Illustrated by Gabriella Turrisi/Axios
Tech companies big and small are scrambling to add the latest hot AI technologies to their products.
Why it matters: Generative AI has dominated the technical conversation in recent months, both for its great features and notable shortcomings.
News promotion:
- Microsoft, which integrated the technology behind ChatGPT into its Bing search and Edge browsers earlier this month, announced today that it will be adding similar functionality to its Windows 11 operating system.
- Meta reorganized its generative AI work on Monday, creating a new product team tasked with bringing the technology to apps like Facebook and Instagram, as well as VR and Metaverse projects.
- Ahead of Microsoft’s Bing and Edge news, Google has rushed to announce its ChatGPT rival Bard, announcing plans to build generative AI responses into its flagship search engine.
- Snapchat, on the other hand, announced on Monday, it will add My AI, an experimental chatbot for users who subscribe to the paid Snapchat+ service.
Small and medium-sized enterprises: They also want to show that they’re totally on board with the hot trend.
- For example, corporate travel specialist TripActions, rebranded as Navan, promised to use AI to overhaul how employees book trips and report expenses.
- ChatGPT and others are being added to all sorts of other services, and new startups are pitching AI chatbots as a solution to everything: retail to marketing to customer service.
Big picture: Technologies like ChatGPT and image generators like the Dall-E 2 and Stable Diffusion have captured the imagination of the tech industry and beyond.
Yes, but: Excitement is one thing. Commercialization and profitable business are separate.
- Whether these new AI technologies will be readily available is still an open question. As highlighted by the many humorous and sometimes frightening chats offered by Bing and others.
- Even assuming these early bugs are resolved, many thorny business and legal challenges remain, as we’ve been writing.
“Today’s AI Problems It’s not about being smart — it’s about being stupid in ways we can’t always predict. AI segments In last week’s latest episode tonight.
- Oliver argues for explainable AI, noting that AI tends to automate biases. Such a system should at least show the work behind how a particular piece of content was created or a particular conclusion was reached.
- “The more money that comes in, the faster people move the goalposts and remove the guardrails,” says Matthew Batalik, an attorney involved in a lawsuit against multiple companies over the behavior of generative AI systems, including Microsoft’s GitHub.
- Early adopters of tech products often act as guinea pigs, but generative AI could be to powerful and unpredictable for the safety of global public experiments.
