More from From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet
Another scoop from the last issue of Command Line:
Meta has built an internal AI chatbot called Metamate that uses company data to help employees summarize meetings, write code, and debug features. Employees will be able to create their own prompts and share them with colleagues.
The company is starting to roll it out internally to a small group now. I wrote in a previous issue that Meta was talking to Microsoft and OpenAI about powering this tool, but now I’m told that it landed on using its own separate, in-house model.
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[The Verge]
Microsoft has once again softened the limitations it placed on the Bing AI Chatbot in February as part of its efforts to correct the search engine’s weird behavior.
Chat’s with the bot can now run for 30 turns (up from the previous 20), and the daily turn limit has increased to 300. This doesn’t mean the previous issues have been resolved though, so proceed with caution.
When we wrote about Engineered Arts’ Ameca android last year, the company said it wants to integrate chatbot functionality, and since then it has done so, using one of the most prominent chatbots, ChatGPT-3 (GPT-4 was too slow). In his conversation with The Verge, Engineered Arts CEO Will Jackson said:
It’s amazing the simple things you can do to make a machine look sentient.
The most human-like trick from the video below was not so much its response, but its double-take after being told “you stink.”
There’s a bunch of examples here but frankly, the nut of the piece is pretty far down:
Bankers have a fiduciary duty not to trade on unreliable information. That’s an issue as use of AI expands.
If you can’t explain where your information came from, is it reliable? Oh well, the hedge funds are at it, too.
“Isn’t this sort of exciting?” writes Matt Levine. “The widespread use of relatively early-stage AI will introduce new ways of making mistakes into finance.”
“This is a facet of the larger AI story — which is to say it’s about automation,” writes John Herrman “But it’s also a story of a large platform deciding to compete more aggressively in the marketplace it controls.”
It’s unclear whether this is what users want. But there is a dark new future forming, one that might suggest fun new antitrust laws!
[Intelligencer]
“One appeal of generative A.I. is that it offers something for every would-be entrepreneur.” Yes, it is nice to see the hype machine in full effect, isn’t it? Here’s a sentence we should revisit in a year: “And unlike crypto, especially now, A.I. is a more credible field to be in for mainstream techies.” Anyway, every single one of these children would have gone to work on Wall Street before the year of our lord 2008.
[The New York Times Magazine]
News coverage of AI chatbots is inescapable — and it has echoes of how crypto was covered at its peak.
Tow Center research shows that AI chatbots are getting as much coverage as cryptocurrencies did in 2021, when the price of Bitcoin peaked at $68,789.63, and NFTs were everywhere. The AI hype cycle is in full swing, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.
[Columbia Journalism Review]
The New York Times highlights a story of a lawyer who is in trouble after filing a motion using research he did with ChatGPT to find relevant cases.
The problem? ChatGPT, as AI chatbots often do, just made a bunch of stuff up, and the opposing lawyers told the Times they “had an inkling a chatbot might have been involved.” This is a screenshot of the lawyer asking ChatGPT if its made-up cases are real.
Are you a good board member who’s really focused on what’s best for any individual company, though? Anyway here’s Reid Hoffman, who’s driving the AI hype:
Few are as intertwined in so many facets of the fast-moving industry as Mr. Hoffman. The 55-year-old sits on the boards of 11 tech companies including Microsoft, which has gone all in on A.I., and eight nonprofits. His venture capital firm, Greylock Partners, has backed at least 37 A.I. companies. He was among the first investors in OpenAI, the most prominent A.I. start-up, and recently left its board. He also helped found Inflection AI, an A.I. chatbot start-up that has raised at least $225 million.
Hoffman has his own AI company now. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
[The New York Times]
The new Bing Chat widget can help with that. You can read more in the Bing team’s Friday blog post.
Just hours after the last international expansion of OpenAI’s generative AI app for the iPhone added 11 countries to the list, it’s adding more than 30 more.
The app launched a week ago in the US.
The app, which launched last week in the US, is now also available in Albania, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Jamaica, Korea, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, and the UK. You can also now browse the web with Bing if you’re a paid user, and disable chat history.
[help.openai.com]
Google announced at IO that Bard would include images where relevant in its responses, and that change is live. Below, a tweet shows what that looks like. The images come from sites like Pinterest. I wish they were AI-generated for extra fun, but alas.
Still, I tried asking it for the best food in Austin, TX, and it failed to highlight Casino El Camino.
Microsoft is putting AI Copilots in everything. Will it change the way we use computers?