ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bard: How AI is rewriting the internet

Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for Donald Trump, admitted to citing fake, AI-generated court cases in a legal document that wound up in front of a federal judge, as reported earlier by The New York Times. A filing unsealed on Friday says Cohen used Google’s Bard to perform research after mistaking it for “a super-charged search engine” rather than an AI chatbot.

The document in question was a motion that asked a federal judge to shorten the length of Cohen’s three-year probation, which he’s now facing following prison time and a guilty plea to tax evasion and other charges. But after reviewing the letter brief, US District Judge Jesse Furman wrote in a filing that “none of these cases exist” and asked Cohen’s lawyer, David Schwartz, to explain why the three cases are included in the motion as well as whether his now-disbarred client helped draft it.

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming the two companies built their AI models by “copying and using millions” of the publication’s articles and now “directly compete” with its content as a result.

As outlined in the lawsuit, the Times alleges OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models (LLMs), which power ChatGPT and Copilot, “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style.” This “undermine[s] and damage[s]” the Times’ relationship with readers, the outlet alleges, while also depriving it of “subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.”

Earlier this month, Google announced the release of Gemini, what it considers its most powerful AI model yet. It integrated Gemini immediately into its flagship generative AI chatbot, Bard, in hopes of steering more users away from its biggest competitor, OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

ChatGPT and the new Gemini-powered Bard are similar products. Gemini Pro is most comparable to GPT-4, available in the subscription-based ChatGPT Plus. So we decided to test the two chatbots to see just how they stack up — in accuracy, speed, and overall helpfulness.

Microsoft’s AI chatbot Copilot will now be able to churn out AI songs on demand — thanks to a new plug-in with Suno. The Cambridge-based AI music startup offers a tool on Discord that can compose an original song — complete with lyrics — based on a text prompt. Now, Copilot users will be able to access Suno using the Microsoft chatbot. 

In order to start making music, Copilot users only need to sign on to their accounts and enable the Suno plug-in — or click on the logo that says, “Make music with Suno.” Users then need to think of a simple one- or two-line text prompt that describes their desired song, such as “create a folk song about Alaska summers” or “write a song about cats in the style of Cat Power” (both prompts I tried personally on Suno via Discord) and type it into Copilot.

Susan Zhuang, a Democrat who will soon represent the 43rd Council District in Brooklyn, New York, admitted to using AI when answering questions from a local news publication, according to a report by the New York Post. In a text message sent to the Post, Zhuang wrote that she uses “AI as a tool to help foster deeper understanding” because English is not her first language.

The responses in question were included in an article from City & State, which asked local council member-elects to fill out a questionnaire about their personal interests and policies. However, the Post noticed something was off with Zhuang’s answer to the question, “What makes someone a New Yorker?”:

One feature added to Microsoft’s AI Copilot in the Edge browser this week is the ability to generate text summaries of videos. But Edge Copilot’s time-saving feature is still fairly limited and only works on pre-processed videos or those with subtitles, as Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s CEO of advertising and web services, explained.

As spotted by MSPowerUser, Parakhin writes, “In order for it to work, we need to pre-process the video. If the video has subtitles – we can always fallback on that, if it does not and we didn’t preprocess it yet – then it won’t work,” in response to a question. 

Google just announced Gemini, its most powerful suite of AI models yet, and the company has already been accused of lying about its performance. 

An op-ed from Bloomberg claims Google misrepresented the power of Gemini in a recent video. Google aired an impressive “what the quack” hands-on video during its announcement earlier this week, and columnist Parmy Olson says it seemed remarkably capable in the video — perhaps too capable.

It’s the beginning of a new era of AI at Google, says CEO Sundar Pichai: the Gemini era. Gemini is Google’s latest large language model, which Pichai first teased at the I/O developer conference in June and is now launching to the public. To hear Pichai and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis describe it, it’s a huge leap forward in an AI model that will ultimately affect practically all of Google’s products. “One of the powerful things about this moment,” Pichai says, “is you can work on one underlying technology and make it better and it immediately flows across our products.” 

Gemini is more than a single AI model. There’s a lighter version called Gemini Nano that is meant to be run natively and offline on Android devices. There’s a beefier version called Gemini Pro that will soon power lots of Google AI services and is the backbone of Bard starting today. And there’s an even more capable model called Gemini Ultra that is the most powerful LLM Google has yet created and seems to be mostly designed for data centers and enterprise applications. 

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become a worldwide phenomenon and one of the fastest-growing consumer products ever, Google’s Bard has been something of an afterthought. The chatbot has steadily gained new features, including access to your data across other Google products, but its answers and information have rarely seemed to rival what you get from ChatGPT and other bots using GPT-3 and GPT-4. 

The case for Bard may have just gotten more compelling, though: as of today, for English-speaking users in 170 countries, Bard is now powered by Google’s new Gemini model, which it says matches and even exceeds OpenAI’s tech in a number of ways. (Google says Gemini is coming to more languages and countries “in the near future.”)

Microsoft is readying a new Bing feature that should take the hassle out of coming up with your own AI prompt. The GPT-4-powered capability, called Deep Search, takes your Bing query and expands on it, allowing the search engine to find answers about several topics related to your question on the web.

As an example, Microsoft shows how Bing turns a vague search for “how do points systems work in Japan” into a detailed prompt that asks Bing to:

There have been a handful of before-and-after moments in the modern technology era. Everything was one way, and then just like that, it was suddenly obvious it would never be like that again. Netscape showed the world the internet; Facebook made that internet personal; the iPhone made plain how the mobile era would take over. There are others — there’s a dating-app moment in there somewhere, and Netflix starting to stream movies might qualify, too — but not many.

ChatGPT, which OpenAI launched a year ago today, might have been the lowest-key game-changer ever. Nobody took a stage and announced that they’d invented the future, and nobody thought they were launching the thing that would make them rich. If we’ve learned one thing in the last 12 months, it’s that no one — not OpenAI’s competitors, not the tech-using public, not even the platform’s creators — thought ChatGPT would become the fastest-growing consumer technology in history. And in retrospect, the fact that nobody saw ChatGPT coming might be exactly why it has seemingly changed everything.

Sam Altman is officially OpenAI’s CEO again.

Just before Thanksgiving, the company said it had reached a deal in principle for him to return, and now it’s done. Microsoft is getting a non-voting observer seat on the nonprofit board that controls OpenAI as well, the company announced on Wednesday.

ChatGPT’s voice feature is now available to all users for free. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI announced users can now tap the headphones icon to use their voice to talk with ChatGPT in the mobile app, as well as get an audible response.

OpenAI first rolled out the ability to prompt ChatGPT with your voice and images in September, but it only made the feature available to paying users.

While OpenAI is in the middle of an existential crisis, there’s a new chatbot update from Anthropic, the Google-backed AI startup founded by former OpenAI engineers who left over disagreements about the company’s increasingly commercial direction as its Microsoft partnership went on.

Anthropic has announced that the latest update of its chatbot, Claude 2.1, can digest up to 200,000 tokens at once for Pro tier users, which it says equals over 500 pages of material.

Meta has reportedly broken up its Responsible AI (RAI) team as it puts more of its resources into generative artificial intelligence. The Information broke the news today, citing an internal post it had seen.

According to the report, most RAI members will move to the company’s generative AI product team, while others will work on Meta’s AI infrastructure. The company regularly says it wants to develop AI responsibly and even has a page devoted to the promise, where the company lists its “pillars of responsible AI,” including accountability, transparency, safety, privacy, and more.