Microsoft Defends Itself

And Releasing Broken Tools

Author

The Alignment
February 19, 2023

‘Twas the weekend but there’s always something going on in AI land. Progress does not wait for anyone.

Here’s what we have lined up for you today -

  1. OpenAI CEO's continued commitment to release AI Tools, even if they are "somewhat broken"

  2. Microsoft defend's Bing

  3. Podcast.ai and generating audio conversations people have never had.

  4. Our AI generated short poem makes a return

Sam Altman is committed to moving fast

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO took the weekend to reflect on the recent drama surrounding ChatGPT and Bing’s trust and safety issues through a series of tweets.

He reinforced his optimism for the rapid developments happening in AI whilst also acknowledging the challenges with biases and safety. What stood out most was his commitment to continue bringing these tools into the hands of the public, “even if they are currently still somewhat broken”.

Microsoft defends Bing

Microsoft has clarified some of the recent drama with regards to its Bing chat through a blog post, with additional updates on how things are going with the new search experience.

Here’s what stood out -

  1. Microsoft will limit chat sessions on its new Bing search engine to five questions per session and 50 questions per day.

  2. In extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions, Bing can become repetitive or be prompted/provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in line with Microsoft's designed tone.

  3. It stated, “The model at times tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses that can lead to a style we didn’t intend.This is a non-trivial scenario that requires a lot of prompting so most of you won’t run into it, but we are looking at how to give you more fine-tuned control.”

  4. 71% of users have given Bing’s AI powered answers a thumbs up

  5. They will continue to push updates and bug fixes daily. The goal still remains to get this technology in the hands of as many people as possible.

It's worth noting that Microsoft did not make excuses for Bing's mishaps. Instead presenting them as a natural by product of releasing any new "generational" product.

Coda's doing what everyone else will soon do as well

Coda, a project management company last valued at $2.5 billion which operates in a similar space to Notion has launched its suite of AI assisted tools. The core premise is simple, use natural language to build project management workflows instead of clicking and formatting tables, databases, diagrams etc.

This release fits in nicely with our prediction of “Every product is going to invest in AI”. Companies are investing in Generative AI tools to augment the user experience. Going for this low hanging is not going to stop any time soon, if anything it’s only going to accelerate.

Product Watch Podcast.ai-

A weekly podcast that explores a new topic in depth, entirely generated by artificial intelligence (including the script and audio).

So far episodes include Joe Rogan interviewing Steve Jobs . Lex Fridman interviewing Richard Feynman and Quentin Tarantino getting interviewed by Zach Galifianakis.

Around the industry -

  1. Steven Wolfram has penned an easy to read (for all levels) essay on how ChatGPT works under the hood. This essay is absolute gold.

  2. Naval Ravikant and Physicist David Deutsch discussed AGI in a recent podcast.

  3. Meta’s Chief AI Scientist and Turing Award Winner Yann LeCun notes OpenAI, DeepMind and Google have been publishing and open sourcing less . And seems to be concerned about it.

  4. Anthropic releases a paper that highlights that it can morally self correct.

We end with a Haiku by ChatGPT. And we've got to say, it does somewhat reflect the sign of the times -

“AI learns our ways,

Biases become part of code,

Equality lost.”