From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet

Judi Dench, Keegan-Michael Key, and Awkwafina are among multiple “actors and influencers” whose voices could become part of Meta’s AI offering, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The company is apparently working to wrap up deals quickly so it can develop and show off the new voices at its Meta Connect conference in September.

Specifically, at least one tool will be “a digital assistant product called MetaAI,” according to multiple unnamed sources in a New York Times report. Meta is negotiating with all of the top talent agencies in Hollywood to secure the voices, the Times writes. And it may pay the actors who sign on “millions of dollars.” Meta doled out similarly fat stacks to the celebrities represented by the recently-discontinued Meta AI chatbots from last year’s Connect.

After striking deals with Google and OpenAI, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is calling on Microsoft and others to pay if they want to continue scraping the site’s data.

“Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used,” Huffman said in an interview this week. He specifically named Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for refusing to negotiate, saying it has been “a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”

Meta’s AI assistant incorrectly said that the recent attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump didn’t happen, an error a company executive is now attributing to the technology powering its chatbot and others.

In a company blog post published on Tuesday, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s global head of policy, calls the responses of its AI to questions about the shooting “unfortunate.” He says Meta AI was first programmed to not respond to questions about the attempted assassination but the company removed that restriction after people started noticing. He also acknowledges that “in a small number of cases, Meta AI continued to provide incorrect answers, including sometimes asserting that the event didn’t happen – which we are quickly working to address.”

Meta is opening up the ability for anyone in the US to create AI versions of themselves in Instagram or on the web with a new tool called AI Studio.

The pitch is that creators and business owners will use these AI profiles to talk to their followers on their behalf. They’ll be able to talk directly with humans in chat threads and respond to comments on their author’s account. Meta says Instagram users in the US can get started with AI Studio via either its website or by starting a new “AI chat” directly in Instagram.

The AI race is quickly changing. Focus is shifting away from the models themselves to the products they power, as evidenced by the events of this week.

First, there was Mark Zuckerberg continuing his scorched-earth campaign to drive down the cost of accessing foundational AI models. Llama 3.1 narrows the gap between the performance of open- and closed-source AI, and Meta claims it costs roughly half as much as OpenAI’s GPT-4o to run. In a video announcing the news, Zuckerberg wore a custom shirt with a quote from Emperor Augustus emblazoned in Latin: “At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army.”

OpenAI is announcing its much-anticipated entry into the search market, SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine with real-time access to information across the internet.

The search engine starts with a large textbox that asks the user “What are you looking for?” But rather than returning a plain list of links, SearchGPT tries to organize and make sense of them. In one example from OpenAI, the search engine summarizes its findings on music festivals and then presents short descriptions of the events followed by an attribution link.

Bing’s new search experience puts AI-generated answers front and center while pushing traditional search results to the side. The new layout, which is rolling out for a small number of queries, fills your search results page with AI-generated summaries addressing various aspects of your question.

Microsoft has shared an early look at what this search experience will look like... and it’s a lot. For the query “What is a spaghetti western?” Bing displays a summary explaining that it’s a “subgenre of western films produced by Italian filmmakers,” along with a series of bullet points of the genre’s key characteristics.

Reddit is ramping up its crackdown on web crawlers. Over the past few weeks, Reddit has started blocking search engines from surfacing recent posts and comments unless the search engine pays up, according to a report from 404 Media.

Right now, Google is the only mainstream search engine that shows recent results when you search for posts on Reddit using the “site:reddit.com” trick, 404 Media reports. This leaves out Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other alternatives — likely because Google has struck a $60 million deal that lets the company train its AI models on content from Reddit.

Back in April, Meta teased that it was working on a first for the AI industry: an open-source model with performance that matched the best private models from companies like OpenAI.

Today, that model has arrived. Meta is releasing Llama 3.1, the largest-ever open-source AI model, which the company claims outperforms GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks. It’s also making the Llama-based Meta AI assistant available in more countries and languages while adding a feature that can generate images based on someone’s specific likeness. CEO Mark Zuckerberg now predicts that Meta AI will be the most widely used assistant by the end of this year, surpassing ChatGPT.

Artificial intelligence is the hot new thing in tech — it feels like every company is talking about how it’s making strides by using or developing AI. But the field of AI is also so filled with jargon that it can be remarkably difficult to understand what’s actually happening with each new development.

To help you better understand what’s going on, we’ve put together a list of some of the most common AI terms. We’ll do our best to explain what they mean and why they’re important.

Figma recently pulled its “Make Designs” generative AI tool after a user discovered that asking it to design a weather app would spit out something suspiciously similar to Apple’s weather app — a result that could, among other things, land a user in legal trouble. This also suggested that Figma may have trained the feature on Apple’s designs, and while CEO Dylan Field was quick to say that the company didn’t train the tool on Figma content or app designs, the company has now released a full statement in a company blog post.

The statement says that Figma “carefully reviewed” Make Designs’ underlying design systems during development and as part of a private beta. “But in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we simply didn’t vet carefully enough,” writes Noah Levin, Figma VP of product design. “A few of those assets were similar to aspects of real world applications, and appeared in the output of the feature with certain prompts.”

Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, and other big names in AI are coming together to form the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI), according to an announcement on Thursday. The initiative aims to address a “fragmented landscape of AI security” by providing access to open-source methodologies, frameworks, and tools.

We don’t know how much of an impact CoSAI will have on the AI industry, but concerns about leaking confidential information and automated discrimination come to mind as examples of questions about the security, privacy, and safety of generative AI technology.

More than 170,000 YouTube videos are part of a massive dataset that was used to train AI systems for some of the biggest technology companies, according to an investigation by Proof News and copublished with Wired. Apple, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Salesforce are among the tech firms that used the “YouTube Subtitles” data that was ripped from the video platform without permission. The training dataset is a collection of subtitles taken from YouTube videos belonging to more than 48,000 channels — it does not include imagery from the videos.

Videos from popular creators like MrBeast and Marques Brownlee appear in the dataset, as do clips from news outlets like ABC News, the BBC, and The New York Times. More than 100 videos from The Verge appear in the dataset, along with many other videos from Vox.

Google is launching its new Vids productivity app in Workspace Labs with the idea that “if you can make a slide, you can make a video in Vids.” Announced in April, Vids allows users to drop docs, slides, voiceovers, and video recordings into a timeline to create a presentation video to share with coworkers. Making it available in the Workspace Labs preview allows Workspace admins to opt in users to try out the AI-powered video maker.

While you can generate video in Vids, it’s not to be confused with AI tools like OpenAI’s Sora, which can create lifelike footage from a prompt. Instead, Vids is about generating a presentation by describing what you want Gemini to create and then letting you alter the video afterward.

Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, is rolling out to all users in the US on Amazon’s mobile app. You can pull up the shopping assistant by tapping the orange and blue icon in the right corner of the app’s navigation bar, where Rufus can answer questions, draw comparisons between items, and give you updates on your order.

Amazon first introduced Rufus in February but only made it available to a small group of users. Rufus uses Amazon’s product listing details, reviews, and community Q&As, along with some information from the web, to inform its answers.

An old Apple blog and the blog’s former authors have become the latest victims of AI-written sludge. TUAW (“The Unofficial Apple Weblog”) was shut down by AOL in 2015, but this past year, a new owner scooped up the domain and began posting articles under the bylines of former writers who haven’t worked there for over a decade. And that new owner, which also appears to run other AI sludge websites, seems to be trying to hide.

Christina Warren, who left a long career in tech journalism to join Microsoft and later GitHub as a developer advocate, shared screenshots of what was happening on Tuesday. In the images, you can see that Warren has apparently been writing new posts as of this July — even though she hasn’t worked at TUAW since 2009, she confirms to The Verge.

The Washington Post is sticking a new climate-focused AI chatbot inside its homepage, app, and articles. The experimental tool, called Climate Answers, will use the outlet’s breadth of reporting to answer questions about climate change, the environment, sustainable energy, and more.

Some of the questions you can ask the chatbot include things like, “Should I get solar panels for my home?” or “Where in the US are sea levels rising the fastest?” Much like the other AI chatbots we’ve seen, it will then serve up a summary using the information it’s been trained on. In this case, Climate Answers uses the articles within The Washington Post’s climate section — as far back as the section’s launch in 2016 — to answer questions.