More from From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet
If your job hasn’t banned plugging company data into an AI chatbot, then go ahead. You’ll still need to join the waitlist though — the results of our first tests from March are right here, and we also tried Bard head-to-head with Bing and ChatGPT.
We’ll see what kind of updates Google I/O brings tomorrow, but maybe it’s better to hold off writing this week’s report with the tool Google employees reportedly called “worse than useless” and “a pathological liar.”
[Google Workspace Updates]
The European Union’s fight with ChatGPT is a glance into what’s to come for AI services.
The company says it’s expanding its pool of trusted testers by “more than 10X today,” which introduces generative AI features across its Workspace apps.
Google is testing AI features in Docs and Gmail to start, allowing users to generate, summarize, or brainstorm text, as well as condense meeting notes into an email.
A paper (PDF) published by Google described the Transformer neural net architecture that is the “T” in OpenAI’s GPT, but the Washington Post reports we shouldn’t expect to see that happen again.
Now the Post says Google Research leader Jeff Dean shifted away from a previous approach of “encouraging researchers to publish academic papers prolifically.”
Instead:
Google would take advantage of its own AI discoveries, sharing papers only after the lab work had been turned into products, Dean said, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private information.
[Washington Post]
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) voted to strike this morning, and though low pay is the main incentive, there’s another contentious issue: AI. The WGA wants to protect members so their work is not used by Hollywood studios to train AI tools that replace them. As Vox explains, it’s a fight that will likely be replicated across many industries in the years to come.
A clear and convincing argument from developer and designer Amelia Wattenberger. As with voice assistants like Siri, chatbots lack affordances (they don’t tell us what they’re capable of) and require too much work to get the right results. But — and it’s an important but — that doesn’t mean the underlying tech isn’t itself useful. It just takes thought and care to implement it.
[wattenberger.com]
But the cost is “crazy” at about seven cents per query, CTO Andrew Bosworth recently told employees. From last night’s edition of my Command Line newsletter:
“That’s the only place in the company we’re really considering working with Microsoft and OpenAI, just because there’s a natural business integration there,” he explained. “Otherwise, we’re working on a companion that is more about all of our code and our internal documentation, built on our own infrastructure. We are moving very fast. I think we’ll have something to play with internally, I’m hoping in mid-June, maybe late June.”
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[The Verge]
The fine folks at Protos had a little talk with Binance’s AI bot and... listen, parting chumps from their money is a novel way to monetize AI.
Schools are getting to grips with the impact of AI language models like ChatGPT, and UC Berkeley School of Law is one of the first to adopt formal rules, reports Reuters.
They’re pretty unsurprising: students can use AI for research but not to help write submitted assignments. With detection software unreliable, though, the whole thing is still a matter of trust.
Microsoft’s Copilot push is expanding to its Viva platform soon. Viva is an employee platform and portal that Microsoft is pushing as a modern Intranet alternative for the digital era of work.
It’s now being upgraded with Copilot AI that will help draft OKRs, create posts in workplace communities, and generate knowledge summaries. Copilot in Microsoft Viva will start rolling out later this year.
