Google and OpenAI's announcements mean "the end of the beginning" of the AI wars
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.
This week, I assess the state of AI chatbots based on two important announcements this week from OpenAI and Google. I also look at the departure of OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, and spotlight one of the early leaders in AI-native search.
Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at [email protected], and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan.
The Google and OpenAI announcements signal a new phase in the AI wars:
Just last year, big tech companies were telling us how great it was that their large language models (LLMs) could summarize documents and write poems. Already the AI sales pitch has grown far more interesting. This week, the two leading players in the AI chatbot race, Google and OpenAI, demonstrated AI chatbots that tackle much heftier problems. So how exactly have the AI models that power these chatbots changed over the past year??
The leading models have become “multimodal.” They can understand and analyze not just text but audio, imagery, and computer code, and create answers in the same mediums. In a simple example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini can intake a visual image (perhaps through the camera of a smartphone) and describe in words the content of the image. “Multimodality radically expands the kind of questions we can ask and the answers we can get back,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the company’s I/O event.?
On Monday, OpenAI demonstrated an upgraded version of ChatGPT, powered by its new GPT-4o model (the “o” stands for “omni”). The most noticeable thing about the new ChatGPT is how “human” interactions with the chatbot feel. That’s mainly because of the sound and behavior of the ChatGPT’s Her-like speaking voice. Its tone is weirdly human; it sounds natural and expressive, even sultry and a bit? flirty in some contexts. It makes jokes. It immediately stops talking when it hears the user start talking. The audio voice represents another “mode,” just like text or visual modes the model understands. And ChatGPT adds yet another mode—emotional intelligence, or “EQ.” It seems able to detect emotion in the user’s voice (in the demo Monday, the chatbot detected stress in the voice of an OpenAI researcher), and then affect its responses with appropriate emotion (for the researcher, empathy). Google will release a similar voice interaction chatbot called “Gemini Live” later this year.??
Click here to read more about the recent Google and OpenAI announcements.
领英推荐
OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever has left the building:
OpenAI is the poster child for the current AI boom. It’s also seen ongoing drama around its executive ranks. Most recently, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever—someone who played a key role in ChatGPT’s blazing-fast ascent—announced he’d be leaving the company.
Sutskever is an idealist and a true believer that the benefits and control of AI should be widely distributed over lots of people—not concentrated in the hands of a few. He’s also deeply concerned about the societal risks AI poses and is cautious about exposing the technology in new products. Sutskever lost a power struggle to maintain those ideals within the everyday operations of the company.?
Click here to read more about Ilya Sutskever’s exit from OpenAI.
Did internet search just catch up with (checks notes . . . ) Perplexity?
Maybe Gartner was right when it predicted that traditional web search volume will drop 25% by 2026. Over the past week, we saw the resurgence of rumors that OpenAI is about to launch an AI-native search engine. And, most importantly, we saw Google announce that its version of AI search will now be a regular part of its storied search service, which has been the dominant way of finding stuff on the web for decades.?
Click here to read more about Perplexity’s AI search play.
More AI coverage from Fast Company:
Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
Perpetual Inventory Clerk at Macy's
4 个月Useful tips