Benedict Evans, a tech analyst whose newsletter is required reading for those who follow the industry, made an interesting point this week. He had, he said, been talking to generalist journalists who "were still under the impression that ChatGPT was a trivial parlour trick and the whole thing was about as interesting as a new iPhone app". On the other hand, he continued, "most people in tech are walking around slowly, holding on to the top of their head with both hands to stop it flying off. But within that, I think we can see a range of attitudes." We certainly can – on a spectrum ranging from the view that this "generative AI" is going to be the biggest bonanza since the invention of the wheel, to fears that it augurs an existential risk to humanity, and numerous opinions in between.

Large language models (LLMs) based on transformer architectures have taken the world by storm, with ChatGPT quickly becoming a household name. While the concept of generative AI is not new and can be traced back to Jürgen Schmidhuber's (now at KAUST) work in the 1990s and even further into history, Ian Goodfellow's generative adversarial networks (GANs) and Google's transformers published in 2017 enabled the development and industrialization of multi-purpose AI. My teams have been working in this area since 2015 both in generative biology and generative chemistry, with AI-generated drugs in human clinical trials and the most advanced departments in pharma companies using our software, and we have utilized LLMs almost since they were first published. OpenAI's GPT has also been available to the public since 2020. However, the public release and consumerization of ChatGPT have taken the world by surprise and triggered a new cycle of hyper investment and productization of LLMs that are propagating into the search market. Although both Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and transformer-based LLMs, as well as multimodal LLMs, are surprisingly good at language understanding and generation, I believe they are still as far from human-level consciousness as a calculator.

OpenAI's startup fund invested $23.5 million in a Series A2 funding round on the engineering company 1X, on 23rd March 2023.[1] Another key product manufactured by 1X is EVE, a high-mobility robot attached with wheels as feet. EVE's ability to gently move, manipulate objects, and interact with the world makes it ideal for use in real-world applications. It uses a base level of training to move about our spaces, turning corners and opening doors using shared autonomy. The robot could replace laborers involved in construction, manufacturing industries, etc and potentially solve the labor shortage crisis.

"Which means we will all hotly debate as to whether it actually achieves AGI. This implies that with a GPT-5 upgrade, generative AI may be indistinguishable from a human. Meanwhile, Chen commented that he didn't mean achieving AGI with GPT5 is a consensus belief within OpenAI, "but non-zero people there believe it will get there." The ability of an AI to learn and comprehend any task or concept that humans can is referred to as AGI, whereas AI refers to a machine that can perform specific tasks. AGI is a higher level of AI that is not restricted to specific tasks or functions.

Are tech companies moving too fast in rolling out powerful artificial intelligence technology that could one day outsmart humans? That's the conclusion of a group of prominent computer scientists and other tech industry notables such as Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who are calling for a 6-month pause to consider the risks. Their petition published Wednesday is a response to San Francisco startup OpenAI's recent release of GPT-4, a more advanced successor to its widely-used AI chatbot ChatGPT that helped spark a race among tech giants Microsoft and Google to unveil similar applications. The letter warns that AI systems with "human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity" -- from flooding the internet with disinformation and automating away jobs to more catastrophic future risks out of the realms of science fiction. It says "recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control."

A new'Dream Simulator' game harnesses the power of ChatGPT to recreate people's dreams in 3D -- instantly. The PC game called Project Electric Sheep uses OpenAI's GPT-3 AI, with people typing what they dreamed about, then seeing the landscape come to life around them. A voice asks, 'What do you wish to dream about,' then the player types in their choices and the game creates the world around them in 3D in seconds. Users can move around inside their dreams using a mouse and interact and talk with the people in their dreams. Users are asked, 'What do you want to dream about?' Gadney said: 'People were stunned.

The training dataset was collected in May 2020 from 54 million public software repositories hosted on GitHub, containing 179 GB of unique Python files under 1 MB. Authors filtered out files which were likely auto-generated, had average line length greater than 100, had maximum line length greater than 1000, or contained a small percentage of alphanumeric characters. After filtering, the final dataset totaled 159 GB. The training dataset was collected in May 2020 from 54 million public software repositories hosted on GitHub, containing 179 GB of unique Python files under 1 MB. Authors filtered out files which were likely auto-generated, had average line length greater than 100, had maximum line length greater than 1000, or contained a small percentage of alphanumeric characters.

ChatGPT bans: The Italian Data Protection Authority also says that OpenAI could be fined if it doesn't make ChatGPT follow privacy laws in Italy. OpenAI says that it has stopped giving ChatGPT to users in Italy because that country is looking into the program. But the CEO of the company, Sam Altman, tweeted, "Though we think we follow all privacy laws." We of course defer to the Italian government and have ceased offering ChatGPT in Italy (though we think we are following all privacy laws). Italy is one of my favorite countries and I look forward to visiting again soon!

After months of sounding the alarm about students using AI apps that can churn out essays and assignments, teachers are getting AI detection technology of their own. On April 4, Turnitin is activating the software I tested for some 10,700 institutions including the University of California, assigning "generated by AI" scores and sentence-by-sentence analysis to student work. It joins a handful of other free detectors already online. For many teachers, AI detection offers a weapon to deter a 21st-century form of cheating.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak were signatories on an open letter signed by more than 2,600 tech industry leaders and researchers. The open letter called for a temporary halt on any further artificial intelligence (AI) development. The petition shared concerns that AI with human-competitive intelligence can pose serious hazards to society and mankind. It urged all AI firms to "immediately cease" developing AI systems that are more potent than Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) for at least six months. GPT-4 is a multimodal large language model created by OpenAI and the fourth in its GPT series.