More from From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet
Content moderators for the San Francisco-based AI firm Sama — who are based in its Nairobi, Kenya hub — are suing the company and its client Meta, alleging that the job required countless hours of viewing disturbing content, including sexual abuse and grisly murders, according to FT.
The Verge has reported on how AI efforts at companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are supported by “a vast tasker underclass” of workers across Africa, Asia, and South America.
Skoda, the Czech car brand that’s also owned by Volkswagen, is building the AI chatbot into its voice assistant in newer vehicles. Drivers will be able to use the ChatGPT-enabled assistant to control the infotainment system, navigation, and air-conditioning, as well as use it to “answer general knowledge questions,” according to Skoda.
ChatGPT Team is targeted toward teams with no more than 150 people. It still has many of the features found in ChatGPT Enterprise, including access to GPT-4 and DALL-E 3; the ability to create custom GPTs; advanced data analysis; a shared workspace; and most importantly, control over data.
Pricing starts at $25 per user/month for annual billing and $30 per user/month when billed monthly.
[OpenAI]
Here’s a deep dive, published by The Washington Post, into the ChatGPT company’s liaison to global leaders, and her role in turning CEO Sam Altman “into the AI industry’s ambassador.”
The article says Makanju’s coaching helped ingratiate Altman to US lawmakers. As the Post writes, the strategy “could also backfire” if things go sideways with AI and he becomes the focus of lawmakers’ ire.
[The Washington Post]
Bloomberg reports that a spokesperson for the language learning app said Duolingo doesn’t as many people anymore to perform the contractors’ work, adding that “part of that could be attributed to AI.”
The spokesperson also said AI isn’t a “straight replacement” because workers are already using AI to help them work. Duolingo has long used AI, having incorporated chatbots in 2016 and OpenAI’s Chat GPT-4 early last year.
Daniel Stenberg, the Curl programming language’s lead developer, writes that AI is gumming up the works in bug reporting.
Stenberg says AI-prompted bug reports can seem legit, and take longer to disprove than normal false alarms. In one case, he asked the submitter for help reproducing the bug. The responses were all suspiciously chatbot-like.
After repeated questions and numerous hallucinations I realized this was not a genuine problem and on the afternoon that same day I closed the issue as not applicable. There was no buffer overflow.
[daniel.haxx.se]
Over at Android Authority, Mishaal Rahman has evidence that ChatGPT’s developers are working to enable the use of it as your default AI assistant.
That way, it could replace Google’s Assistant (which is getting a generative AI boost from Bard), Bing, Alexa, or others when you long-press your Android home button. However, the code also suggests access could be tied to paying for a ChatGPT Plus subscription.
Ernie Bot, the AI-powered chatbot developed by Chinese tech giant Baidu, hit the milestone months after its public release in August. Just like ChatGPT, Ernie Bot can do things like summarize documents, answer questions, generate outlines, and more.
Google showed off Bard’s new ability to pull deep content from YouTube videos recently, but if the robot is watching YouTube for you, does the YouTube Creator make any money?
Jules Terpak, a content creator who explores digital culture, asked that very question to Bard lead Jack Krawczyk, who didn’t seem to have very much in the way of an answer. You can hear it below at about 18:50.
The company acknowledged on Thursday that ChatGPT has been phoning it in lately (again), and it’s fixing it. Then overnight, it made a series of posts about the chatbot training process, saying it must evaluate the model using certain metrics — AI benchmarks, you might say — calling it “an artisanal multi-person effort.”
You know, like bread with seeds in it.
Google has been an ‘AI-first company’ for nearly a decade. Now, a year into the AI era brought on by ChatGPT, it’s finally making a big move.
The phrase became an internal joke after ChatGPT’s popularity exploded right out of the gate, according to the NYT’s recap of its launch a year ago and the reaction among Big Tech companies.
Google and Meta scrambled AI teams to launch competing products — even if that meant removing some guardrails — like Bard and LLaMa. And Microsoft’s rush to beat Google had Satya Nadella saying, “We have a big order coming to you, a really big order coming to you,” to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang as he ordered $2 billion in chips.