GSV's AI News & Updates (02/06/23)
The AI Wars, ChatGPT Plagiarism, Anthropic's $300M Raise, Intercom Wipes Out AI Customer Service
We’ve moved to a newsletter format! You are receiving this weekly update on the intersection of AI and education as part of our GSV community – we hope this will be a helpful resource as we navigate this evolving and exciting intersection.
Please feel free to send over any relevant resources you may come across (claire@gsv.com) – we’d love to learn and hear from you!
General 🚀
💥 JUST IN: Google announces Bard, an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. This is expected to be a ChatGPT rival and is currently being tested by a limited group. Pichai notes that Bard “draws on information from the web”, suggesting it may be able to answer questions about recent events (which ChatGPT struggles with).
💥 JUST IN (minutes after Google’s announcement): Microsoft announces surprise event for tomorrow with Bing ChatGPT expected. The special in-person press event will be held at its Redmond headquarters tomorrow. Microsoft’s response to Google’s ChatGPT rival will come in the form of ChatGPT integration into Bing.
Google invests $300M in AI startup Anthropic for a reported 10% stake: cash-for-computing deal shows how large tech groups are investing in companies at the vanguard of generative AI. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by several researchers who left OpenAI, and had raised $700M+ before Google’s investment. Its general-purpose chatbot Claude looks similar to ChatGPT but employs a model called 'Constitutional AI' that supposedly enhances safety and transparency.
Oh the Things You’ll Do with Bing’s ChatGPT: a leaked preview of Bing’s ChatGPT integration: the search bar is now a chatbox, Bing can do research (and cite!), ask Bing to make plans for you to be creative, and you can still serach the traditional way.
Quora’s new AI chatbot Poe: currently an iPhone app, it provides suggested follow-up prompts, clickable topics to go down rabbit holes. They have multiple different bots, all built on different models - Sage = OpenAI, Heron = Anthropic, Dragonfly = another OpenAI model.
Customer support chatbot company Intercom embeds AI: summarization, rephrase / translating tone, expand answers, article generation.
Reflecting on the AI Hype Cycle: What are investors looking for in AI? What Does This Mean For Venture?
OpenAI’s Sam Altman Talks ChatGPT And How Artificial General Intelligence Can ‘Break Capitalism’
Where Have All The AI Cowboys Gone? Risk, power, and the yin and yang of large language models.
ChatGPT hit 100M MAU, just two months after launch
TikTok took 9 months, Instagram 2.5 years, Spotify 6 years, Facebook 4.5 years
They’re announcing their paid plan at $20/month - waitlist here
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Lavender raises a $13.2M Series A: Lavender’s product is made up of 3 different components: (1) a sales email coach, (2) a “personalization assistant” and (3) an email intelligence and coaching portal. The email tools provide research material on recipients and can automatically create drafts from that research. Lavender scores emails and suggests improvements in real time.
Artifact: a personalized newsfeed driven by AI. The founders of Instagram have announced their new project - “TikTok for Text”
Maroofy: search for any song & it'll use the song's audio to find similar-sounding music. Powered by an AI model trained on 120M+ songs.
Humata: use ChatGPT on your own files. Any document can be queried in a conversational form for answers - technical papers, legal documents, books, can all become custom data sets.
Symbiotic.fyi: another ChatGPT for your own documents.
Untitled AI: a custom search engine designed to help you locate answers within YouTube videos.
Summari: instead of becoming another AI summary extension, they are pivoting to generating an article summary when you hover your mouse over a link.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
💥 OpenAI releases AI vs Human Detector for ChatGPT: With identifying 26% of AI-written texts as “likely AI,” they’ve beaten the state-of-the-art in detecting AI-generated text. Only 9% of students will get unjustified detention because of false positives. Chatbot plagiarism by students has been a major concern - this is a massive step in the right direction as we evolve education by integrating this new technology.
However, the first release is far from perfect:
First, ask ChatGPT: "Write three paragraphs introducing George Washington."
Then, ask: "Rewrite the previous three paragraphs to evade a tool that identifies AI-generated text."
Result: "The classifier considers the text to be unclear if it is AI-generated."
At This School, Computer Science Class Now Includes Critiquing Chatbots: Some schools are asking student programmers to think critically about rapid advances in artificial intelligence.
In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human: that’s my hope for the age of A.I. — that it forces us to more clearly distinguish the knowledge that is useful information from the humanistic knowledge that leaves people wiser and transformed.
NYT Columnist uses AI tools to take his writing to the next level and tests 3 different tools (ChatGPT, Wordtune, Rytr).
Fiverr adds “AI Services” to its platform: focused on attracting AI savvy freelancers - ChatGPT application developers, Stable Diffusion and MidJourney Artists, AI Chatbot Developers and more.
Replika, a ‘virtual friendship’ AI chatbot, hit with data ban in Italy over child safety: Replika operates a freemium ‘virtual friendship’ service based on customizable digital avatars whose “personalized” responses are powered by artificial intelligence.
Some of the world’s largest corporations are relying on AI to automate processes instead of hiring new employees.
The Machines of Mastery: AI chatbots can actually make us more skilled with real, mistakes-driven “deliberate” practice—which is how anyone can get better at anything.
Tech 💻
GraphGPT: converts unstructured natural language into a knowledge graph. Successive queries can update the existing state of the graph or create an entirely new structure.
Fun/Other 🎉
WTF Does This Company Do? an AI summarizer of any company’s landing page.
AI Replace my Ex: this AI tool will replace any photo of your ex with an item of your choice.
Memes
