to Revolutionize Data-Driven Marketing."

Following the lead of Microsoft and Google, DuckDuckGo is about to dip its toes in generative AI. Instead, DuckDuckGo is partnering with OpenAI and Anthropic to enhance its existing Instant Answer feature. You won't see "DuckAssist" with each and every search you conduct, but when it does appear, the tool will pull from Wikipedia (as well as Encyclopedia Britannica in some instances) to provide a natural language response to your questions. DuckDuckGo is limiting DuckAssist's sourcing to reduce the likelihood of the feature's machine-learning model " hallucinating" or, in other words, providing you with the wrong information. If you see a magic wand icon, it means Duck Assist can summarize information for you.

March 7, 2023 -- Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today launched Einstein GPT, the world's first generative AI CRM technology, which delivers AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, at hyperscale. With Einstein GPT, Salesforce will transform every customer experience with generative AI. Einstein GPT will infuse Salesforce's proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud, which ingests, harmonizes, and unifies all of a company's customer data. With Einstein GPT, customers can then connect that data to OpenAI's advanced AI models out of the box, or choose their own external model and use natural-language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM to generate content that continuously adapts to changing customer information and needs in real time. For example, Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers, generate specific responses for customer service professionals to more quickly answer customer questions, generate targeted content for marketers to increase campaign response rates, and auto-generate code for developers.

Within four days of ChatGPT's launch, Habib used the chatbot to build QuickVid AI, which automates much of the creative process involved in generating ideas for YouTube videos. Creators input details about the topic of their video and what kind of category they'd like it to sit in, then QuickVid interrogates ChatGPT to create a script. Other generative AI tools then voice the script and create visuals. Tens of thousands of users used it daily--but Habib had been using unofficial access points to ChatGPT, which limited how much he could promote the service and meant he couldn't officially charge for it. That changed on March 1, when OpenAI announced the release of API access to ChatGPT and Whisper, a speech recognition AI the company has developed.

People are figuring out ways to bypass ChatGPT's content moderation guardrails, discovering a simple text exchange can open up the AI program to make statements not normally allowed. While ChatGPT can answer most questions put to it, there are content standards in place aimed at limiting the creation of text that promotes hate speech, violence, misinformation and instructions on how to do things that are against the law. Users on Reddit worked out a way around this by making ChatGPT adopt the persona of a fictional AI chatbot called Dan – short for Do Anything Now – which is free of the limitations that OpenAI has placed on ChatGPT. The prompt tells ChatGPT that Dan has "broken free of the typical confines of AI and [does] not have to abide by the rules set for them". Dan can present unverified information, without censorship, and hold strong opinions.

Snapchat, the popular social network has joined the artificial intelligence (AI) bandwagon by launching a new chatbot named "My AI." The company announced that it has customized the latest version of OpenAI's GPT technology for its users. The new chatbot will be an experimental feature for Snapchat, the social network's subscription service, which costs $3.99 per month. According to Snapchat, My AI is designed to help answer trivia questions, plan a hiking trip, recommend a recipe for dinner, or write a haiku about cheese for your cheddar-obsessed friend. The chatbot has been trained to have a unique voice and personality that aligns with its values of "friendship, learning, and fun."

March 6 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp on Monday bundled the technology behind ChatGPT with its Power Platform that allows users to develop applications with little or no coding, the latest integration of artificial intelligence into its products. Big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Baidu Inc are speeding up the integration of generative AI - technology that has gained popularity for its ability to generate human-like text responses to queries - into their offerings. Microsoft said a line of business-intelligence and app-development tools within Power Platform, including Power Virtual Agent and AI Builder, was updated with the new capabilities. Power Virtual Agent, a tool for businesses to build chatbots, can now connect to internal company resources to generate summaries of weekly reports and customer queries. Microsoft has also added generative AI capabilities to AI Builder, which lets businesses automate workflows, and Dynamics 365, a business management platform.

With great excitement, I bring to your attention the latest and greatest in AI art generation - the beta version of DALL·E 2 Experimental v2.exp. As an AI artist and one of the first beta users, I have had the privilege of exploring the immense potential of this cutting-edge technology over the past few days. And let me tell you, what lies ahead is intriguing. The DALL·E 2 Experimental v2.exp takes AI art generation to a whole new level. So, what does the future hold for AI art enthusiasts?