As the increasingly conversational capability of AI continues to dominate headlines, Arvind Sanjeev has been looking at the process of co-writing using artificial intelligence. In particular, how we might use product design to welcome people put off by the tech, as well as encouraging more "mindful" prompts. For Arvind, one answer is using the interface of a traditional typewriter. The typewriter, or Ghostwriter, is powered by the GPT-3 language model from OpenAI. It allows users to enter any prompt through the keys, hit return and receive a response from the AI.

If successful, it will bring powerful AI tools to the masses. So what would ChatGPT-powered Microsoft products look like? We asked Microsoft and OpenAI. Neither was willing to answer our questions on how they plan to integrate AI-powered products into Microsoft's tools, even though work must be well underway to do so. However, we do know enough to make some informed, intelligent guesses. Hint: it's probably good news if, like me, you find creating PowerPoint presentations and answering emails boring.

DAVOS, Switzerland--Microsoft Corp. plans to incorporate artificial-intelligence tools like ChatGPT into all of its products and make them available as platforms for other businesses to build on, Chief Executive Satya Nadella said. Speaking Tuesday at a Wall Street Journal panel at the World Economic Forum's annual event here in the Swiss mountains, Mr. Nadella said that his company will move quickly to commercialize tools from OpenAI, the research lab behind the ChatGPT chatbot as well as image generator Dall-E 2, which turns language prompts into novel images. Microsoft was an early investor in the startup.

Crypto tokens linked to artificial intelligence have seen a surge in interest after reports that Microsoft could invest $10 billion into ChatGPT creator OpenAI. The rally has cooled slightly since news of the deal first broke last week, but nine coins connected to the sector have surged over 50% in the past week, according to CoinGecko. Many of the tokens are considered "small cap" with low liquidity, meaning it doesn't take much to move the price. ImgnAI, a token linked to an anime-based AI image generator, has been one of the top performers, rising a whopping 718% over the past week. The coin has seen transaction volume of $750,198 in the past 24 hours. Fetch.ai, a more liquid AI-related coin, saw volume of $77.6 million over the past 24 hours.

Microsoft is giving more people -- or at least more customers -- access to OpenAI's technologies, including ChatGPT. The tech giant has announced that it's now making the Azure OpenAI Service generally available after giving a limited number of enterprise customers access to it when it debuted in November 2021. As Bloomberg notes, customers who have access to the service can use various OpenAI tools for their own cloud applications, including the Dall-E AI art generator and the GPT-3.5 language system. Microsoft says it's also adding access to ChatGPT, which it describes as a "fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5," to the service "soon." ChatGPT is coming soon to the Azure OpenAI Service, which is now generally available, as we help customers apply the world's most advanced AI models to their own business imperatives. The tech giant has been associated with OpenAI ever since it invested $1 billion in the Elon Musk-founded startup back in 2019.

ChatGPT has multiple uses, from writing or fixing a code to getting suggestions, getting explanations, writing non-plagiarised essays, creating summaries of long write-ups, getting solutions to problems etc. The possibilities are still open to explorations as the beta version is available for users to try out. It especially gained popularity when students started realising that they can use ChatGPT to get through their homework assignments and projects by just letting this "assistant" do it for them. Students around the world have been using it to complete their work and teachers have been reporting about how they are doubting the credibility of the work being submitted to them. These developments are catching a lot of traction on the internet.

I wrote about the movement to ban ChatGPT in schools, and why it seems like a missed opportunity. We believe teaching computer science and AI in schools is critically important. Students need to learn how to navigate a world where programming and artificial intelligence are part of our everyday lives.

Industry practitioners always face the problem of choosing the appropriate model for deployment under different considerations, such as to maximize a metric that is crucial for production, or to reduce the total cost given financial concerns. In this work, we focus on the text classification task and present a quantitative analysis for this challenge. Using classification accuracy as the main metric, we evaluate the classifiers' performances for a variety of models, including large language models, along with their associated costs, including the annotation cost, training (fine-tuning) cost, and inference cost. We then discuss the model choices for situations like having a large number of samples needed for inference. We hope our work will help people better understand the cost/quality trade-offs for the text classification task.

What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one's vulnerability, one's perilousness, one's smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering. This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings.

This is a weekly newsletter exploring the collision of technology and humanity. What's exciting about AI right now is that the platform layer is solidifying, meaning that it's time for the application layer to emerge. Over the past few months, I've written several Digital Native pieces about what's happening in AI. Given that this is the topic in tech as we head into 2023, I wanted to combine those pieces into one cohesive deep-dive on AI, and then expand upon them. The result is that this is a longer piece than usual, but my hope is that it offers a "state of the union" snapshot for where we are and a hint at where we might be going. When I think about what's happening in artificial intelligence, I tend to think of two movies. One came out 33 years ago, and one came out 10 months ago. Hyperland is a mostly-forgotten 1990 film written by Douglas Adams, an author best known for writing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The premise of Hyperland (which you can watch on YouTube here) is that Adams is fed up by passive linear TV--what the film calls "the sort of television that just happens at you, that you just sit in front of like a couch potato." Seeking a more interactive form of media, Adams takes his TV to a dump, where he meets Tom (played by Tom Baker). Tom is a software agent--essentially, a digital butler capable of personalizing your information and entertainment diet to your specific interests. Tom takes our protagonist through a virtual land of hypermedia--linked text, sounds, images, and videos. In other words, Tom takes Adams on a journey through the internet.