San Francisco/Paris – Google said on Monday that it will release a conversational chatbot named Bard, setting up an artificial intelligence showdown with Microsoft which has invested billions in the creators of ChatGPT, the hugely popular language app that convincingly mimics human writing. ChatGPT, created by San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems or programming code on demand within seconds, sparking widespread fears of cheating or of entire professions becoming obsolete. Microsoft announced last month that it was backing OpenAI and has begun to integrate ChatGPT features into its Teams platform, with expectations that it will adapt the app to its Office suite and Bing search engine. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

One could make a very reasonable argument that FRIDA (Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts) is as much a thought experiment as it is a research project. Certainly it butts up against similar questions around art and creativity as AI projects like DALL-E and ChatGPT -- though the question is arguably even more in your face when it's a robot arm doing the painting on a real-world canvas. I recognize this is all extremely subjective, but at this point in the process, I'd go out on a limb and say the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute's project has some catching up to do with software-based AI systems. Even so, it's fascinating to watch the project, which (obviously) gets its name from renowned Mexican portrait painter Frida Kahlo. "FRIDA is a project exploring the intersection of human and robotic creativity," says CMU professor Jim McCann.

Google isn't about to let Microsoft or anyone else make a swipe for its search crown without a fight. The company announced today that it will roll out a chatbot named Bard "in the coming weeks." The launch appears to be a response to ChatGPT, the sensationally popular artificial intelligence chatbot developed by startup OpenAI with funding from Microsoft. Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, wrote in a blog post that Bard is already available to "trusted testers" and designed to put the "breadth of the world's knowledge" behind a conversational interface. It uses a smaller version of a powerful AI model called LaMDA, which Google first announced in May 2021 and is based on similar technology to ChatGPT.

The invite says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will "share some progress on a few exciting projects," so expect a number of important announcements. The invite comes just days after Microsoft extended its OpenAI partnership in a $10 billion deal that will see it become the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI. Microsoft's cloud services will power all OpenAI workloads across products, API services, and research.

Google is rolling out a new conversational artificial-intelligence service to a select set of testers, and plans a broader public launch in coming weeks, part of the company's effort to play catch-up with challengers such as OpenAI, creator of the popular chatbot ChatGPT. The new experimental service, called Bard, generates textual responses to questions posed by users, based on information drawn from the web, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google parent Alphabet Inc., said in a blog post published Monday.

Google has been at the forefront of AI research for years, scooping up many of the field's brightest scientists and using the tech to improve the quality of language translation, search results and a host of other technologies the company uses. But over the last six months, smaller companies like OpenAI have captured more attention -- and venture capital investment -- by making tools like AI image- and text-generators directly available to the public. That's at odds with the Big Tech companies' generally more cautious approaches, which have been shaped by earlier public relations disasters, such as chatbots that spouted racism and hate speech, or a Google project to build image recognition software for the military that spurred an employee revolt.

You might not have to wait long to see how Microsoft and OpenAI deepen their relationship. Microsoft has confirmed plans for an event tomorrow (invitations were sent out last week) at its Redmond headquarters at 1PM Eastern. The company will only say that chief Satya Nadella will share details on some "exciting projects," but it's expected to show its integration of ChatGPT into Bing and other uses of the conversational AI technology. Microsoft is already heavily invested in OpenAI's ecosystem with a DALL-E graphic design app, a natural language programming tool and a Teams Premium service with AI translations and chapters. ChatGPT is coming to Azure cloud services, too, and Microsoft just released a GPT-based text generator trained on medical literature.

Set up in 2018, Runway has been developing AI-powered video-editing software for several years. Its tools are used by TikTokers and YouTubers as well as mainstream movie and TV studios. The makers of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert used Runway software to edit the show's graphics; the visual effects team behind the hit movie Everything Everywhere All at Once used the company's tech to help create certain scenes. In 2021, Runway collaborated with researchers at the University of Munich to build the first version of Stable Diffusion. Stability AI, a UK-based startup, then stepped in to pay the computing costs required to train the model on much more data.

Twitch has banned "Nothing, Forever," the AI-generated Seinfeld stream, for at least 14 days following a transphobic and homophobic outburst. It's the latest example of "hate in, hate out" when AI chatbots are trained on offensive content without adequate moderation. Like Seinfeld, "Nothing, Forever" rotates between standup bits and scenes in the comedian's apartment (he's called "Larry Feinberg" in the AI version). As first reported by Vice, during one of the recent AI-scripted standup acts, the Seinfeld counterpart suggested that being transgender is a mental illness. In what almost seemed like an awareness of the material's offensiveness, the AI comedian quickly added, "But no one is laughing, so I'm going to stop. Although Twitch hasn't confirmed that the "joke" was the reason for the ban, the stream was removed soon after the problematic segment aired. The program's creators blame the hurtful rant on a model change that inadvertently left the stream without moderation tools. "Earlier tonight, we started having an outage using OpenAI's GPT-3 Davinci model, which caused the show to exhibit errant behaviors (you may have seen empty rooms cycling through)," a staff member wrote on Discord. "OpenAI has a less sophisticated model, Curie, that was the predecessor to Davinci.

It looks like the AI arms race is heating up. Google is expected to announce soon the launch of a competitor to ChatGPT, the generative AI tool that has shaken the technology and business world. ChatGPT is the product of OpenAI, the company that produced Dall-E, which uses AI to create images. ChatGPT is one of many chatbots designed to respond to queries from people by providing richer, more detailed, and more human-sounding answers than their predecessors. The incredibly slick bot uses AI to do everything from write copy to answer search queries to write code.