AI roundup #3 👩‍💻

😈 Bing & Bard's mischief

While a user was testing Bard, they happened to ask when it would shut down. Bard scanned the internet and found a joke on Hacker News that said it had already happened.

Now, if you ask Microsoft’s Bing chatbot if Google’s Bard chatbot has been shut down, it says YES, citing as evidence a news article that discusses a tweet in which a user asked Bard when it would be shut down.

The silly incident shows how easily misinformation can spread through these Large Language Models.

Sources: Inclined.ai, TheVerge

🏪 ChatGPT plugins: OpenAI's 'App Store' moment

On 24 March 2023, OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT plugins. With this, users and developers can now integrate third-party services or allow them to access up-to-date information.

Check out the GitHub repository.

OpenAI, in its blog post, said that they are gradually rolling out plugins in ChatGPT to study real-world implications, use, and safety and alignment challenges.

It seems very likely that users will eventually be able to choose from hundreds of plug-ins of all kinds while using ChatGPT. Perplexity’s Srinivas says his own company, Perplexity AI, will hold conversations about the possibility of having a plug-in at ChatGPT.

Sources: Analytics India Mag, FastCompany

🚀 Bill Gates on the future of AI

The Microsoft co-founder published a seven-page letter on Tuesday — "The Age of AI has Begun" — outlining his views on the future of AI. He wrote that developing AI is "as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the internet, and the mobile phone."

"I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities."

The company Gates founded, Microsoft, is looking to become a leader in AI. Its $10bn investment in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, has already borne fruit with the same technology being used to power its Bing chatbot and Microsoft Copilot program. The Bing search engine just hit the 100m daily active users milestone.

Sources: Business Insider, GatesNotes, Forbes

🥷 AI Used to imagine Macron rioting

Amidst the ongoing troubles in France over the retirement reforms and the social unrest that has emerged from President Macron’s controversial bill, Internet users have turned to AI to get creative.

During the last few days, some strikingly lifelike photographs created by AI tools have been trending on social media.

These come courtesy of the latest version of Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program created by a San Francisco-based independent research lab, Midjourney Inc, which first went live in March 2022.

The latest version (the fifth) was made available on 16 March in open beta i.e. open to anyone who is interested in using the product, and the evolution is first-rate. And since all it takes is one sentence to create any image, Internet users have naturally jumped on the opportunity to keep it topical and let off some steam by prompting images reflecting the current context in France.

Sources: Euronews.culture

🔥 Adobe launches Firefly

Adobe has now entered the AI race, joining Microsoft, Google, and others by introducing a new family of generative AI models called Firefly. Announced this week at the company's annual Adobe Summit conference, Firefly is bringing generative AI into Adobe's suite of apps and services to generate media content.

The new AI model will be available for use in products offered by the company such as Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Adobe Express.

Adobe said Firefly will place an emphasis on giving creators “opportunities to benefit from your skills and creativity and protect your work.” The company already offers non-AI platforms that do that.

Sources: Forbes, CNBC

💻Canva's rebuttal: A suite of AI-powered design tools

The AI battle heats up as Canva unveils new AI-powered features just after Adobe's Firefly. At an event on Thursday in Sydney that Canva expected to live stream to a million remote viewers, the company announced a range of AI features under the name ‘Magic’.

This includes Magic Design, which allows people to create personalized design templates from an image or style, Magic Presentation, which can create slideshow-style presentations from a prompt, and Magic Write, a copywriting tool.

AI has the potential to be a blessing or a curse for the likes of Adobe and Canva, with each keen to integrate its prowess into its offerings.

Source: BackendNews, Forbes

🥈Gen-2 of text-to-video generating AI

Runway, the startup that co-created the popular Stable Diffusion AI image generator, has released an AI model that takes any text description - such as "turtles flying in the sky" - and generates three seconds of matching video footage.

Realistically and consistently synthesize new videos. Either by applying the composition and style of an image or text prompt to the structure of a source video (Video to Video). Or, using nothing but words (Text to Video). It's like filming something new, without filming anything at all.
Source: Gen-2: The Next Step Forward for Generative AI

Runway’s first artificial intelligence (AI) software, Gen-1, was able to make new videos using data from existing videos. While impressive, its new Gen-2 software can create full videos entirely from text descriptions in a huge leap for the technology.

But just as there are many players in the text-to-image space, text-to-video is likely to see many competitors crop up quickly, in the near future.

Sources: EconomicTimes, PetaPixel

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AI Roundup #2: Last Week in AI