The Indian Panorama

Tag: OpenAI

  • OpenAI puts popular apps like Spotify and Canva inside ChatGPT

    OpenAI puts popular apps like Spotify and Canva inside ChatGPT

    OpenAI is taking another big leap with ChatGPT by allowing users to use some of their favourite apps directly inside the chatbot. The company has announced new integrations with services like Spotify, Canva, Coursera, Figma and Zillow, all of which can now be accessed through simple text prompts in ChatGPT. The update was revealed during OpenAI’s DevDay event and is powered by the company’s new Apps SDK, which allows developers to build and connect third-party tools to the AI platform.

    ChatGPT now supports popular third-party apps

    The idea behind this integration is to let users do more from within ChatGPT without needing to switch between different websites or apps. For instance, you can now ask ChatGPT to create a playlist on Spotify, design a poster on Canva, or look for rental listings on Zillow, all through a chat conversation. To use these tools, users will first need to connect their app accounts to ChatGPT. After that, they can start giving instructions naturally as part of their conversation. For example, you can say, “Spotify, make a playlist for my morning run,” and ChatGPT will create one based on your preferences. Or you can tell it, “Canva, design a promotional post for my bakery,” and the chatbot will instantly generate a design preview. Spotify said the experience is still evolving, noting, “It’s early days, so while we might not be able to deliver on every request just yet, we’ll continue to build, refine, and improve the experience over the coming weeks and months.”

    Canva, Coursera, Figma, and Zillow join the lineup

    Among the apps now available, Canva stands out for its creative capabilities. Inside ChatGPT, users can ask Canva to generate a design, preview it, and even make changes by typing simple instructions such as “make the text bigger” or “change the background colour.” Once done, users can open the design in Canva for final edits.

    Figma brings similar creative power, allowing users to create or modify diagrams, brainstorm layouts, and collaborate on designs. Coursera, on the other hand, makes learning easier, ChatGPT can now recommend online courses, videos, and study materials directly from Coursera’s database based on what users are discussing.

    Meanwhile, Zillow’s integration focuses on real estate. Users can ask ChatGPT to find homes with specific requirements like “three-bedroom houses with a garden near Delhi,” and the chatbot will show listings complete with prices, photos, and maps.

  • OpenAI releases video generator Sora

    OpenAI has publicly released its new Artificial Intelligence video generator Sora but the company won’t let most users depict people as it monitors for patterns of misuse.
    Users of a premium version of OpenAI’s flagship product ChatGPT can now use Sora to instantly create AI-generated videos based on written commands. Among the highlighted examples are high-quality video clips of sumo-wrestling bears and a cat sipping coffee.
    But only a small set of invited testers can use Sora to make videos of humans as OpenAI works to “address concerns around misappropriation of likeness and deepfakes,” the company said in a blog post.
    Text-to-video AI tools like Sora have been pitched as a way to save costs in making new entertainment and marketing videos but have also raised concerns about the ease with which they could impersonate real people in politics and otherwise.
    OpenAI says it is blocking content with nudity and that a top priority is preventing the most harmful uses, including child sexual abuse material and sexual deepfakes.
    The makers said they were encountering high demands and had suspended account creation for some time. “We’re currently experiencing heavy traffic and have temporarily disabled Sora account creation,” according to its webpage.
    OpenAI first unveiled Sora earlier this year but said it wanted to first engage with artists, policymakers and others before releasing the new tool to the public.
    The company, which has been sued by some authors and The New York Times over its use of copyrighted works of writing to train ChatGPT, hasn’t disclosed what imagery and video sources were used to train Sora.
    Source: AP

  • OpenAI enters Google-dominated search market with SearchGPT

    OpenAI enters Google-dominated search market with SearchGPT

    OpenAI is venturing into a territory long dominated by Google with the selective launch of SearchGPT, an artificial intelligence-powered search engine with real-time access to information from the internet.
    The move, announced on Thursday, July 25, also places the AI giant in competition with its largest backer Microsoft’s Bing search and emerging services such as Perplexity — a search-focused AI chatbot firm backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and semiconductor giant Nvidia.
    Shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet ended 3% lower on Thursday, July 25, after OpenAI’s announcement.
    OpenAI said it has opened sign-ups for the new tool, which is currently in the prototype stage and is being tested with a small group of users and publishers. The company plans to integrate the best features from the search tool into ChatGPT in the future.
    “AI-powered search tools from OpenAI and Perplexity re-affirm search as a content engagement model but pressure Google to be better at its own game,” Canaccord Genuity analyst Kingsley Crane said.
    Google dominates the search engine market with a 91.1% share as of June, according to web analytics firm Statcounter.
    SearchGPT will provide summarized search results with source links in response to user queries, OpenAI said in a blog post. Users will also be able to ask follow-up questions and receive contextual responses.
    The company will give publishers access to tools for managing how their content appears in SearchGPT results. News Corp and The Atlantic are publishing partners for SearchGPT.
    SearchGPT signals a closer collaboration between publishers and OpenAI, following content licensing agreements with major organizations like Associated Press, News Corp and Axel Springer. “Newer AI-powered search providers could face challenges of their own, with Perplexity already facing pending legal action from publishers like Wired and Forbes, and Condé Nast,” said Crane.
    Major search engines have been trying to integrate AI into search since ChatGPT first launched in November 2022. Microsoft, through its early investment, adopted OpenAI technology for its Bing search engine, while Google rolled out AI-powered summaries for the wider public at its developer conference in May. Google did not respond to a Reuters query on the potential impact of SearchGPT on its business.
    Google AI systems make headway with math in progress toward reasoning
    Alphabet’s Google unveiled a pair of artificial intelligence systems on Thursday that demonstrated advances in solving complex mathematical problems, a key frontier of generative AI development.
    The current class of AI models, which work by statistically predicting the next word, have struggled with abstract math, which requires greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence. DeepMind, the company’s AI unit, published results showing that its new AI models in development, called AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, solved four out of six questions at the 2024 International Math Olympiad, a prominent competition for high school students. Source: Reuters

  • Pichai on OpenAI launching ChatGPT 4o one day prior to Google I/O 2024

    Pichai on OpenAI launching ChatGPT 4o one day prior to Google I/O 2024

    OpenAI launched ChatGPT 4o, a new AI model that will power ChatGPT chatbot, just a day before Google developer’s conference. ChatGPT 4o will be available for free, the Sam Altman-led AI start-up said. But was the day for the reveal chosen specifically to taunt Google?
    Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that “one event happened over a day, does not matter over time.” He explained, “my perspective, this inflexion point we are on with AI, the opportunity that I see, you want to zoom out, the fact that one event happened over a day, does not matter over time.”
    He added, “As a company, we have been investing in it over a long time. We are developing state of art models and working to deploy them to billions of people in a way where we can make a difference in their lives. And to me, that’s the North Star, that’s our mission. We stay focused on that.”
    Sundar Pichai was also asked about the possibility of OpenAI violating Google’s terms and conditions. He said, “Look, I think it’s a question for them to answer. I don’t have anything to add. We do have clear terms of service. And so, you know, I think normally in these things we engage with companies and make sure they understand our terms of service. And we’ll sort it out.”
    This comes after it was reported that OpenAI may be violating terms and conditions to train its AI models.

  • ChatGPT is now more direct and less verbose in its responses: OpenAI

    ChatGPT is now more direct and less verbose in its responses: OpenAI

    Sam Altman-run OpenAI has said it has made its AI chatbot called ChatGPT more direct and less verbose. In a post on X, the company said its new GPT-4 Turbo model is now available to paid ChatGPT users. “We’ve improved capabilities in writing, math, logical reasoning, and coding,” said the company. The new AI model has been trained on publicly available data up to December last year.
    “When writing with ChatGPT, responses will be more direct, less verbose and use more conversational language,” OpenAI posted.
    The company said it continues to invest in making its AI models better and looks forward to seeing what the users do with those.
    “If you haven’t tried it yet, GPT-4 Turbo is available in ChatGPT Plus, Team, Enterprise, and the API,” it added. Meanwhile, the AI company allegedly transcribed more than a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4. The New York Times reported last week that OpenAI knew this was not legal but “believed it to be fair use”.
    An OpenAI spokesperson was quoted as saying that the company uses “numerous sources including publicly available data and partnerships for non-public data,” to maintain its global research competitiveness.

  • This is how OpenAI aims to fight deepfakes with ‘Voice Engine’ in election year

    This is how OpenAI aims to fight deepfakes with ‘Voice Engine’ in election year

    As world leaders scramble to tackle the menace of deepfakes in a global election year, Sam Altman-run OpenAI is trying to develop beneficial AI, with a text-to-speech model called ‘Voice Engine’.
    The AI model uses text input and a “single 15-second audio sample” to generate natural-sounding speech.
    “It is notable that a small model with a single 15-second sample can create emotive and realistic voices,” according to OpenAI. The company admitted that generating speech that resembles people’s voices has serious risks, which are especially top of mind in an election year.
    “We are engaging with the US and international partners from across government, media, entertainment, education, civil society and beyond to ensure we are incorporating their feedback as we build,” said OpenAI.
    The partners testing ‘Voice Engine’ have agreed to OpenAI’s usage policies, which prohibit the impersonation of another individual or organisation without consent or legal right.
    “In addition, our terms with these partners require explicit and informed consent from the original speaker and we don’t allow developers to build ways for individual users to create their own voices,” the company said in a blog post.
    Partners must also clearly disclose to their audience that the voices they’re hearing are AI-generated, the company added.
    “Finally, we have implemented a set of safety measures, including watermarking to trace the origin of any audio generated by Voice Engine, as well as proactive monitoring of how it’s being used”.

  • Amazon Web Services lays off hundreds of staff in sales, marketing and tech roles

    Amazon Web Services lays off hundreds of staff in sales, marketing and tech roles

    WASHINGTON (TIP): Amazon Web Services has eliminated several hundred sales, marketing and tech roles, it said on Wednesday, April 3, the latest in a series of job cuts by its parent Amazon.com.

    The impacted staff include a few hundred each at AWS’ sales, marketing and global services division and the physical stores’ technology team, the cloud-computing arm of Amazon said. “We’ve identified a few targeted areas of the organization we need to streamline,” an AWS spokesperson said on mail.

    Amazon has over the past months laid off hundreds of staff in divisions, including its Prime Video service, healthcare business and Alexa voice assistant unit, as big technology firms extend their massive job cuts over the past two years into 2024.

    More than 57,000 workers have been laid off across 229 firms so far this year, according to tracking website Layoffs.fyi. Amazon had laid off more than 27,000 in 2022 and 2023, after the tech industry hired too many people during the pandemic.

    The cut at AWS’ 60,000-strong sales, marketing and global services division are likely part of a broad reorganization under sales chief Matt Garman, according to news site The Information, which first reported the development.

    After suffering a slowdown in growth last year due to an uncertain economy, Amazon’s cloud business has been showing signs of stabilization, helping the company beat quarterly revenue expectations in February.

    Still, its position as the world’s biggest cloud provider is being challenged by rival Microsoft, which has taken an early lead in the race to make money from generative artificial intelligence through an investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

  • ChatGPT to get ‘memory’ to remember who you are, what you like

    ChatGPT to get ‘memory’ to remember who you are, what you like

    OpenAI is testing “memory” for its AI chatbot ChatGPT, which will allow the bot to remember information about you and your conversations over time.
    You can explicitly tell ChatGPT to remember something, ask it what it remembers, and tell it to forget conversationally or through settings.
    “You can also turn it off entirely. We are rolling out to a small portion of ChatGPT free and Plus users this week to learn how useful it is. We will share plans for broader roll out soon,” OpenAI said in a statement.
    “ChatGPT’s memory will get better the more you use it and you’ll start to notice the improvements over time”.
    The users can turn off memory at any time. While memory is off, they won’t create or use memories. “If you want ChatGPT to forget something, just tell it. You can also view and delete specific memories or clear all memories in settings,” the company informed. If you’d like to have a conversation without using memory, use temporary chat.
    Source: IANS

  • Elon Musk launches AI firm xAI as he looks to take on OpenAI

    Elon Musk launches AI firm xAI as he looks to take on OpenAI

    Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, launched his long-teased artificial intelligence startup xAI on Wednesday, unveiling a team comprised of engineers from the same big U.S. technology firms that he hopes to challenge in his bid to build an alternative to ChatGPT.
    The startup will be led by Musk, already the CEO of electric car maker Tesla, CEO of rocket launch company SpaceX and owner of Twitter, who has said on several occasions that the development of AI should be paused and that the sector needed regulation. Musk has repeatedly voiced concerns about AI’s potential for “civilizational destruction.”
    In a Twitter Spaces event Wednesday evening, Musk explained his plan for building a safer AI. Rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will seek to create a “maximally curious” AI, he said.
    “If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint,” Musk said. “I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.”
    Musk also predicted that superintelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, will arrive in five or six years.
    Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018.
    Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.
    The website for xAI said it will hold a Twitter Spaces event on July 14.
    The team at xAI includes Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer at Google’s DeepMind; Tony Wu, who worked at Google; Christian Szegedy, who was also a research scientist at Google; and Greg Yang, who was previously at Microsoft.
    Musk in March registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm lists Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.
    Musk had said in April that he would launch TruthGPT, or a maximum truth-seeking AI to rival Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.
    Generative AI caught the limelight with OpenAI’s launch of popular chatbot ChatGPT, which came in November last year, ahead of the launch of Bard and Bing AI.
    Dan Hendrycks, who will advise the xAI team, is currently director of the Center for AI Safety and his work revolves around the risks of AI.
    Musk’s new company is separate from X Corp, but will work closely with Twitter, Tesla and other companies, according to the website.xAI said it is recruiting experienced engineers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
    India not considering tax waivers for Tesla
    India’s finance ministry is not considering any duty waivers for U.S. automaker Tesla Inc, Revenue Secretary Sanjay Malhotra told Reuters on Thursday, July 13.
    Last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was pushing the car maker to make a “significant investment” in the country, adding that such an announcement was expected soon.In the past, talks between the U.S. carmaker and the Indian government have involved seeking customs duty waivers for importing its electric vehicles, which was rejected by India. Source: Reuters

  • Microsoft Rolls Out ChatGPT-Powered Teams Premium

    Microsoft Rolls Out ChatGPT-Powered Teams Premium

    Microsoft on Wednesday, February 1, rolled out a premium Teams messaging offering powered by ChatGPT to simplify meetings using the AI chatbot that has taken Silicon Valley by a storm.The premium service will cost $7 (roughly Rs. 600) per month in June before increasing to $10 (roughly Rs. 800) in July, Microsoft said.

    OpenAI-owned ChatGPT will generate automatic meeting notes, recommend tasks and help create meeting templates for Teams users.

    Microsoft, which announced a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI earlier this month, has said it aims to add ChatGPT’s technology into all its products, setting the stage for more competition with rival Alphabet’s Google. The chatbot, which can produce prose or poetry on command, is at the forefront of generative AI, a space where more and more big tech companies are funneling their resources in. ChatGPT on Wednesday announced a $20 (roughly Rs. 1,600) per-month subscription plan, which will let subscribers receive access to faster responses and priority access to new features and improvements. ChatGPT owner OpenAI launched a pilot subscription plan for its popular AI-powered chatbot, called ChatGPT Plus, for $20 (roughly Rs. 1,600) per month. Subscribers will receive access to ChatGPT during peak times, faster responses and priority access to new features and improvements.

    In a blog post published by OpenAI on Wednesday, the company introduced ChatGPT Plus, which will be initially rolling out only for the customers in the United States. The company will soon extend the access availability through inviting people from its waitlist, probably over the coming weeks. OpenAI will also be rolling out ChatGPT to more regions in the near future.

    Source: Reuters