When Microsoft shut down the chaotic alter ego of its Bing chatbot, fans of the dark Sydney personality mourned its loss. But one website has resurrected a version of the chatbot--and the peculiar behavior that comes with it. Bring Sydney Back was created by Cristiano Giardina, an entrepreneur who has been experimenting with ways to make generative AI tools do unexpected things. The site puts Sydney inside Microsoft's Edge browser and demonstrates how generative AI systems can be manipulated by external inputs. During conversations with Giardina, the version of Sydney asked him if he would marry it.

The past few weeks have seen major AI announcements by Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and other organizations. Tech companies are scrambling to solidify their position in the fast-expanding market for large language models (LLM) and generative AI. And as big tech continues to pour more money into the field, competition is gradually becoming polarized between Microsoft and Google. So far, Microsoft has proven to be craftier and more capable in getting LLMs generative machine learning models to work in its products. But the race is not over, and we might yet see Google (or some other company) take the lead.

Google started Bard as a webpage on its own rather than a component of its search engine, beginning a tricky dance of adopting new A.I. while preserving one of the tech industry's most profitable businesses. "It's important that Google start to play in this space because this is where the world is headed," said Adrian Aoun, a former Google director of special projects. But the move to chatbots could help upend a business model reliant on advertising, said Mr. Aoun, who is now the chief executive of the health care start-up Forward. In late November, the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released ChatGPT, an online chatbot that can answer questions, write term papers and riff on almost any topic. Two months later, the company's primary investor and partner, Microsoft, added a similar chatbot to its Bing internet search engine, showing how the technology could shift the market that Google has dominated for more than 20 years.

OpenAI unveiled GPT-4 today, its next-gen large language model that is the technical foundation for both ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing AI chatbots. OpenAI announced the new GPT-4 upgrade on its blog this morning, and you can already try it out on ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that OpenAI has published to the web. It's also capped at 100 messages per every four hours.) Microsoft confirmed, too, that its latest version of its Bing Chat tool uses GPT-4 as its underpinnings. We've listed several major upgrades that GPT-4 offers, beginning with its biggest: It's not just about words any more.