Meta Platforms on Thursday released early versions of its latest large language model, Llama 3, and an image generator that updates pictures in real time while users type prompts, as it races to catch up to generative AI market leader OpenAI. The models will be integrated into virtual assistant Meta AI, which the company is pitching as the most sophisticated of its free-to-use peers. The assistant will be given more prominent billing within Meta's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger apps as well as a new standalone website that positions it to compete more directly with Microsoft-backed OpenAI's breakout hit ChatGPT. The announcement comes as Meta has been scrambling to push generative AI products out to its billions of users to challenge OpenAI's leading position on the technology, involving an overhaul of computing infrastructure and the consolidation of previously distinct research and product teams. The social media giant equipped Llama 3 with new computer coding capabilities and fed it images as well as text this time, though for now the model will output only text, Chris Cox, Meta's chief product officer, said in an interview.

It began with a tweet of a bar graph depicting a sharp rise in the month of February: Neil Clarke, the publisher and editor in chief of the science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld, had plotted out the publication's past few years of plagiarized and spammy submissions. Until late 2022, the bars are barely visible, but in the past few months--and especially this month--the numbers climb dramatically, mostly due to AI-generated content. Clarke wrote a post laying out the situation entitled "A Concerning Trend." Five days and a massive amount of online chatter later, Clarkesworld announced it's closing submissions for now. Clarke says they've seen this problem growing for a while, but they took the time to analyze the data before talking about it publicly.

Google on Wednesday announced a slew of features powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), but a mistake in an ad caused its share price to tank. The search engine giant is rushing into the space after the bot ChatGPT caught the imagination of web users around the world with its ability to generate essays, speeches and even exam papers in seconds. Microsoft has announced a multibillion-dollar partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI and unveiled new products on Tuesday, while Google tried to steal the march a day earlier by announcing its "Bard" alternative. The bots are quickly being integrated into search engines and Google is battling to preserve its two-decade dominance of the web search industry. But astronomers on Twitter quickly noticed that Google's Bard had given out an error in an ad on Twitter touting its new technology.

Microsoft has been teasing the importance of its OpenAI partnership recently, setting up just how important this moment is for the company's AI ambitions. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company will turn AI models into the next major computing platform. "The next major wave of computing is being born, as the Microsoft Cloud turns the world's most advanced AI models into a new computing platform," Nadella said in an earnings statement last month. "We are committed to helping our customers use our platforms and tools to do more with less today and innovate for the future in the new era of AI."

OpenAI has sparked an explosion of funding and software development around artificial-intelligence software that understands human language. While the technology still makes plenty of mistakes, new applications are coming out in droves, from tools that help marketers write copy to audio chatbots that may be able to negotiate discounts for customers of a companies like Comcast. Last week, subscribers of The Information joined a conference call about the year ahead in AI with Noam Shazeer, CEO of Character, which is developing chatbots similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and who co-authored a seminal research paper on that subject while working at Google; and Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, which runs a Github-like service for software engineers to store their machine learning models.

LONDON, Oct 11 (Reuters) - China has won the artificial intelligence battle with the United States and is heading towards global dominance because of its technological advances, the Pentagon's former software chief told the Financial Times. China, the world's second largest economy, is likely to dominate many of the key emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics within a decade or so, according to Western intelligence assessments. Nicolas Chaillan, the Pentagon's first chief software officer who resigned in protest against the slow pace of technological transformation in the U.S. military, said the failure to respond was putting the United States at risk. "We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it's already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion," he told the newspaper.

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Quora Questions are part of a partnership between Newsweek and Quora, through which we'll be posting relevant and interesting answers from Quora contributors throughout the week. The one way Amazon can win over Google in the long run given Google's AI superiority in this space is by partnering better with device manufacturers. To start off, I don't think the battle between Amazon Echo and Google Home is as important as the one between Amazon Alexa, which is their voice assistance service, and the Google (Voice) Assistant. Both Amazon Echo and Google Home are speakers with voice assistance built into them. The speakers are fairly standard, as speakers go. The real magic happens in the voice assistants that sit in the cloud and do the heavy lifting on behalf of these devices.

Nvidia Corp. has unveiled two more graphics processing unit (GPU) chips aimed at the fast-growing branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning. At the GPU Technology Conference currently underway in Beijing, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang (pictured) introduced the Tesla P4 and Tesla P40 GPUs that form part of the Pascal architecture-based deep learning platform. The company had officially entered the deep learning market in April with the announcement of the 15-billion transistor Tesla P100 chip, aimed at deep learning. "With the Tesla P100 and now Tesla P4 and P40, Nvidia offers the only end-to-end deep learning platform for the data center, unlocking the enormous power of AI for a broad range of industries," said Ian Buck, general manager of accelerated computing at Nvidia. While the Tesla P100 focuses on training tasks, the Tesla P4 and P40 has been designed specifically for inferencing.