by STORY: The AI race went into hyperdrive on Tuesday with two major announcements from the two arch-rivals in the fast-paced industry, Microsoft and Alphabet.
First, the Google owner unveiled a suite of artificial intelligence tools for its Gmail, Workspace, and Cloud software, aiming to get ahead of Microsoft just days before the expected similar announcement.
Then, just hours later, OpenAI, funded by Microsoft, announced that it was beginning to release a powerful AI model called GPT-4, setting the stage for the proliferation of even more human-like technology.
Reuters Technology reporter Jeffrey Dastin explains.
“There’s this crazy competition right now in the tech space where Google has long been the winner and at the forefront of AI and suddenly Microsoft comes here with their Bing chatbot and Microsoft is going to reinvent search, which is at the heart of the business of Google. Now, as we expect, Microsoft will be talking about Microsoft Word and how it will reinvent productivity with AI and Google two days before its announcement. So there’s so much intensity right now about who is going to have the best technology in people’s hands quickest. But there’s a second dialogue that’s equally interesting, and that’s on the research and more experimental front. So, on the same day, Open AI that created Chat GPT – the chat bot that spurred this race – it just came out with its latest technology and says this is on a different human level than we’ve seen before have. So this new technology called GPT-4 had to be simulated d bar exam. This is what law students complete before entering professional practice. And this new technology scored in the top 10% of test takers, human test takers, when trying to run the exact same test. And that’s relative to its earlier version of this technology called GPT 3.5, which scored it in the bottom 10%. So we’re seeing a lot of advances in research, and it’s only a matter of time before those advances get into the hands of users.”
Meanwhile, Google was trying to get ahead in the race to win business with AI tools designed to “change” the work of lawyers as well as marketers, academics and – yes – journalists.
“Google has announced what it believes the future of productivity is. So instead of having to write a blog post or tag content or whatever, at work or even in a personal context, it gives you AI to do it on your behalf. And it adds that I create gmail to create google docs. Google pushes virtually every tool people use from Google to create content. Google demonstrated to reporters what that looks like. So an executive opened up a Google Doc that looks just like any other Google Doc we’d see today, except there’s this purple magic wand that the Google exec called a magic wand. And you click on it and he can design any type of text for you and then update that text at your discretion with whatever tone you set. So you can say please write a message, please write a marketing blog, write a workout plan, take some notes that you just jotted down between meetings and turn those notes into a full-fledged essay like You see fit wi Mai the help of AI.”
Alphabet grants approved trial users ongoing access to new Google Workspace features throughout the year before they are rolled out more widely.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has teased a Thursday event about how it’s “reinventing productivity with AI,” which is expected to showcase the rival word processor.
