Meta didn't wait for Tuesday's LlamaCon keynote to unveil its first big AI announcement of the week. The company launched a standalone app that competes with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and other multimodal AI chatbots. Sticking to the company's roots, the app also includes a social feed and the ability to draw on info from your profile and posts you've shared. The Meta AI app offers similar features to rival chatbots, including text and voice chats, live web access and the ability to generate and edit images. But it also includes a Discover feed that (for better or worse) adds a social element to your AI queries.

I never thought I'd say this but … I cheated on you, ChatGPT, and Gemini. It was just the right thing to do. But hear me out: I was paying two separate subscription fees to get help writing and generating images for my blog when I heard about this all-in-one AI tool, 1minAI. Everyone was talking about how it does everything ChatGPT and Gemini do, but more. I didn't believe it because I'd never heard of it.

Alibaba's announcement of its new AI-powered service, Tongyi Qianwen, is a significant development in the increasingly competitive large language model space. The Chinese multinational conglomerate, which specializes in e-commerce, retail, internet, and technology, plans to eventually roll out the new software across all its platforms. Tongyi Qianwen is a large language model that generates compelling responses to user prompts. The technology was trained on vast troves of data and is designed to be integrated into Alibaba's Tmall Genie smart speakers and workplace messaging platform DingTalk initially. However, the company has plans to add the technology to all its applications, including e-commerce and mapping services.

By that time, the launch had been met with an almost overwhelming wave of disappointment. Chinese publications with testing access ridiculed the chatbot's performance, social media users mocked it with memes, and Baidu's stock dropped by 6.4%. But a curious thing has happened since last week's launch: Ernie Bot's reputation seems to have bounced back. Baidu's stock price rebounded by 15.7% on Friday. More Chinese reporters gained access to the chatbot and published more moderate reviews.

In a fair world, technology should be accessible to all and used for humanity's betterment. However, there is a growing concern that AI could be monopolised for vested interests by large corporations. This is why open sourcing is paramount. ChatGPT, the popular chatbot by OpenAI, has been one of the biggest breakthroughs in AI. In just five days since its launch, approximately one million individuals engaged with the bot and it is expected that the number will soon reach the billion mark.

Google on Monday launched its ChatGPT competitor called Bard. Bard is designed as an'experimental conversational AI service' that answers users' queries and participates in conversations. CEO Sundar Pichai announced a soft launch to select'trusted testers' to get feedback before a public release in the coming weeks. While Google has yet to release more details, the company shows that users can ask Bard queries, like'how to explain new discoveries from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old' or'plan a friend's baby shower.' The initial release of Bard uses the tech giant's lightweight model version of LaMDA, which requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users and allowing for more feedback.

I recently started an AI-focused educational newsletter, that already has over 150,000 subscribers. TheSequence is a no-BS (meaning no hype, no news etc) ML-oriented newsletter that takes 5 minutes to read. The goal is to keep you up to date with machine learning projects, research papers and concepts. When it comes to the space of generative AI and foundational models, OpenAI seems to have hit escape velocity with the recent release of technologies such as ChatGPT. Given the computational requirements of these systems, it seems logical that the core competition of OpenAI will come from incumbent AI labs such as Google-DeepMind and Meta AI.

Google employees have been testing several potential ChatGPT competitors as part of the tech giant's bid to launch a response to OpenAI's technology, according to CNBC. A previous New York Times report said that Google CEO Sundar Pichai declared "code red" and accelerated AI development to be able to unveil at least 20 AI-powered products this year. Now, CNBC has detailed several of the products the company is working on, including a chatbot called "Apprentice Bard" that uses Google's LaMDA conversation technology. Apparently, Google management asked the LaMDA team to prioritize working on a ChatGPT competitor, telling them that it takes precedence over any other project and even warning them not to attend unrelated meetings. Apprentice Bard reportedly looks and functions like ChatGPT in that a user can type a question or a prompt in a text box and then get a written response. CNBC says it saw samples proving the bot's answers include information from recent events -- something ChatGPT isn't capable of, because it only has limited knowledge about anything that happened after 2021.