Artificial intelligence (AI) is suddenly the darling of the tech world, thanks to ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can do things such as carry on conversations and write essays and articles with what some people believe is human-like skill. In its first five days, more than a million people signed up to try it. The New York Times hails its "brilliance and weirdness" and says it inspires both awe and fear. For all the glitz and hype surrounding ChatGPT, what it's doing now are essentially stunts -- a way to get as much attention as possible. The future of AI isn't in writing articles about Beyoncé in the style of Charles Dickens, or any of the other oddball things people use ChatGPT for. Instead, AI will be primarily a business tool, reaping billions of dollars for companies that use it for tasks like improving internet searches, writing software code, discovering and fixing inefficiencies in a company's business, and extracting useful, actionable information from massive amounts of data.

Microsoft has announced a deepening of its partnership with the company behind the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT by announcing a multibillion dollar investment in the business. It said the deal with OpenAI would involve deploying the company's artificial intelligence models across Microsoft products, which include the Bing search engine and its office software such as Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, has been a sensation since it launched in November, with users marvelling at its ability to perform a variety of tasks from writing recipes and sonnets to job applications. It is at the forefront of generative AI, or technology trained on vast amounts of text and images that can create content from a simple text prompt. It has also been described as "a gamechanger" that will challenge teachers in universities and schools amid concerns that pupils are already using the chatbot to write high-quality essays with minimal human input.

Microsoft said Monday that it is entering a "third phase" of its relationship with ChatGPT developer OpenAI through a multibillion-dollar investment. But the deal may come with a price for users, too: a $42 monthly "professional" tier subscription that sources say OpenAI is testing among early adopters. In 2019, Microsoft said it would invest $1 billion into OpenAI, then a relatively unknown developer of AI technologies. On Monday, Microsoft said it would extend its partnership through a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs." "Microsoft will deploy OpenAI's models across our consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI's technology," the company said.

Microsoft on Monday said it had extended its partnership with OpenAI, the research lab and creator of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that has sparked widespread fears of cheating in schools and universities. In a company blog post tweeted by CEO Satya Nadella, the tech giant announced a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs" that would be "broadly shared with the world." OpenAI's ChatGPT became an internet sensation when it was released without warning in November, allowing users to experiment with its ability to write essays, articles and poems as well as computer code in just seconds. With teachers alarmed by its ability, ChatGPT is banned in universities and school districts - including in New York City and Washington DC - and has sparked nervous debates about the future of office work. California-based OpenAI is also the creator of DALL-E, a program that can swiftly draw up digital images and illustrations at a simple request.

Tel-Aviv-based AI21 Labs launched today Wordtune Spices, a writer-augmentation tool based on generative AI. Selecting from 12 different cues, writers can generate a range of textual options to add to and enhance sentences. Spices can also suggest statistics to strengthen an argument or sharpen a detail. AI21 says Spices is not intended to replace writers but to function as a writing assistant, suggesting additional complete sentences that improve and enhance the text that is being written. It could help refine and enrich the main message of the text, bolster and enrich arguments, and add creative expressions such as a joke or inspirational quote. The Israeli startup claims to have solved one of the major issues with popular applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT which do not give source credit.

Microsoft is once again pouring money into OpenAI as part of an expanded partnership. The tech giant is making a "multibillion dollar" investment that will lead to wider uses of OpenAI's technology, as well as stronger behind-the-scenes support. While the two companies are short on specifics, Microsoft says you can expect "new categories of digital experiences" that include both consumer-facing and business products. The developer-focused Azure OpenAI Service will play a role. The continued union will also see Microsoft boost its investments in supercomputers that accelerate OpenAI's research.

Microsoft Corp. said Monday it is making a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, substantially bolstering its relationship with the startup behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot as the software giant looks to expand the use of artificial intelligence in its products. Microsoft said the latest partnership builds upon the company's 2019 and 2021 investments in OpenAI.

Today, we are announcing the third phase of our long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs to ensure these benefits are broadly shared with the world. This agreement follows our previous investments in 2019 and 2021. It extends our ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each of us to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies. "We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform," said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. "In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications."

DALL·E 2 is the newest AI model by OpenAI. If you've seen some of its creations and think they're amazing, keep reading to understand why you're totally right -- but also wrong. OpenAI published a blog post and a paper entitled "Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents" on DALL·E 2. The post is fine if you want to get a glimpse at the results and the paper is great for understanding the technical details, but neither explains DALL·E 2's amazingness -- and the not-so-amazing -- in depth. That's what this article is for. If this in-depth educational content is useful for you, subscribe to our AI mailing list to be alerted when we release new material. DALL·E 2 is the new version of DALL·E, a generative language model that takes sentences and creates corresponding original images. At 3.5B parameters, DALL·E 2 is a large model but not nearly as large as GPT-3 and, interestingly, smaller than its predecessor (12B). Despite its size, DALL·E 2 generates 4x better resolution images than DALL·E and it's preferred by human judges 70% of the time both in caption matching and photorealism. As they did with DALL·E, OpenAI didn't release DALL·E 2 (you can always join the never-ending waitlist). However, they open-sourced CLIP which, although only indirectly related to DALL·E, forms the basis of DALL·E 2. (CLIP is also the basis of the apps and notebooks people who can't access DALL·E 2 are using.)

Now that AI programs speak with us in natural language, turn our thoughts into illustrations, and embody our voices, a major conflict over their ethics is en route. And if you thought the content moderation fight was intense, just wait for this one. At stake is how chatbots address political issues, how AI illustrators portray the world, and whether some applications like voice emulators should even exist. Given the scale and power of this blossoming technology, the activists won't be subtle. They've had their practice fighting over human speech online, and they'll bring that experience to this war.