At this point, Apple might as well just go ahead and announce it is working on a ChatGPT rival.ChatGPT is an artificial-intelligence chatbot developed by San Francisco-based AI research company OpenAI. Released in November 2022, it can have conversations on topics from history to philosophy, generate lyrics in the style of Taylor Swift or Billy Joel, and suggest edits to computer programming code. See more details below.
The term ‘artificial intelligence’ began life back in the 1950s, but it’s something almost all of us will have encountered. Online maps, facial recognition and even social media are all considered forms of AI, but in recent years the tech has expanded to become more humanlike.
Virtual assistants such as Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri have all been created to speak and respond like a person, but new advanced chatbots have knowledge no human can match.
They include one you’ve probably heard a lot about recently: ChatGPT. But what actually is it, and what can it do that wasn’t possible already? Here’s everything you need to know.
What is ChatGPT?
Created by American company OpenAI in late 2022, ChatGPT is an advanced chatbot that falls into the category of ‘generative AI’. Essentially, this means you enter a written prompt and get a text-based response back.
ChatGPT is trained on a vast compilation of articles, websites and social-media posts scraped from the internet as well as real-time conversations—primarily in English—with human contractors hired by OpenAI. It learns to mimic the grammar and structure of the writing and reflects frequently-used phrases.
The chatbot isn’t always accurate: its sources aren’t fact-checked, and it relies on human feedback to improve its accuracy.
As reported by CNBC, Alibaba, the Chinese technology giant Alibaba has announced that it is working on its own competitor to ChatGPT, the conversational AI developed by OpenAI that has taken the tech industry by storm over the last few months.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba told CNBC Wednesday that it is working on a rival to ChatGPT, joining the flurry of tech firms to jump on board the chatbot hype. A company spokesperson said the company is working on a ChatGPT-style of technology and it is currently being tested internally at the firm.
While Alibaba says that the technology has been in development since 2017 and testing is already being done internally at the company, it would not tell the outlet when users can actually expect to get their hands on the product.
A spokesperson for the company said that “as a technology leader, we will continue to invest in turning cutting-edge innovations into value-added applications for our customers as well as their end-users through cloud services.”
Alibaba is the latest tech giant to wade into the AI wars that are starting to heat up. Just this week, both Microsoft and Google held events to showcase their advancements in artificial intelligence. For Microsoft, the company announced a brand new version of Bing, the company’s search engine, and Edge, its web browser. Both new versions incorporate the next generation of GPT, Open AI’s conversational AI technology.
Google, on the other hand, announced some notable AI updates to both search and maps. It also revealed Bard a few days ago, the company’s competitor to the new version of Bing. The first demo of Google’s AI chatbot, however, contained a pretty embarrassing error when it said the James Webb Space Telescope was the first to discover planets outside of our solar system. That’s incorrect.
The AI wars are here!