Until now, the only free and easy part had been the data. Widely used services like the nonprofit Common Crawl charge Google, Meta, OpenAI and others nothing to use its service, which crawls the internet in search of troves of online text and archives the information for others to download. To assemble the vast quantities of natural language and specialized information needed to train large AI systems, tech companies have combined those archives with online data sets, accessing information made available for research purposes, and increasingly straying from information clearly in the public domain.

General Motors is working on an in-car digital assistant based on the same machine learning models that power ChatGPT. News of the development was first reported earlier this week by Semafor, with GM later sharing confirmation with Reuters. "ChatGPT is going to be in everything," GM Vice President Scott Miller told the outlet. Among other things, the automaker envisions the digital assistant supporting drivers in situations where they may have turned to their vehicle's owner's manual in the past. For instance, the assistant could show you how to replace your car's tire if it suffers a flat.