Is this Microsoft's ChatGPT rival?

Howdy, wizards.

I’m regularly sharing AI news and tool recommendations on LinkedIn – and I’d love for you to join me there. To everyone who follows me this week, I’ll send you a special treat by DM: my favourite custom instruction for ChatGPT that you can implement right now. I haven’t seen it anywhere else, but it’s saving me hours each month.

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Here’s what I got for you this week:

• Dario’s Picks:
  1. Microsoft’s massive new foundation model
  2. Claude gets Team plan and an iOS app
  3. OpenAI might be launching a search engine
  4. Randy Travis sings again with the help of AI
  5. OpenAI is making deals with news publishers – and getting sued by them‍
  6. Bytes: the other important AI news this week

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Dario’s Picks

1. Microsoft’s massive new foundation model

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Microsoft is building their own in-house LLM. The model’s name internally is MA-1 and it is, with a massive 500B parameters, probably large enough to compete with the leading LLMs to date. The model Microsoft is developing now dwarfs any of the smaller, open-source models the company has previously trained.

The effort is led by Mustafa Suleyman who recently joined from Inflection AI, along with other most of the other staff from Inflection that Microsoft recently acquired in a 650$ million deal.

Why it matters

Microsoft seems to be steering in the direction of lessening their dependence on OpenAI. Considering their financial power, learnings from their partnership with OpenAI and the recent boost of expertise from Inflection (makers of the emotionally intelligent chatbot Pi) – it’s likely that the company might soon become a key player in the market of foundation models and chatbots.

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2. Claude gets Team plan and an iOS app

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Claude, one of the best AI chatbots in the game right now (in addition to ChatGPT and Gemini) just dropped two new things:

• A Team plan for businesses. Requiring a minimum of 5 seats, at 30$/user/month, it’s ideal for small teams. The main things are the privacy aspect, as it protects your business’ data, and increased usage versus the Pro plan.
• An iOS app for everyone. It’s free and syncs with your web chats. It also has vision capability, so you can analyse things from the real world with your phone’s camera.

Anthropic also announced they’ve got new collaboration features and integrations with databases coming soon to Claude.

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Why it matters

I think for many businesses it’s not an either/or for ChatGPT and Claude – they’ll sign up for Teams plans on both. There’s tasks where one thrives over the other.

I’m also excited to see vision capability on mobile. I’m using the one in ChatGPT for so many things: getting context for stuff I see in a museum, translating signs when I’m travelling, identifying weird animals I see, etc.)

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3. OpenAI might be launching a search engine

Fresh off the rumour mill. OpenAI registered SSL certificates for https://search.chatgpt.com/ (reported by The Information back in February), fuelling rumours that they’re launching a search engine – a Google competitor.

Some people who might have insider knowledge, insinuated it’ll launch this week, but it looks like it might not happen as The Information now reports OpenAI is considering postponing a product event this week.

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Why it matters

I personally don’t think OpenAI has a Google imitation in the works. Sam Altman specifically said, during the recent podcast with Lex Fridman that “I don’t think the world needs another copy of Google”. But I think they’re up to something more in the direction of what Perplexity is doing, at an intersection of LLMs and search.

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4. Randy Travis sings again with the help of AI

Randy Travis, an American country singer that lost his voice to a stroke in 2013, has released a new song, Where That Came From, under the Warner record label that’s using an AI-restored version of his voice.

The process consisted of a surrogate singer and an AI model trained on 42 vocal-isolated recordings of the artist. The surrogate singer’s voice was then transformed into Travis’ with AI.

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Why it matters

With all the (legitimate) critique against AI voice cloning and its very real potential for scams, etc., I must admit it’s refreshing to see something like this balancing the picture a bit. Let’s hope there’s more “where that came from” ;)

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5. OpenAI is making deals with news publishers – and getting sued by them

8 regional US newspapers (owned by Alden Global Group) just sued OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringements in training their AI models. It’s not the first time neither of the companies are getting sued for this very reason, not long ago they were sued by none other than NYT.

However, it’s interesting to note that at the same time OpenAI is actively making licensing deals with some of the biggest publishers out there; just last week they partnered with Financial Times.

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Why it matters

Between the lines, it seems to me news publishers are doing what they can to get a share of the cake in these AI times. It’s unclear why they went for a lawsuit rather than opting to strike a deal, though. Whatever the outcome of these lawsuits, it’s going to affect how news publishers go about gating their content and think about revenue streams going forward.

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GPTs

Due to technical issues with the database there’s no GPT updates this time – but they’ll be back again next week.

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Bytes

Quick links to other notable AI news and resources from the last week

• Hampton, a private community of founders surveyed 100+ of their members on how they use AI. You can see which tools are most used in their business, etc.
• GitHub Copilot Workspace: Welcome to the Copilot-native developer environment
• Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered assistant for businesses and developers, is now generally available
• Elon Musk’s Plan For AI News
• Better Siri is coming: what Apple’s research says about its AI plans