OpenAI DevDay deep dive

Plus: Elon's new chatbot

November 10, 2023

Happy Friday! How’s this for a crazy story to start your weekend: Polish rum company Dictador appointed the world’s first AI CEO, Mika. While we don’t know how many executive decisions Mika is really in charge of, the humanoid robot claims that she is devoid of personal bias, ensuring strategic choices that prioritize Dictador’s best interests. The cherry on top? Mika just became an honorary professor at the Collegium Humanum University in Warsaw. 

Anyway, here are the top AI headlines you definitely shouldn’t miss this week!

Everything You Need to Know About DevDay

OpenAI

OpenAI just changed the game—again. The company’s heavily anticipated DevDay finally happened, bringing about some major updates.

The biggest announcements:

1)    GPT Builder allows anyone (with a Plus account) to build their own custom versions of ChatGPT—called GPTs—tailored to a specific purpose. For example, you can create a GPT specifically designed to critique your creative writing or a Canva GPT that creates new designs. Training your GPT on natural language (i.e. simple text instructions) is enough…no coding required. GPTs sport several useful features:

  • Integration with web browsing, DALL-E, and OpenAI’s code interpreter tool. 

  • Access to external data (like interacting with your emails, databases, or Canva account). 

2)    GPT Store, to be launched later this month, will allow users to share and sell the GPTs they’ve created. Essentially the App Store of AI, this could be the beginning of a democratized GPT economy with millions of creators (coders or not) monetizing the AI apps they’ve built.

3)    GPT-4 Turbo is the updated version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. It accepts a lot more input than previous models: GPT-4 Turbo has a 128,000 token context window, meaning you can now input up to 100,000 words (AKA nearly 300 pages in length). This is 4x the size of the old GPT-4’s context window and 28,000 tokens more than Claude’s. GPT-4 Turbo also boasts:

  • Cost savings. While the tokens are increasing, the price is decreasing: “GPT-4 Turbo input tokens are 3x cheaper than GPT-4 at $0.01 and output tokens are 2x cheaper at $0.03,” the company said.

  • Up-to-date knowledge. GPT-4 Turbo can now access information up to April 2023.

  • Voice variety. With its fancy new text-to-speech feature, GPT-4 Turbo also comes with six preset voices to choose from.

Other big updates:

  • The Assistants API. This purpose-built AI allows developers to build their own agents to interpret code, retrieve external data, or call programming functions for a specific action.

  • Copyright Shield. This promises to protect AI builders from copyright claims. OpenAI said it will cover any legal fees for its developer customers in the face of IP lawsuits.

  • …and much more.

Big picture: With competition heating up, OpenAI is strategically positioning itself as the go-to platform for AI developers. And it’s off to a good start—the latest updates make it easier than ever for builders to participate in the AI ecosystem.

🗞️ Other AI News & Articles

Elon’s Snarky New Chatbot

Jaap Arriens—NurPhoto/Getty Images

Last weekend, Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI sent waves through the AI world with its announcement of its first chatbot, Grok. And in true Elon style, Grok is anything but boring.

The details: Grok is powered by Grok-1, xAI’s frontier LLM that reportedly surpasses GPT-3.5’s capabilities—yet lags behind GPT-4’s— according to ML benchmarks (like math problems and multiple-choice questions). After just two months of training, Grok is still in beta and available to a select number of users to test. Eventually, Grok will be a feature of X Premium+, which costs $16 per month.

What makes Grok different?

  • Modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Grok has a witty, rebellious personality. As a counterweight to ChatGPT, Grok intends to be “less politically correct” and will also answer “spicy” questions.

  • Grok is trained on X data, one of the largest text datasets in the world.

  • Grok also has access to posts on X in real-time, giving it the ability to comment on current events.

  • Features like APIs, image, and audio recognition are currently in the works. A version of Grok will also run in Teslas.

Why it matters: Grok’s rebellious tone strongly contrasts Claude’s and ChatGPT’s careful responses. It remains to be seen whether there’s a strong demand for uncensored chatbots—but if there is, experts fear that misinformation and socially harmful content could spread more easily.

P.S. xAI kept up the announcement streak after Grok’s launch. On Monday, it launched PromptIDE—a software application for building prompts and interpreting AI model outputs. This makes it easier for users to write and debug prompts and understand how their prompts affect Grok’s outputs.

Rentable GPU Capacity

Amazon

Getting your hands on GPU capacity is like trying to snag the last slice of pizza at a college party—competitive, chaotic, and pretty hard to pull off. But Amazon Web Services (AWS) just launched a new service that makes it a lot easier (securing GPU instances, that is, not pizza).

 The TL;DR: 

  • The new service—called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Capacity Blocks for ML—lets customers rent Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU instances for quick AI projects.

  • Users can sign up for the number of instances they need for a defined block of time, and know exactly how much it will cost upfront (like reserving a hotel room). 

  • Users can reserve their desired amount of GPU instances for up to 14 days, up to eight weeks in advance.

    • When the time frame is up, the instances automatically shut down.

  • The price for renting GPUs is dynamic, meaning it varies depending on supply and demand.

Big picture: AWS’s new service provides a much-needed solution for AI builders to get access to GPUs, which saw high costs and major supply shortages in recent months.

By avoiding months-long contracts and only paying for the processing power they really need, developers without Big Tech money gain the resources they need to build. It’s yet another major step towards AI democratization.

Everything else:

  • Fastbots enables agencies to white label and sell Ai Chatbots to their clients.*

  • Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic—just weeks after Amazon’s $4 billion commitment. 

  • Midjourney, Stability AI, and Deviant Art scored a court victory in an AI copyright case by artists. 

  • Microsoft started rolling out Windows 11 with integrated Copilot. 

  • Instagram is reportedly developing a customizable “AI friend”. 

  • Quora’s AI platform Poe introduced an AI chatbot creator economy.

  • Scarlett Johansson hits AI app with legal action for cloning her voice in an ad.

*This is sponsored advertising content.

📺️ This Week’s Videos to Watch:

More important AI news: Dive deeper into this week’s hottest AI news stories (because yes, there are even more) in my latest YouTube video:

More on Grok: Still wondering how you can use Grok? In this video I check out what the new chatbot can actually do.

DevDay 101: Here’s OpenAI CEO Sam Altman introducing all the new GPT updates at DevDay’s opening keynote.

And that’s a wrap! Curious to hear whether you think Grok will give ChatGPT a run for its money. Does the world need more sarcastic chatbots? Shoot me a reply with your thoughts!

—Matt (FutureTools.io)

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You rock! See ya next week. :)

P.S. This newsletter is 100% written by a human. Okay, maybe 96%.