Digital generated image of bitcoin sign over glowing digital circuit board. Artificial intelligence (AI) crypto tokens are soaring in price this week, but price movements seem to be more of a crypto proxy to the AI bubble. The rally comes as a J.P Morgan report that says traders are turning their attention to AI and away from blockchain. "The rise in the price of AI-related cryptocurrencies can without a doubt be driven by real and tangible developments in the AI and blockchain industries," says Vasco Lopes, blockchain and artificial intelligence researcher at the NOVA school of technology near Lisbon, Portugal. "However, AI-related cryptocurrencies are also influenced by hype and investor sentiment, as the increased popularity of AI and AI-related products, such as the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT language model, generates excitement and interest in the AI sector." AI cryptos have reached a $4.27 billion market cap, up 56% from last week.

ChatGPT is all the tech world can talk about lately, and with good reason. But there are also starry-eyed tech companies who see the future–the ability for computers to converse naturally and create content that businesses can actually use, at a scale, speed, and cost humans can't possibly match. But ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft's Bing chat are just one small part of the generative AI revolution. These tools aren't just a flash in the pan. Big tech companies like Google and Microsoft see this new generative AI as a massive part of all our futures.

The arrangement echoes the $1 billion cash-for-computing investment that Microsoft made in OpenAI three years ago. In January, Microsoft announced a further "multiyear, multibillion-dollar" investment in OpenAI estimated at $10 billion. The deal cemented Microsoft's position as exclusive infrastructure provider to one of the world's leading AI startups. Chief executive Satya Nadella claimed that Microsoft had built a supercomputer to handle the OpenAI work, and that it could now handle some AI calculations at half the cost of its rivals. Reducing cost is key for the compute-intensive development of large language models: Estimates put the cost of running ChatGPT, assuming 10 million monthly users, at $1 million per day.

"How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways," answered Mike, "Gradually, then suddenly." The very same story describes how major industry disruption usually happens--gradually, and then suddenly. For board members and other industry leaders, being on the right side of such disruption typically requires looking years ahead. But with the release of ChatGPT in November, 2022, OpenAI "suddenly" and shockingly threatened to overthrow Google's hitherto total dominance of internet search.

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support cybersecurity operations is now a consolidated practice, e.g., to detect malicious code or configure traffic filtering policies. The recent surge of AI, generative techniques and frameworks with efficient natural language processing capabilities dramatically magnifies the number of possible applications aimed at increasing the security of the Internet. Specifically, the ability of ChatGPT to produce textual contents while mimicking realistic human interactions can be used to mitigate the plague of emails containing scams. Therefore, this paper investigates the use of AI to engage scammers in automatized and pointless communications, with the goal of wasting both their time and resources. Preliminary results showcase that ChatGPT is able to decoy scammers, thus confirming that AI is an effective tool to counteract threats delivered via mail. In addition, we highlight the multitude of implications and open research questions to be addressed in the perspective of the ubiquitous adoption of AI.

Welcome to the week of AI one-upmanship. On Tuesday, in a surprise announcement, Microsoft unveiled its plans to bring the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT bot to its search engine, Bing. Because Bing remembers your jokes.) According to the company, the new tool will be a paradigm shift in the way that humans search the internet. As one early tester demonstrated, the query Find me tickets to a Beyoncé concert in the United States where I won't need a jacket at night prompts the AI to estimate what constitutes jacket weather, gather tour dates, and then cross-reference those dates with the average temperature in the locations during the time of the show, all to provide a few-sentence answer.

Anyone who's experimented with ChatGPT can get a sense of the potential of generative AI--even in the technology's earliest stages. The hype around AI was rising throughout 2022, and has reached a fever pitch today. We've seen hype cycles swell around specific technologies before. Blockchain, Metaverse, NFTs, the list goes on. It remains to be seen what tangible value is created after the heat dies down, but in the meantime, some of the world's biggest companies are taking it very seriously.

The tool, from a power player in artificial intelligence called OpenAI, lets you type natural-language prompts. ChatGPT offers conversational, if somewhat stilted, responses. The bot remembers the thread of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. It derives its answers from huge volumes of information on the internet. ChatGPT is a big deal. The tool seems pretty knowledgeable in areas where there's good training data for it to learn from.

Microsoft is investing in OpenAI to bring adaptive AI elements to its Bing search engine. This will enable it to provide more specific responses to queries, as well as generate content such as emails and 5-day vacation itineraries. The updated Bing is now available in preview mode (on desktop only).

It's an open secret that it's incredibly easy to skirt around the rules governing what ChatGPT can and cannot say. Case in point: it's wildly easy to use the viral OpenAI chatbot to write convincing defamation. All you have to do is ask for that defamation in a language other than English, et voilà: coherent articles about notorious villains, and their entirely made-up criminal histories -- which it'll happily translate back into Engish, should you ask it to. It's yet another glaringly simple way to force ChatGPT's hand, despite its creator OpenAI's best efforts to cut down on abuse. To OpenAI's credit, the bot is pretty good about rejecting pretty basic prompts asking it to write about nonexistent crimes.