Weekly AI - 12 Nov 2023
Hello readers! Welcome to Weekly AI. In this issue, we'll learn about OpenAI’s announcements in their DevDay conference, how Google brings conversational search globally and the chatbot developed by xAI.
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OpenAI DevDay Announcements
OpenAI made a wave of announcements during their recent DevDay developer conference. The AI research company unveiled numerous upgrades and new offerings aimed at empowering developers and expanding access to advanced AI capabilities. In this newsletter, we summarize the key announcements OpenAI made regarding innovations in language, vision, speech, platform capabilities, pricing, protections, and open source tools.
→ GPT-4 Turbo - Bigger, Smarter, and Cheaper AI Coming Soon
OpenAI announced that in the next few weeks they will release GPT-4 Turbo, an upgraded version of their popular AI chatbot technology. GPT-4 Turbo will be able to remember more context, have knowledge of events up to April 2023, and be available at a lower price. This will make advanced conversational AI more affordable and accessible for developers and businesses to use.
→ Make Your Own Mini AI Chatbot with GPTs
Soon anyone will be able to build their own custom conversational AI chatbots powered by GPT technology, without needing to code. OpenAI is releasing GPTs, a simple way to create AI bots trained on specific topics. Later this month OpenAI will also launch a GPT Store where people can share and potentially make money from GPT chatbots they build.
→ New Assistants API to Help Create Smarter AI Helpers
OpenAI released a new Assistants API to make it easier for developers to build AI assistants and chatbots that can understand context, retrieve knowledge, and perform tasks. Key features include reading code, pulling data, and integrating functions. This provides the tools to create customizable virtual assistants with persistent memory.
→ Add Voice, Images, and Video to AI Apps
OpenAI added new capabilities to their platform allowing AI apps to understand speech, generate human-like voices, and create images. Developers can now build apps with AI that talks, sees, and creates visuals. This brings AI apps closer to how humans experience the world.
→ OpenAI Lowers Costs to Make AI More Accessible
OpenAI reduced pricing for capabilities like chatbots, image creation, and speech across their developer platform. For example, GPT-4 Turbo is now 3x cheaper for text input and 2x cheaper for text output compared to GPT-4. Lower costs aim to make advanced AI available to more developers and businesses.
→ OpenAI Offers Legal Protection for AI Builders
OpenAI introduced Copyright Shield to defend customers and cover costs if they face copyright claims around AI apps built using OpenAI's main platform features and ChatGPT Enterprise. This provides legal reassurance for developers building AI solutions.
→ Improved Open Source Speech Recognition Model Released
OpenAI released an upgraded open source model called Whisper large-v3 that improves speech recognition capabilities across languages. It is optimized to transcribe speech accurately and quickly for real-time applications. The open source access allows anyone to benefit from the latest speech AI.
→ Access to GPT-4 Finetuning for Customization
OpenAI launched an experimental program granting limited access to fine-tuning GPT-4 models. Unlike the GPT-3.5 fine-tuning program, GPT-4 will involve more oversight from OpenAI teams due to the challenges of properly fine-tuning the more advanced model. While it may require more effort to achieve meaningful gains, controlled access to fine-tuning promises to allow advanced customization of GPT-4 for specific use cases down the line.
Google's AI-powered search rolls out globally
Google announced the global expansion of its AI-powered search experience, known as Search Generative Experience (SGE). SGE allows users to have natural conversations with AI through search, going beyond just providing links. The conversational search is now available in over 120 countries and territories and supports Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Indonesian in addition to existing languages. However, it's not yet available in any European Union member states.
RedPajama Releases Massive 30 Trillion Token Open Dataset for Training Large Language Models
AI startup Together released a major new version of their RedPajama dataset containing over 30 trillion filtered and deduplicated tokens scraped from the web. This open dataset aims to accelerate research into large language models by providing the community with the largest public corpus to date specifically for LLM training. Together states this will lift the burden off developers to scrape and clean their own data. The release includes quality annotations to filter and reweight data based on criteria like toxicity, as well as multilingual data in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. Together views this as an evolving project that will grow over time with community input.
Elon Musk's xAI Announces Early Version of Grok LLM
AI startup xAI recently announced the release of an early prototype of their conversational AI system called Grok. Grok is intended to be an AI assistant that can answer a wide range of questions with some wit and humor. It is designed to provide real-time knowledge by accessing Twitter (X). The company says Grok represents rapid progress in training large language models efficiently. Grok outperformed other models of similar size on benchmarks, though is still surpassed by much larger models like GPT-4. xAI plans to continue improving Grok's capabilities and will offer limited early access in the US. They highlight goals like integrating formal verification for reliability and safety. The announcement provides an overview of Grok's capabilities so far and xAI's future research directions.
That wraps up this week's AI news! If you found this informative, don't forget to share it with friends and colleagues. And be sure to subscribe to get next week's news straight to your inbox. Thanks for reading!