Top 5 stories of the week: Generative AI market heating up (even more)

Once again, AI news topped the tech headlines this week — in particular, the generative AI market is becoming increasingly competitive, with both new and well-established enterprises making significant investments.

This includes GitHub’s new Copilot X; startup Codium AI’s new code-integrity tool TestGPT; and a whole slew of new tools, services and capabilities from Nvidia. Still, skepticism remains, with OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman even expressing apprehension.

Not topping the list (but still noteworthy AI news): Databricks released its GPT-like Dolly; OpenAI turned ChatGPT into a platform overnight with several new plugins; OpenAI rival Character AI announced a $1 billion valuation; and Google released Bard, a competitor to ChatGPT, Claude and Bing Chat.

Interested in reading more? Here are the top five stories for the week of March 20-24.

1. With GPT-4, dangers of ‘Stochastic Parrots’ remain, say researchers; no wonder OpenAI CEO is a ‘bit scared’

After “another epic week in generative AI,” VentureBeat AI writer and editor Sharon Goldman wrote in her “AI Beat” column that she was “more than ready for a dose of thoughtful reality amid the AI hype.”

This she found in a March 2021 AI research paper, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” Although it led to firings, researchers decided it was time to look back at the explosive paper — which in hindsight, seemed to foreshadow the current debates around the risks of LLMs such as GPT-4 in its comparison of language models to “a stochastic parrot.”

2. GitHub unveils Copilot X: The future of AI-powered software development

In our second top story, VentureBeat’s newest AI editor and writer Michael Nuñez broke the news of GitHub’s new Copilot X.

As a pioneer in the use of generative AI for code completion, GitHub is now taking its partnership with OpenAI further by adopting the latest GPT-4 model and expanding Copilot’s capabilities.

Its new AI-powered tool, built using OpenAI’s Codex model, writes 46% of the code on the platform and has helped developers code up to 55% faster. By auto-completing comments and code, Copilot serves as an AI pair programmer that keeps developers focused and productive.

3. As Nvidia pushes to democratize AI, here’s everything it announced at GTC 2023

Nvidia held its annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) this week — which came with several new announcements.

Most notably, the company is continuing its AI investment and hardware push. Nvidia now offers rental of AI supercomputing infrastructure with DGX Cloud; new hardware for AI inference and recommendations; and Isaac Sim for remote robot design (among many other new tools and capabilities).

4. Nvidia will bring AI to every industry, says CEO Jensen Huang in GTC keynote: ‘We are at the iPhone moment of AI’

Sporting his characteristic leather jacket and armed with his quick wit, humor and enthusiasm, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang delivered a highly-anticipated keynote focusing almost entirely on AI. His presentation announced partnerships with Google, Microsoft and Oracle, among others, to bring new AI, simulation and collaboration capabilities to “every industry.”

“The warp drive engine is accelerated computing, and the energy source is AI,” said Huang. Generative AI capabilities, he said, have “created a sense of urgency for companies to reimagine their products and business models. Industrial companies are racing to digitalize and reinvent into software-driven tech companies to be the disrupter and not the disrupted.”

5. TestGPT, a generative AI tool for ensuring code integrity, is released for beta

Finally, Tel Aviv-based Codium AI has released a beta version of its generative AI-powered code-integrity solution, dubbed TestGPT. This offers autogenerated software test suite suggestions to help developers speed coding and bug scans, starting with Python and JavaScript. The company said it received $11 million in seed funding to develop this AI model.