Top 2 stories of the week: AI buzz and CES unveils a self-driving — baby stroller?
Happy New Year! This first week of 2023 has already been a whirlwind of AI and excitement from CES 2023, the annual Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.
Senior writer/editor, Sharon Goldman, was kept busy with, among other AI news, DALL-E and ChatGPT. Will 2023 be the year of generative AI? It’s sure starting that way. In our top story of the week, Goldman talks to the DALL-E inventor and DALL-E 2 co-inventor, Aditya Ramesh, about how far the technology has come in its first two years, and how much further it can go.
Our second and third top stories both star ChatGPT. In position 2, Ben Dickson analyzes Microsoft’s decision this week to incorporate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, reportedly as soon as March. Will it help Bing unseat Google as the top search engine? Maybe … But maybe it will topple Google in other ways.
In position 3, papers written by ChatGPT have been banned from a top AI conference. And then the crowd went wild! Teachers and professors have already been expressing their concern about receiving papers written by AI instead of students; now the topic has moved beyond academia. Since it directly affects those who create and revise the actual AI technology, expect to see the issue addressed in 3, 2, 1 …
Our fourth and fifth top stories of the week are about new technologies unveiled at this week’s CES show. Everyone could use a lighter pair of AR glasses, but a self-driving baby stroller? That’s going to be a harder sell.
Here are the top five stories for the week of January 2nd.
1. Two years after DALL-E debut, its inventor is ‘surprised’ by impact
Before DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, there was just a research paper called “Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation.”
With that paper and a controlled website demo, on January 5, 2021 — two years ago today — OpenAI introduced DALL-E, a neural network that “creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.” (Also today: OpenAI just happens to reportedly be in talks for a “tender offer that would value it at $29 billion.”)
2. ChatGPT and the unbundling of online search
Since the release of ChatGPT in November, there has been a lot of speculation about OpenAI’s latest large language model (LLM) spelling doom for Google Search. The sentiment has only intensified with the recent report of Microsoft preparing to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine.
There are several reasons to believe that a ChatGPT-powered Bing (or any other search engine) will not seriously threaten Google’s search near-monopoly. LLMs have several critical problems to solve before they can make a dent in the online search industry. Meanwhile, Google’s share of the search market, its technical ability and its financial resources will help it remain competitive (and possibly dominant) as conversational LLMs start to make their mark in online search.