Welcome to The Week in Generative AI, a weekly column for marketers from Quad Insights that quickly sums up need-to-know developments surrounding this rapidly evolving technology.
Elon Musk’s xAI releases AI chatbot
Grok, an AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI, is the latest entry into the large language model (LLM) market. The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Dean writes that xAI claims Grok is “designed for tasks including information retrieval and coding assistance” and notes that Musk “boasted that [Grok] has both a love of sarcasm and the advantage of access to real-time information via X.”
The company’s announcement states that Grok was “designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak” and that the chatbot will “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” xAI acknowledged that Grok lags in some areas compared to more extensively trained models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Writing in Wired, Will Knight shares concerns that “the announcement does not explain what ‘spicy’ or ‘rebellious’ means” — and that unlike other LLMs, Grok has few “guardrails.”
Related news:
OpenAI Dev Days
Leading up to the one-year anniversary of ChatGPT’s release (on Nov. 30, 2022), the chatbot’s developer OpenAI reported a user base of 100 million weekly active users and released a variety of updates at its inaugural developer conference, OpenAI DevDay, held on Monday in San Francisco.
As Bloomberg’s Rachel Metz reports, “OpenAI is now letting users build custom versions of ChatGPT to accomplish specific personal and professional tasks.” The company also “plans to introduce a store later this month where users can find tailored GPTs from other users — and make money from their own.” The GPT Store will function as a hub for these applications, facilitating a space to showcase and monetize the most popular GPT creations.
At OpenAI DevDay, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demonstrated GPT-4 Turbo, the updated model, by creating a custom chatbot during his presentation. The Turbo model is informed by data up to April 2023, addressing a previous limitation of outdated knowledge.
Related coverage:
- “All the news from OpenAI’s first developer conference” (The Verge)
- “OpenAI Lets Mom-and-Pop Shops Customize ChatGPT” (The New York Times)
- “What OpenAI’s wave of releases says about 2024” (VentureBeat)
- “‘ChatGPT detector’ catches AI-generated papers with unprecedented accuracy” (Nature)
Hollywood comes to terms over AI usage
After months of negotiations and a strike that lasted 118 days, SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) negotiators on Thursday approved a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), putting an end to the longest actors strike in Hollywood history.
According to Variety’s Gene Maddaus, the final days of negotiation were tense because “AI remained one of the most complicated issues to resolve.” The result is that those in the industry will “see the first-ever protections for actors against artificial intelligence,” writes Maddaus. Over at Vanity Fair, Katey Rich notes that “AI was a major sticking point in the WGA [Writers Guild of America] strike negotiations as well, but its use for writers is significantly different than for actors” because “an AI script … is a very different thing than a digital resurrection of a dead celebrity.”
Related Coverage:
- “‘This Was A Negotiation For The Future’: Fran Drescher & Duncan Crabtree-Ireland On SAG-AFTRA Deal, AI & Informed Consent + Importance Of CEOs” (Deadline)
- “Studios Want To Own Actors’ Images Forever Thanks To AI” (Giant Freakin Robot)
Further reading
- “I’ve Worked With Generative AI for Nearly a Year. Here’s What I’ve Learned.” (The Wall Street Journal)
- “What marketers can expect as Google rolls out AI asset generation for ads” (Marketing Dive)
- “A Robot’s Nightmare Is a Burrito Full of Guac” (The Atlantic)
- “Exclusive: Meta bars political advertisers from using generative AI ads tools” (Reuters)
- “FTC takes shots at AI in rare filing to US Copyright Office” (VentureBeat)
- “Humane’s Ai Pin is a $700 Smartphone Alternative You Wear All Day” (Wired)
- “Google contractors who helped train the Bard AI chatbot vote to unionize” (Insider)
- “What marketers can expect as Google rolls out AI asset generation for ads” (Marketing Dive)
- “Adobe Caught Selling AI-Generated Images of Israel-Palestine Violence” (Futurism)
Thanks for reading. We’ll see you next week.
If you’d like to catch up on prior installments of this column, start by heading to last week’s recap: “The Week in Generative AI: November 3, 2023 edition”
