The boss of the firm behind ChatGPT and the UK technology secretary discussed a multibillion-pound deal to give the entire country premium access to the AI tool, the Guardian has learned. Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, talked to Peter Kyle about a potential agreement to give UK residents access to its advanced product. According to two sources with direct knowledge of the meeting, the idea was floated as part of a broader discussion in San Francisco about opportunities for collaboration between OpenAI and the UK. Those close to the discussion say Kyle never really took the idea seriously, not least because it could have cost as much as 2bn. OpenAI offers free and subscription versions of ChatGPT.

Earlier this week, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT can now be connected to more apps and services, allowing you to pull your data from those sources in real time. Newly connectable sources that were explicitly mentioned include Outlook, Teams, Google Drive, Gmail, and Linear. ChatGPT can now connect to more internal sources & pull in real-time context--keeping existing user-level permissions. These new connections are only available for paid ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team, Enterprise, and Edu users. Furthermore, the feature is excluded for users in the European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland, and UK.

Finals season looks different this year. Across college campuses, students are slogging their way through exams with all-nighters and lots of caffeine, just as they always have. Through the end of May, OpenAI is offering students two months of free access to ChatGPT Plus, which normally costs 20 a month. It's a compelling deal for students who want help cramming--or cheating--their way through finals: Rather than firing up the free version of ChatGPT to outsource essay writing or work through a practice chemistry exam, students are now able to access the company's most advanced models, as well as its "deep research" tool, which can quickly synthesize hundreds of digital sources into analytical reports. The OpenAI deal is just one of many such AI promotions going around campuses.

Following the release of rival Anthropic's Claude for Education, OpenAI has announced that its 20 ChatGPT Plus tier will be free for college students until the end of May. The offer comes just in time for final exams and will provide features like OpenAI's most advanced LLM, GPT-4o and an all-new image generation tool. "We are offering a Plus discount for students on a limited-time basis in the US and Canada," the company wrote in a FAQ. "This is an experimental consumer program and we may or may not expand this to more schools and countries over time." On top of the aforementioned features, ChatGPT Plus will offer students benefits like priority access during peak usage times and higher message limits.

Sora is a powerful AI video generation model that can create videos from text prompts, animate images, or remix videos in new styles. OpenAI first previewed the model back in February, but today is the first time the company is releasing it for broader use. The core function of Sora--creating impressive videos with simple prompts--remains similar to what was previewed in February, but OpenAI worked to make the model faster and cheaper ahead of this wider release. There are a few new features, and two stand out. With it, you can create multiple AI-generated videos and then assemble them together on a timeline, much the way you would with conventional video editors like Adobe Premiere Pro.

Earlier today, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Pro, a 200 monthly subscription for its flagship chatbot. This release is the first of many expected during the next 12 days, as the San Francisco startup has scheduled a slew of announcements to roll out starting today. Everything from OpenAI's 20 monthly subscription is included at this price level as well as significantly more access to the GPT-4o and o1 artificial intelligence models. With a ChatGPT Pro subscription--which will cost 2,400 for a full year--users can also use an exclusive model from OpenAI called o1 pro mode that wields more computing power to process answers. "Power users of ChatGPT, at this point, they really use it a lot, and they want more compute than 20 can buy," said CEO Sam Altman during the video broadcast announcing the new premium tier.

It feels like artificial intelligence is in everything these days -- TVs, laptops, phones, websites, even PDF editors -- and that big boom can be attributed to the wild success of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Microsoft is doing its best to compete with its own Copilot AI chatbot, and both ChatGPT and Copilot are pretty good at providing answers, generating text and images, and holding conversations. Most importantly, they're both free to use. But ChatGPT and Copilot both offer paid plans in the form of ChatGPT Plus and Copilot Pro, respectively. Why would you pay for them when they're freely available?

Despite years of evidence to the contrary, many Republicans still believe that President Joe Biden's win in 2020 was illegitimate. A number of election denying candidates won their primaries during Super Tuesday, including Brandon Gill, the son-in-law of right-wing pundit Dinesh D'Souza and promoter of the debunked 2000 Mules film. Going into this year's elections, claims of election fraud remain a staple for candidates running on the right, fueled by dis- and misinformation, both online and off. And the advent of generative AI has the potential to make the problem worse. A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that tracks hate speech on social platforms, found that even though generative AI companies say they've put policies in place to prevent their image-creating tools from being used to spread election-related disinformation, researchers were able to circumvent their safeguards and create the images anyway.

The problem with testing AI chatbot subscriptions like Google's Gemini Advanced and OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus is their generality. The same tool is used for disparate applications; the same software service that developers in San Francisco are using to build their latest app might also be used by parents in Kansas to plan a Paw Patrol birthday. Even though companies often tout esoteric benchmarks to prove their chatbot's superiority, it can be hard to discern how a chatbot's technical prowess translates into a better experience for you, the user. Google is the latest company to offer one of its best AI chatbots as a subscription product; in early February, the company began offering access to Gemini Advanced for 20 per month. In doing so, Google was following the precedent set by OpenAI, which sells access to its GPT-4-powered chatbot for 20 a month.

Google just upgraded its AI chatbot. Access to the new Gemini Advanced chatbot is available right now through a monthly subscription to Google One, the company's cloud backup service. With today's release, there's a new tier of Google One service called the AI Premium plan, which costs 20 per month; subscribe and you'll get the standard Google One benefits, plus access to the new chatbot. That 20 monthly fee is the same price OpenAI charges for access to its GPT-4 model via ChatGPT Plus. If you don't want to pay for your AI tools, Google also offers a more basic option called Gemini Pro that remains free to use.