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More from From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
Duolingo laid off 10 percent of its contractors because of AI.

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.

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
AI is making it harder to deal with bug reports.

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.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
OpenAI code suggests ChatGPT could sub in for Google Assistant on Android phones soon.

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.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Baidu’s ChatGPT competitor has reached over 100 million users.

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.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
“So.. how are you making sure that this relationship between Bard and YouTube is fair for creators?”

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.

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
OpenAI is working to make GPT-4 less lazy.

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 launches Gemini, the AI model it hopes will take down GPT-4

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.

David Pierce
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
OpenAI execs dubbed ChatGPT a “Low key research preview.”

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.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Microsoft Copilot is now generally available.

Copilot, the AI chatbot formerly known as Bing Chat, is out of preview. That means Copilot is now available in 105 languages and 169 countries “on all modern browsers for mobile and web,” according to Caitlin Roulston, the director of communications at Microsoft.

Even though the preview label is going away today, Roulston says Microsoft will continue to “launch new features in preview while we iterate, listen to feedback, and improve the experience for our users.”

ChatGPT is winning the future — but what future is that?

OpenAI didn’t mean to kickstart a generational shift in the technology industry. But it did. Now all we have to decide is where to go from here.

David Pierce
Jon Porter
Jon Porter
A troll worthy of Clippy themself.

This Wall Street Journal article about the recent drama at OpenAI contains an amazing anecdote. Apparently an employee at AI rival Anthropic thought it’d be funny to send “thousands of paper clips in the shape of OpenAI’s logo” as a prank, in reference to the infamous paperclip maximizer thought experiment.

Weirdly, I think OpenAI’s logo makes for a great paperclip design. Should we be worried?

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
Sony finished its second round of tests of its in-camera authenticity tech.

The company tested baking a cryptographic “digital signature” into photos taken by its cameras to set them apart from AI-generated or otherwise faked images. Sony says the feature will come to cameras like the Alpha 9 III via a firmware update in Spring 2024.

Picture of a Sony digital camera
Image: Sony