The news: OpenAI has finally released its first open-weight large language models since 2019's GPT-2. Unlike the models available through OpenAI's web interface, these new open models can be freely downloaded, run, and even modified on laptops and other local devices. Why it matters: These releases re-establish OpenAI as a presence for users of open models. That's particularly notable at a time when Meta, which had previously dominated the American open-model landscape with its Llama models, may be reorienting toward closed releases--and when Chinese open models are becoming more popular than their American competitors. MIT Technology Review Narrated: AI means the end of internet search as we've known it The biggest change to the way search engines deliver information to us since the 1990s is happening right now.

Every day, we are tracked hundreds or even thousands of times across the digital world. All of this is collected, packaged together with other details, and used to create highly personalized profiles that are then shared or sold, often without our explicit knowledge or consent. A consensus is growing that Americans need better privacy protections--and that the best way to deliver them would be for Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation. So what can Americans expect for their personal data in 2025? We spoke to privacy experts and advocates about what's on their mind regarding how our digital data might be traded or protected moving forward.

The biggest change to the way search engines have delivered information to us since the 1990s is happening right now. Which means instead of keywords, you use real questions, expressed in natural language. And instead of links, you'll increasingly be met with answers, written by generative AI and based on live information from all across the internet, delivered the same way. Of course, Google--the company that has defined search for the past 25 years--is trying to be out front on this. In May of 2023, it began testing AI-generated responses to search queries, using its large language model (LLM) to deliver the kinds of answers you might expect from an expert source or trusted friend.

Google has officially been named a monopoly. On Aug. 5, a federal judge charged the tech giant with illegally using its market power to harm rival search engines, marking the first antitrust defeat for a major internet platform in more than 20 years--and thereby calling into question the business practices of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies. Many experts have speculated the landmark decision will make judges more receptive to antitrust action in other ongoing cases against the Big Tech platforms, especially with regards to the burgeoning AI industry. Today, the AI ecosystem is dominated by many of the same companies that the government is challenging in court, and those companies are using the same tactics to entrench their power in AI markets. Judge Amit Mehta's ruling in the Google case centered on the massive sums of money the company paid firms like Apple and Samsung to make its search engine the default on their smartphones and browsers.

Google is reportedly drawing up plans to charge for AI-enhanced search features, in what would be the biggest shake up to the company's revenue model in its history. The radical shift is a natural consequence of the vast expense required to provide the service, experts say, and would leave every leading player in the sector offering some variety of subscription model to cover its costs. Google's proposals, first reported by the Financial Times, would entail the company exclusively offering its new search feature to users of its premium subscription services, which customers already have to sign up to if they want to use artificial intelligence assistants in other Google tools such as Gmail and its office suite. With that search experience, being trialled in beta for selected users, Google's generative AI is used to respond to queries directly with a single answer, in a similar style to the conversational approach of ChatGPT and competitors. "AI search is more expensive to compute than Google's traditional search processes. So in charging for AI search Google will be seeking to at least recoup these costs," said Heather Dawe, chief data scientist at the digital transformation consultancy UST.

The need for Question Answering datasets in low resource languages is the motivation of this research, leading to the development of Kencorpus Swahili Question Answering Dataset, KenSwQuAD. This dataset is annotated from raw story texts of Swahili low resource language, which is a predominantly spoken in Eastern African and in other parts of the world. Question Answering (QA) datasets are important for machine comprehension of natural language for tasks such as internet search and dialog systems. Machine learning systems need training data such as the gold standard Question Answering set developed in this research. The research engaged annotators to formulate QA pairs from Swahili texts collected by the Kencorpus project, a Kenyan languages corpus. The project annotated 1,445 texts from the total 2,585 texts with at least 5 QA pairs each, resulting into a final dataset of 7,526 QA pairs. A quality assurance set of 12.5% of the annotated texts confirmed that the QA pairs were all correctly annotated. A proof of concept on applying the set to the QA task confirmed that the dataset can be usable for such tasks. KenSwQuAD has also contributed to resourcing of the Swahili language.

Yourchat.ai Ltd., a tech firm, today announced the opening of its cutting-edge AI services to the US market through ChatGPT, yourchat.ai, The chatbot then uses ChatGPT to sort through the top Google search results before responding to the query with a written response that includes the sources of the results. Users do not have to waste time sifting through several linked search results, as they would in a regular Google search, to get the answer(s) they are looking for. Also, there are no adverts displayed to customers when they utilize the service, which is far quicker than Microsoft's Bing with GPT4. Users may post their finest search prompts on all open platforms with the hashtag #yoursearch and receive a $5,000 reward as well as a job offer if the business utilizes it on yoursearch.ai.

Straight from the AI's mouth ChatGPT is a natural language processing model developed by OpenAI that is capable of generating human-like text. It has the potential to revolutionize the field of education in several ways. One potential benefit of ChatGPT is its ability to generate personalized learning materials. By asking questions and providing input, students can use ChatGPT to generate tailored study guides and practice exercises. This can be particularly useful for students who struggle to keep up with the pace of a traditional classroom or who need extra help to understand a particular subject.

So far, there doesn't seem to be an awful lot that ChatGPT – the chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI) – can't do. It has been used to pass exams, deliver a sermon, write software and give relationship advice -- to name just a handful of its functions. The bot is currently free for anyone to use, meaning that lots of users have been asking it questions to get the information they need in their daily lives. Since the turn of the millennium, this job has been primarily reserved for Google -- the world's most popular search engine and its $149 billion (£120 billion) business. And, if so, which of the warring tech giants will get there first?

"How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways," answered Mike, "Gradually, then suddenly." The very same story describes how major industry disruption usually happens--gradually, and then suddenly. For board members and other industry leaders, being on the right side of such disruption typically requires looking years ahead. But with the release of ChatGPT in November, 2022, OpenAI "suddenly" and shockingly threatened to overthrow Google's hitherto total dominance of internet search.