Top 5 stories of the week: Generative AI dominates the news again

Our AI senior writer/editor, Sharon Goldman, was kept busy again this week with news about generative AI and the new GPT-4 release. She wrote about all the big names — from Google to Microsoft, OpenAI to Anthropic, and even the effects of the SVB bank crash on the AI world. 

Of the five top stories for the past week, Goldman wrote four of them. Oh, and she was also recently recognized by Muck Rack as one of the top 10 (#2!) most-viewed AI journalists in 2023 so far. We’re so proud of Sharon and glad our readers find her coverage so engaging. We do, too!

Without further ado, here are the top five stories for the week of March 10-17.

1. As GPT-4 chatter resumes, Yoshua Bengio says ChatGPT is a ‘wake-up call’

In a virtual Q&A titled “What’s Lacking In ChatGPT? Bridging the gap to human-level intelligence,” deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, who won the 2018 Turing Award together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, said that current work on multimodal large neural nets, which have images or video as well as text, would “help a lot” with the “world model” issue — that is, that models need to understand the physics of our world.

He also warned that market pressures will likely push tech companies toward secrecy rather than openness with their AI models, and that the “media circus” around ChatGPT is a “wake-up call” about the potential of powerful AI systems to both do good for society as well as create significant ethical concerns.

2. This AI startup just raised $350 million for generative AI trained to use every software tool and API           

With its generative AI trained to use every software tool and API, the year-old Adept AI has announced a new round of funding that bets on the potential to help knowledge workers boost how they use their everyday software tools.

Want to create profit and loss columns in Google Sheets? Set a reminder in Salesforce? Whether it’s browsing the internet or navigating a complex enterprise software tool, the idea is that what might ordinarily take many clicks can be done with a quick text prompt.

3. Google announces new generative AI lineup in advance of Microsoft’s rumored GPT-4 debut

On Tuesday, Google announced a laundry list of new generative AI capabilities and features for developers, through a PaLM API and in Google Cloud, as well as new integrations for users of Google Workspace, including in Gmail and Google Docs.

The announcements come just a month after Google unveiled its search chatbot Bard and less than a week after Bloomberg reported that a new internal Google directive “requires generative AI to be incorporated into all of its biggest products within months.”

4. What’s next in large language model (LLM) research? Here’s what’s coming down the ML pike

There is a lot of excitement around the potential applications of large language models (LLM). We’re already seeing LLMs used in several applications, including composing emails and generating software code.

But as interest in LLMs grows, so do concerns about their limits; this can make it difficult to use them in different applications. Some of these include hallucinating false facts, failing at tasks that require commonsense and consuming large amounts of energy.

5. Lightning AI CEO slams OpenAI’s GPT-4 paper as ‘masquerading as research’

William Falcon, CEO of Lightning AI and creator of PyTorch Lightning, an open-source Python library that provides a high-level interface for popular deep learning framework PyTorch, spoke with VentureBeat this week about the highly anticipated launch of GPT-4.

The conversation was wide-ranging, covering everything from possibilities to pitfalls. Falcon shared his insights on the future of AI and the impact of GPT-4 on the industry. Here’s what he had to say.