The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for April 13, 2023, included some breaking news on Amazon Bedrock, the new service competing directly with OpenAI and Microsoft’s Azure AI services. We also discussed Twitter’s generative AI ambitions, HuggingGPT, a positive generative AI launch from MailChimp and a lackluster implementation by Expedia, OpenAI’s bug bounty, the Italy ChatGPT saga, a deepfake of Charles Barkley, Alibab’s everything AI bot, and a bit more.

Bret Kinsella (that’s me) hosted again this week with my Voicebot.ai colleague Eric Schwartz. The top stories in generative AI land this week include:

Amazon Takes on OpenAI & Microsoft

A multivendor Bedrock approach: Amazon Bedrock now offers easy access to many generative AI models, including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI, and Titan.
Copilot gets a competitor: Amazon’s CodeWhisperer, a text-to-code generator, is now general availability and free. GitHub Copilot may have a market share lead with 400,000 paying subscribers, but free is a good way to accumulate users.

Elon Musk Goes Shopping

Twitter and Generative AI: Elon Musk has reportedly purchased 10,000 GPUs after he was out recruiting some well-known AI researchers. So, why did he want OpenAI and others to pause their AI research? We’ll see. Musk may want Twitter to be an “everything app,” and generative AI would be a key element. Or, he may just want advertisers to have a useful feature.

HuggingGPT and Multi-Model Systems

Microsoft’s latest take on hybrid AI: Microsoft researchers released a paper and a GitHub repository with a new multi-model LLM controller (orchestrator) that can govern access to a variety of AI models for a single interface called HuggingGPT. We will see more of these multi-model services.

MailChimp Gets AI Copywriter

Building on the core product: MailChimp added AI writing capabilities via an OpenAI integration. It looks like a clean, on-point generative AI feature. There is no extra cost for the feature right now, but at what point will the companies start passing along the model inference costs to users?

Expedia Misses the Plot

Generating misperception: Expedia also announced some new generative AI features, but it actually only enables you to learn more about hotels and activities. You can’t actually book a flight or hotel even though the press release language was cleverly written to suggest there is more there than travel review search. Speaking of search, the new GPT-4-powered Bing not only does a better job of trip planning and research, but it also enables you to book a flight and hotel.

Alibaba Goes for Everything

A generative cornucopia: Alibaba announced its new generative AI solution. The ChatGPT competitor is called Tongyi Qianwen. It is integrated into the Tmall Genie assistant (i.e., Alibaba’s voice assistant), takes meeting notes, writes emails, and creates business documents. It can also help you shop and the company says it supports both Chinese and English.

OpenAI Bug$ Out

Crowdsourcing security vulnerabilities: OpenAI launched a new Bug Bounty program which will pay out between $200 - $20,000 to developers that find “vulnerabilities, bugs, or security flaws.” This follows OpenAI’s highly publicized security vulnerability and subsequent investigations by privacy regulators in Italy and Canada.

FanDuel Goes Deep

A young Charles Barkley pitches sports gambling: FanDuel has a new commercial that includes a real-life Charles Barkley and a deepfake of his younger self. Deepfakes are becoming mainstream. Or, maybe they already are.

The show was originally broadcast live on YouTube and LinkedIn, and we also added it to the Voicebot Podcast for your convenience. You can see the video here on YouTube.

Generative AI News - Charles Barkley Deepfake, Elon Musk, Hugging Face and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 315

The Voicebot Podcast