Bing, Bard, ChatGPT, and all the news on AI chatbots – The Verge

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By Umar Shakir, a news writer fond of the electric vehicle lifestyle and things that plug in via USB-C. He spent over 15 years in IT support before joining The Verge.
Big players, including Microsoft, with its Bing AI (and Copilot), Google, with Bard, and OpenAI, with ChatGPT-4, are making AI chatbot technology previously restricted to test labs more accessible to the general public.
How do these large language model (LLM) programs work? OpenAI’s GPT-3 told us that AI uses “a series of autocomplete-like programs to learn language” and that these programs analyze “the statistical properties of the language” to “make educated guesses based on the words you’ve typed previously.” 
Or, in the words of James Vincent, a human person: “These AI tools are vast autocomplete systems, trained to predict which word follows the next in any given sentence. As such, they have no hard-coded database of ‘facts’ to draw on — just the ability to write plausible-sounding statements. This means they have a tendency to present false information as truth since whether a given sentence sounds plausible does not guarantee its factuality.”
But there are so many more pieces to the AI landscape that are coming into play — and there are going to be problems — but you can be sure to see it all unfold here on The Verge.
Dec 11
Richard Lawler
Google showed off Bard’s new ability to pull deep content from YouTube videos recently, but if the robot is watching YouTube for you, does the YouTube Creator make any money?
Jules Terpak, a content creator who explores digital culture, asked that very question to Bard lead Jack Krawczyk, who didn’t seem to have very much in the way of an answer. You can hear it below at about 18:50.
Dec 9
Wes Davis
The company acknowledged on Thursday that ChatGPT has been phoning it in lately (again), and it’s fixing it. Then overnight, it made a series of posts about the chatbot training process, saying it must evaluate the model using certain metrics — AI benchmarks, you might say — calling it “an artisanal multi-person effort.”
You know, like bread with seeds in it.
Dec 9
Amrita Khalid
One feature added to Microsoft’s AI Copilot in the Edge browser this week is the ability to generate text summaries of videos. But Edge Copilot’s time-saving feature is still fairly limited and only works on pre-processed videos or those with subtitles, as Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s CEO of advertising and web services, explained.
As spotted by MSPowerUser, Parakhin writes, “In order for it to work, we need to pre-process the video. If the video has subtitles – we can always fallback on that, if it does not and we didn’t preprocess it yet – then it won’t work,” in response to a question. 
Dec 7
Emilia David
Google just announced Gemini, its most powerful suite of AI models yet, and the company has already been accused of lying about its performance. 
An op-ed from Bloomberg claims Google misrepresented the power of Gemini in a recent video. Google aired an impressive “what the quack” hands-on video during its announcement earlier this week, and columnist Parmy Olson says it seemed remarkably capable in the video — perhaps too capable.
Dec 6
David Pierce
It’s the beginning of a new era of AI at Google, says CEO Sundar Pichai: the Gemini era. Gemini is Google’s latest large language model, which Pichai first teased at the I/O developer conference in June and is now launching to the public. To hear Pichai and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis describe it, it’s a huge leap forward in an AI model that will ultimately affect practically all of Google’s products. “One of the powerful things about this moment,” Pichai says, “is you can work on one underlying technology and make it better and it immediately flows across our products.” 
Gemini is more than a single AI model. There’s a lighter version called Gemini Nano that is meant to be run natively and offline on Android devices. There’s a beefier version called Gemini Pro that will soon power lots of Google AI services and is the backbone of Bard starting today. And there’s an even more capable model called Gemini Ultra that is the most powerful LLM Google has yet created and seems to be mostly designed for data centers and enterprise applications. 
Dec 6
David Pierce
While OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become a worldwide phenomenon and one of the fastest-growing consumer products ever, Google’s Bard has been something of an afterthought. The chatbot has steadily gained new features, including access to your data across other Google products, but its answers and information have rarely seemed to rival what you get from ChatGPT and other bots using GPT-3 and GPT-4. 
The case for Bard may have just gotten more compelling, though: as of today, for English-speaking users in 170 countries, Bard is now powered by Google’s new Gemini model, which it says matches and even exceeds OpenAI’s tech in a number of ways. (Google says Gemini is coming to more languages and countries “in the near future.”)
Dec 6
Richard Lawler
The phrase became an internal joke after ChatGPT’s popularity exploded right out of the gate, according to the NYT’s recap of its launch a year ago and the reaction among Big Tech companies.
Google and Meta scrambled AI teams to launch competing products — even if that meant removing some guardrails — like Bard and LLaMa. And Microsoft’s rush to beat Google had Satya Nadella saying, “We have a big order coming to you, a really big order coming to you,” to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang as he ordered $2 billion in chips.
Dec 5
Emma Roth
Microsoft is readying a new Bing feature that should take the hassle out of coming up with your own AI prompt. The GPT-4-powered capability, called Deep Search, takes your Bing query and expands on it, allowing the search engine to find answers about several topics related to your question on the web.
As an example, Microsoft shows how Bing turns a vague search for “how do points systems work in Japan” into a detailed prompt that asks Bing to:
Dec 1
Emma Roth
Copilot, the AI chatbot formerly known as Bing Chat, is out of preview. That means Copilot is now available in 105 languages and 169 countries “on all modern browsers for mobile and web,” according to Caitlin Roulston, the director of communications at Microsoft.
Even though the preview label is going away today, Roulston says Microsoft will continue to “launch new features in preview while we iterate, listen to feedback, and improve the experience for our users.”
Nov 30
David Pierce
There have been a handful of before-and-after moments in the modern technology era. Everything was one way, and then just like that, it was suddenly obvious it would never be like that again. Netscape showed the world the internet; Facebook made that internet personal; the iPhone made plain how the mobile era would take over. There are others — there’s a dating-app moment in there somewhere, and Netflix starting to stream movies might qualify, too — but not many.
ChatGPT, which OpenAI launched a year ago today, might have been the lowest-key game-changer ever. Nobody took a stage and announced that they’d invented the future, and nobody thought they were launching the thing that would make them rich. If we’ve learned one thing in the last 12 months, it’s that no one — not OpenAI’s competitors, not the tech-using public, not even the platform’s creators — thought ChatGPT would become the fastest-growing consumer technology in history. And in retrospect, the fact that nobody saw ChatGPT coming might be exactly why it has seemingly changed everything.
Nov 30
Alex Heath
Sam Altman is officially OpenAI’s CEO again.
Just before Thanksgiving, the company said it had reached a deal in principle for him to return, and now it’s done. Microsoft is getting a non-voting observer seat on the nonprofit board that controls OpenAI as well, the company announced on Wednesday.
Nov 23
Jon Porter
This Wall Street Journal article about the recent drama at OpenAI contains an amazing anecdote. Apparently an employee at AI rival Anthropic thought it’d be funny to send “thousands of paper clips in the shape of OpenAI’s logo” as a prank, in reference to the infamous paperclip maximizer thought experiment.
Weirdly, I think OpenAI’s logo makes for a great paperclip design. Should we be worried?
[WSJ]
Nov 22
Wes Davis
The company tested baking a cryptographic “digital signature” into photos taken by its cameras to set them apart from AI-generated or otherwise faked images. Sony says the feature will come to cameras like the Alpha 9 III via a firmware update in Spring 2024.

Nov 21
Emma Roth
ChatGPT’s voice feature is now available to all users for free. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI announced users can now tap the headphones icon to use their voice to talk with ChatGPT in the mobile app, as well as get an audible response.
OpenAI first rolled out the ability to prompt ChatGPT with your voice and images in September, but it only made the feature available to paying users.
Nov 21
Wes Davis
While OpenAI is in the middle of an existential crisis, there’s a new chatbot update from Anthropic, the Google-backed AI startup founded by former OpenAI engineers who left over disagreements about the company’s increasingly commercial direction as its Microsoft partnership went on.
Anthropic has announced that the latest update of its chatbot, Claude 2.1, can digest up to 200,000 tokens at once for Pro tier users, which it says equals over 500 pages of material.
Nov 18
Wes Davis
Meta has reportedly broken up its Responsible AI (RAI) team as it puts more of its resources into generative artificial intelligence. The Information broke the news today, citing an internal post it had seen.
According to the report, most RAI members will move to the company’s generative AI product team, while others will work on Meta’s AI infrastructure. The company regularly says it wants to develop AI responsibly and even has a page devoted to the promise, where the company lists its “pillars of responsible AI,” including accountability, transparency, safety, privacy, and more.
Nov 17
Emma Roth
Microsoft says it’s using GPT-4 to garner the “most pertinent insights” from webpages and write summaries beneath Bing search results. You won’t see these summaries beneath every search result, but you can check which ones are AI-generated by clicking the little arrow next to the result’s URL. If the description is written by AI, it’ll say “AI-Generated Caption.”
Nov 17
Richard Lawler
Earlier this year, Google combined two AI teams into one group which is working on a new model to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4. Its leader, Demis Hassabis, discussed the combo on Decoder:
And we’re already feeling, even a couple of months in, the benefits and the strengths of that with projects like Gemini that you may have heard of, which is our next-generation multimodal large models — very, very exciting work going on there, combining all the best ideas from across both world-class research groups. It’s pretty impressive to see.
Now, The Information cites two sources saying its launch is expected in Q1 of 2024, not this month as they were previously told. It also reports Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been spending “four to five days a week” with the developers.
[The Information]
Nov 16
Jon Porter
Google is testing new generative AI features for YouTube that’ll let people create music tracks using just a text prompt or a simple hummed tune. The first, Dream Track, already seeded to a few creators on the platform, is designed to auto-generate short 30-second music tracks in the style of famous artists. The feature can imitate nine different artists, who’ve chosen to collaborate with YouTube on its development. YouTube is also showing off new tools that can generate music tracks from a hum.
The announcement comes as YouTube attempts to navigate the emerging norms and copyright rules around AI-generated music while also protecting its relationship with major music labels. The issue was brought into sharp relief when an AI-generated “Drake” song went viral earlier this year, and YouTube subsequently announced a deal to work with Universal Music as it establishes rules around AI-generated music on its platform.
Nov 15
Wes Davis
Microsoft announced a plethora of changes for its Microsoft Copilot AI during Microsoft Ignite today that make the chatbot more interactive and participatory, particularly in Teams meetings. The updates expand Copilot’s role as an enterprise helper in Office apps like Teams, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
Microsoft has added some flexibility to the chatbot’s output, so users can tweak it with instructions to make its formatting and tone more to their personal liking. Word and PowerPoint will get the new personalization features to start, but the company says other Microsoft 365 apps will gain support in time.
Nov 14
Wes Davis
CNBC reports Airbnb bought the “stealth mode” Gameplanner.AI for almost $200 million, and notes its plans to use generative AI for trip planning help.
The article says Gameplanner.AI was founded in 2020 by former Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer, whose later work included co-founding Viv Labs, which Samsung bought to make Bixby.
[CNBC]
Nov 8
Richard Lawler
In a sitdown with Verge EIC Nilay Patel on Decoder, the 44th president discussed Joe Biden’s recently-signed executive order about AI, why Obama disagrees with the idea that social networks are a “common carrier,” and which iPhone apps he uses the most, now that he’s no longer president and he can use an iPhone.
Nov 8
Alex Heath
Moments after OpenAI’s big keynote wrapped in San Francisco on Monday, the reporters in attendance made our way down to a private room to chat with CEO Sam Altman and CTO Mira Murati. During the Q&A, they elaborated on the big news that had just been shared onstage: OpenAI is launching a platform for creating and discovering custom versions of ChatGPT. 
There are natural parallels to draw between OpenAI’s GPT Store, which is set to go live in a few weeks, and the debut of the iPhone’s App Store in 2008. Like Apple way back then, OpenAI is inviting developers who are excited about this new wave of technology to hopefully help create a new, enduring platform. 
Nov 7
Umar Shakir
Google is rolling out new generative AI tools for creating ads, from writing the headlines and descriptions that appear along with searches to creating and editing the accompanying images. It’s pitching the tool for use by both advertising agencies as well as businesses without in-house creative staff. Using text prompts, advertisers can iterate on the text and images they generate until they find something they like.
Google also promises that it will never generate two of the same images, which can avoid the awkward possibility that two competing businesses end up with the exact same photo elements.
Nov 6
Emilia David
OpenAI announced more improvements to its large language models, GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, including updated knowledge bases and a much longer context window. The company says it will also follow Google and Microsoft’s lead and begin protecting customers against copyright lawsuits.
GPT-4 Turbo, currently available via an API preview, has been trained with information dating to April 2023, the company announced Monday at its first-ever developer conference. The earlier version of GPT-4 released in March only learned from data dated up to September 2021. OpenAI plans to release a production-ready Turbo model in the next few weeks but did not give an exact date.
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