Tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 (text-to-text or text-to-image AI tools) are all the rage these days. But for them to work effectively, you need to ask the right questions to get the results you want. Learning what to say to these tools will only become more important as they become more integrated in various industries. Check out Unite.ai's very own generative AI: Images.ai AI prompt engineering is an effective way to get the desired output with an AI tool.

A version of this article was published in TIME's newsletter Into the Metaverse. You can find past issues of the newsletter here. The AI chatbot ChatGPT has become mega-popular in just a matter of weeks--way faster than social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram. Only two months after its launch in late November, the chatbot had 100 million monthly active users in January, according to data from Similarweb. A study from Swiss bank UBS noted that "in 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app."

The competition between the two tech giants reflects the excitement and hype around technology called generative AI, which uses massive computer programs trained on reams of text and images to build bots that conjure content of their own based on relatively complex questions. Google first unveiled its chatbot LaMDA in 2021, but didn't make it available to the public. Last year, smaller AI company OpenAI made its chatbot ChatGPT and image generator DALL-E available to the public, spurring a burst of interest in the technology, which in turn pushed Microsoft and Google to rush out their products.

ChatGPT is a version of GPT-3, a large language model also developed by OpenAI. Language models are a type of neural network that has been trained on lots and lots of text. Because text is made up of sequences of letters and words of varying lengths, language models require a type of neural network that can make sense of that kind of data. Recurrent neural networks, invented in the 1980s, can handle sequences of words, but they are slow to train and can forget previous words in a sequence. In 1997, computer scientists Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber fixed this by inventing LTSM (Long Short-Term Memory) networks, recurrent neural networks with special components that allowed past data in an input sequence to be retained for longer. LTSMs could handle strings of text several hundred words long, but their language skills were limited.

Last Monday, I began looking into why artificial intelligence is still so bad at creating hands. In recent weeks, lots of people have been sharing images that could be mistaken for photos of actual humans--until your eyes wander to the subjects' misshapen fingers. A.I.'s inability to create realistic hands is a long-standing issue, highlighting both that the technology needs refining and that fingers are extraordinary things. To compare various A.I. tools' hand skills, I entered this prompt into five different art generators: "A couple that has been together for 50 years holding hands after a fight." The hands were not stellar.

If it seems like everyone is rushing to develop an alternative to ChatGPT, you're not wrong. Chinese online commerce heavyweight Alibaba has confirmed to CNBC that it's working on its equivalent to OpenAI's hit AI chatbot. The company isn't detailing features or offering a release schedule, but says it has been developing generative AI since 2017 and is in the middle of internal testing. The reveal comes as multiple tech giants have introduced rivals to or spinoffs of ChatGPT this week. Google unveiled Bard, while China's Baidu said it was testing "Ernie Bot." Microsoft, meanwhile, launched a redesigned Bing that uses a "much more powerful" language model built with OpenAI's help.

A product race is under way in the world of artificial intelligence. Just this week, Google announced plans to release Bard, a search chatbot based on its proprietary large language model; yesterday, Microsoft held an event unveiling a next-generation web browser with a supercharged Bing interface powered by ChatGPT. Though most big tech companies have been quietly developing their own generative-AI tools for years, these giants are scrambling to demonstrate their chops after the public release and runaway adoption of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has accumulated more than 30 million users in two months. OpenAI's success is an apparent signal to tech leaders that deep-learning networks are the next frontier of the commercial internet. AI evangelists will similarly tell you that generative AI is destined to become the overlay for not only search engines, but also creative work, busywork, memo writing, research, homework, sketching, outlining, storyboarding, and teaching.

Google and Microsoft are going head to head over the future of search by embracing the technology behind artificial intelligence chatbots. Google announced on Monday that it is testing Bard, a rival to the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, which has swiftly become a sensation, and will roll it out to the public in the coming weeks. And on Tuesday, Microsoft announced it is increasing its focus on artificial intelligence, boosting funding for new tools and integrating the technology underpinning ChatGPT into products including its Bing search engine and Edge browser, with the goal of making search more conversational. ChatGPT, developed by San Francisco company OpenAI, has reached 100 million users since its public launch in November, becoming by some estimates the fasting growing consumer app of all time. Here are some questions about Google and Microsoft's AI plans and their likely impact.

AI-generated text, from tools like ChatGPT, is starting to impact daily life. Teachers are testing it out as part of classroom lessons. Marketers are champing at the bit to replace their interns. Memers are going buck wild. It would be a lie to say I'm not a little anxious about the robots coming for my writing gig.

"All of the automation that we're looking at enhances the capabilities and makes the jobs easier for our best and brightest people, and it eliminates a lot of the otherwise mundane projects or activities," Mr. Wren said on the company's earnings call Tuesday. CMO Today delivers the most important news of the day for media and marketing professionals. His comments were in response to an analyst's question about how technology from Microsoft Corp. -backed OpenAI could affect Omnicom's business and the advertising market overall. Microsoft is integrating the ChatGPT tech into its Bing search engine. The company reported organic revenue growth of 7.2% in the fourth quarter, beating the average analyst estimate of 3.7% organic revenue growth, according to FactSet.