Lifeboat Foundation

The Microsoft cofounder talked to Forbes about his work with AI unicorn OpenAI and back on Microsoft’s campus, AI’s potential impact on jobs and in medicine, and much more.

In 2020, Bill Gates left the board of directors of Microsoft, the tech giant he cofounded in 1975. But he still spends about 10% of his time at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, meeting with product teams, he says. A big topic of discussion for those sessions: artificial intelligence, and the ways AI can change how we work — and how we use Microsoft software products to do it.

Q&A platform Quora has opened up public access to its new AI chatbot app, Poe, which lets users ask questions and get answers from a range of AI chatbots, including those from ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, and other companies like Anthropic. Beyond allowing users to experiment with new AI technologies, Poe’s content will ultimately help to evolve Quora itself, the company says.

Quora first announced Poe’s mobile app in December, but at the time, it required an invite to try it out. With the public launch on Friday, anyone can now use Poe’s app. For now, it’s available only to iOS users, but Quora says the service will arrive on other platforms in a few months.

In an announcement, the company explained it decided to launch Poe as a standalone product that’s independent of Quora itself because of how quickly AI developments and changes are now taking place. However, there will be some connections between the Q&A site and Poe. If and when Poe’s content meets a high enough quality standard, it will be distributed on Quora’s site itself, where it has the ability to reach Quora’s 400 million monthly visitors, the company noted.

Magic, a startup developing a code-generating platform similar to GitHub’s Copilot, today announced that it raised $23 million in a Series A funding round led by Alphabet’s CapitalG with participation from Elad Gil, Nat Friedman and Amplify Partners. So what’s its story?

Magic’s CEO and co-founder, Eric Steinberger, says that he was inspired by the potential of AI at a young age. In high school, he and his friends wired up the school’s computers for machine learning algorithm training, an experience that planted the seeds for Steinberger’s computer science degree and his job at Meta as an AI researcher.

“I spent years exploring potential paths to artificial general intelligence, and then large language models (LLMs) were invented,” Steinberger told TechCrunch in an email interview. “I realized that combining LLMs trained on code with my research on neural memory and reinforcement learning might allow us to build an AI software engineer that feels like a true colleague, not just a tool. This would be extraordinarily useful for companies and developers.”

Google is rushing to take part in the sudden fervor for conversational AI, driven by the pervasive success of rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Bard, the company’s new AI experiment, aims to “combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models.” Not short on ambition, Google!

The model, or service, or AI chatbot, however you wish to describe it, was announced in a blog post by CEO Sundar Pichai. He pointedly notes Google’s recentering around AI some years back, as well as the fact that the most influential concept (the Transformer) was created by the company’s researchers in 2017.

“It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people,” Pichai writes. It’s hard not to wonder while reading this how Google managed to get leapfrogged so decisively by OpenAI, the latter of which is now synonymous with the technologies the former pioneered.

Google is working on a competitor to OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. The ‘experimental conversational AI service’ is called Bard and is only being tested by a limited group.

It’s official: Google is working on a ChatGPT competitor named Bard.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced the project in a blog post today, describing the tool as an “experimental conversational AI service” that will answer users’ queries and take part in conversations. The software will be available to a group of “trusted testers” today, says Pichai, before becoming “more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”

Continue reading “Google announces ChatGPT rival Bard, with wider availability in ‘coming weeks’” »

Microsoft is holding a special press event at its Redmond headquarters tomorrow, and it’s expected to focus primarily on its OpenAI partnership and ChatGPT for Bing.

Microsoft is holding a major news event tomorrow on February 7th. The software giant first mailed out invites to an in-person event at the company’s Redmond headquarters last week and is now officially announcing the event minutes after Google made its ChatGPT rival official.

Microsoft’s event starts at 10AM PT / 1PM ET on February 7th, and the company isn’t teasing much ahead of time. But it’s likely the company will focus on its rumored ChatGPT integration into Bing and its broader partnership with OpenAI.

Continue reading “Microsoft announces surprise event for tomorrow with Bing ChatGPT expected” »

Google has unveiled a new artificial intelligence chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent bid to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said in a blog post that Bard will be opened up to “trusted testers” starting Monday (local time), with plans to make it available to the public “in the coming weeks.”

Like ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November by AI research company OpenAI, Bard is built on a large language model.

Is there any strategy or alliance too complex for its ruthless intelligence?

Meta AI made a groundbreaking announcement with the launch of CICERO — the first-ever AI (artificial intelligence) capable of winning at Diplomacy, a multiplayer strategy game that calls for mutual trust, compromise, and teamwork. This marks a significant milestone in AI evolution.

“CICERO moves AI from the gaming table into real-world applications.”

Continue reading “Meta’s AI just became the first to outwit human players in Diplomacy” »

Game on!

Feb 6 (Reuters) — Google owner Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) on Monday said it will launch a chatbot service and more artificial intelligence for its search engine as well as developers, an answer to Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) in their rivalry to lead a new wave of computing.

Microsoft, meanwhile, said it planned its own AI reveal for Tuesday.

Continue reading “Google unveils ChatGPT rival Bard, AI search plans in battle with Microsoft” »