March 25, 2023 8:06 am

(Reuters) – Generative artificial intelligence has grow to be a buzzword this year, capturing the public’s fancy and sparking a rush amongst Microsoft and Alphabet to launch items with technologies they think will modify the nature of perform.

Right here is every thing you need to have to know about this technologies.

WHAT IS GENERATIVE AI?

Like other types of artificial intelligence, generative AI learns how to take actions from previous information. It creates brand new content material – a text, an image, even computer system code – primarily based on that instruction, as an alternative of just categorizing or identifying information like other AI.

The most well-known generative AI application is ChatGPT, a chatbot that Microsoft-backed OpenAI released late final year. The AI powering it is identified as a big language model simply because it requires in a text prompt and from that writes a human-like response.

GPT-four, a newer model that OpenAI announced this week, is “multimodal” simply because it can perceive not only text but photos as nicely. OpenAI’s president demonstrated on Tuesday how it could take a photo of a hand-drawn mock-up for a internet site he wanted to make, and from that produce a actual one particular.

WHAT IS IT Great FOR?

Demonstrations aside, enterprises are currently placing generative AI to perform.

The technologies is useful for producing a 1st-draft of advertising and marketing copy, for instance, even though it may possibly call for cleanup simply because it is not ideal. One particular instance is from CarMax Inc, which has applied a version of OpenAI’s technologies to summarize thousands of consumer testimonials and enable shoppers choose what applied vehicle to get.

Generative AI likewise can take notes in the course of a virtual meeting. It can draft and personalize emails, and it can make slide presentations. Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google every single demonstrated these options in item announcements this week.

What is Incorrect WITH THAT?

Practically nothing, even though there is concern about the technology’s possible abuse.

College systems have fretted about students turning in AI-drafted essays, undermining the difficult perform essential for them to understand. Cybersecurity researchers have also expressed concern that generative AI could enable poor actors, even governments, to create far a lot more disinformation than prior to.

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At the very same time, the technologies itself is prone to producing errors. Factual inaccuracies touted confidently by AI, named “hallucinations,” and responses that appear erratic like professing like to a user are all causes why providers have aimed to test the technologies prior to producing it extensively readily available.

IS THIS JUST ABOUT GOOGLE AND MICROSOFT?

These two providers are at the forefront of investigation and investment in big language models, as nicely as the greatest to place generative AI into extensively applied software program such as Gmail and Microsoft Word. But they are not alone.

Huge providers like Salesforce Inc as nicely as smaller sized ones like Adept AI Labs are either producing their personal competing AI or packaging technologies from other individuals to give customers new powers by way of software program.

HOW IS ELON MUSK INVOLVED?

He was one particular of the co-founders of OpenAI along with Sam Altman. But the billionaire left the startup’s board in 2018 to stay clear of a conflict of interest amongst OpenAI’s perform and the AI investigation becoming carried out by Telsa Inc – the electric-automobile maker he leads.

Musk has expressed issues about the future of AI and batted for a regulatory authority to assure improvement of the technologies serves public interest.

“It really is really a unsafe technologies. I worry I may possibly have carried out some issues to accelerate it,” he mentioned towards the finish of Tesla Inc’s Investor Day occasion earlier this month.

“Tesla’s carrying out excellent issues in AI, I never know, this one particular stresses me out, not positive what a lot more to say about it.”

(This story has been refiled to appropriate dateline to March 17)

(Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in Palo Alto, Calif. and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)

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