Enlarge / The Google "G" logo surrounded by whimsical characters, all of which look stunned and surprised. (credit: Google)

On Thursday, Google capped off a rough week of providing inaccurate and sometimes dangerous answers through its experimental AI Overview feature by authoring a follow-up blog post titled, "AI Overviews: About last week." In the post, attributed to Google VP Liz Reid, head of Google Search, the firm formally acknowledged issues with the feature and outlined steps taken to improve a system that appears flawed by design, even if it doesn't realize it is admitting it.

To recap, the AI Overview feature—which the company showed off at Google I/O a few weeks ago—aims to provide search users with summarized answers to questions by using an AI model integrated with Google's web ranking systems. Right now, it's an experimental feature that is not active for everyone, but when a participating user searches for a topic, they might see an AI-generated answer at the top of the results, pulled from highly ranked web content and summarized by an AI model.

While Google claims this approach is "highly effective" and on par with its Featured Snippets in terms of accuracy, the past week has seen numerous examples of the AI system generating bizarre, incorrect, or even potentially harmful responses, as we detailed in a recent feature where Ars reporter Kyle Orland replicated many of the unusual outputs.

Enlarge / OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. (credit: JASON REDMOND / Contributor | AFP)

Apple and OpenAI have successfully made a deal to include OpenAI's generative AI technology in Apple's software, according to The Information, which cites a source who has spoken to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about the deal.

It was previously reported by Bloomberg that the deal was in the works. The news appeared in a longer article about Altman and his growing influence within the company.

"Now, [Altman] has fulfilled a longtime goal by striking a deal with Apple to use OpenAI’s conversational artificial intelligence in its products, which could be worth billions of dollars to the startup if it goes well," according to The Information's source.

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On Thursday, several major tech companies, including Google, Intel, Microsoft, Meta, AMD, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Cisco, and Broadcom, announced the formation of the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Promoter Group to develop a new interconnect standard for AI accelerator chips in data centers. The group aims to create an alternative to Nvidia's proprietary NVLink interconnect technology, which links together multiple servers that power today's AI applications like ChatGPT.

The beating heart of AI these days lies in GPUs, which can perform massive numbers of matrix multiplications—necessary for running neural network architecture—in parallel. But one GPU often isn't enough for complex AI systems. NVLink can connect multiple AI accelerator chips within a server or across multiple servers. These interconnects enable faster data transfer and communication between the accelerators, allowing them to work together more efficiently on complex tasks like training large AI models.

This linkage is a key part of any modern AI data center system, and whoever controls the link standard can effectively dictate which hardware the tech companies will use. Along those lines, the UALink group seeks to establish an open standard that allows multiple companies to contribute and develop AI hardware advancements instead of being locked into Nvidia's proprietary ecosystem. This approach is similar to other open standards, such as Compute Express Link (CXL)—created by Intel in 2019—which provides high-speed, high-capacity connections between CPUs and devices or memory in data centers.

Enlarge / Helen Toner, former OpenAI board member, speaks during Vox Media's 2023 Code Conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel on September 27, 2023. (credit: Getty Images)

In a recent interview on "The Ted AI Show" podcast, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner said the OpenAI board was unaware of the existence of ChatGPT until they saw it on Twitter. She also revealed details about the company's internal dynamics and the events surrounding CEO Sam Altman's surprise firing and subsequent rehiring last November.

OpenAI released ChatGPT publicly on November 30, 2022, and its massive surprise popularity set OpenAI on a new trajectory, shifting focus from being an AI research lab to a more consumer-facing tech company.

"When ChatGPT came out in November 2022, the board was not informed in advance about that. We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter," Toner said on the podcast.

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On Monday, OpenAI announced the formation of a new "Safety and Security Committee" to oversee risk management for its projects and operations. The announcement comes as the company says it has "recently begun" training its next frontier model, which it expects to bring the company closer to its goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), though some critics say AGI is farther off than we might think. It also comes as a reaction to two weeks of public setbacks for the company.

Whether the aforementioned new frontier model is intended to be GPT-5 or a step beyond that is currently unknown. In the AI industry, "frontier model" is a term for a new AI system designed to push the boundaries of current capabilities. And "AGI" refers to a hypothetical AI system with human-level abilities to perform novel, general tasks beyond its training data (unlike narrow AI, which is trained for specific tasks).

Meanwhile, the new Safety and Security Committee, led by OpenAI directors Bret Taylor (chair), Adam D'Angelo, Nicole Seligman, and Sam Altman (CEO), will be responsible for making recommendations about AI safety to the full company board of directors. In this case, "safety" partially means the usual "we won't let the AI go rogue and take over the world," but it also includes a broader set of "processes and safeguards" that the company spelled out in a May 21 safety update related to alignment research, protecting children, upholding election integrity, assessing societal impacts, and implementing security measures.

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Bing, Microsoft's search engine platform, went down in the very early morning today. That meant that searches from Microsoft's Edge browsers that had yet to change their default providers didn't work. It also meant that services relying on Bing's search API—Microsoft's own Copilot, ChatGPT search, Yahoo, Ecosia, and DuckDuckGo—similarly failed.

Services were largely restored by the morning Eastern work hours, but the timing feels apt, concerning, or some combination of the two. Google, the consistently dominating search platform, just last week announced and debuted AI Overviews as a default addition to all searches. If you don't want an AI response but still want to use Google, you can hunt down the new "Web" option in a menu, or you can, per Ernie Smith, tack "&udm=14" onto your search or use Smith's own "Konami code" shortcut page.

If dismay about AI's hallucinations, power draw, or pizza recipes concern you—along with perhaps broader Google issues involving privacy, tracking, news, SEO, or monopoly power—most of your other major options were brought down by a single API outage this morning. Moving past that kind of single point of vulnerability will take some work, both by the industry and by you, the person wondering if there's a real alternative.

Enlarge / Scarlett Johansson attends the Golden Heart Awards in 2023. (credit: Sean Zanni / Contributor | Patrick McMullan)

OpenAI is sticking to its story that it never intended to copy Scarlett Johansson's voice when seeking an actor for ChatGPT's "Sky" voice mode.

The company provided The Washington Post with documents and recordings clearly meant to support OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's defense against Johansson's claims that Sky was made to sound "eerily similar" to her critically acclaimed voice acting performance in the sci-fi film Her.

Johansson has alleged that OpenAI hired a soundalike to steal her likeness and confirmed that she declined to provide the Sky voice. Experts have said that Johansson has a strong case should she decide to sue OpenAI for violating her right to publicity, which gives the actress exclusive rights to the commercial use of her likeness.

Enlarge / A screenshot of Microsoft's new "Recall" feature in action. (credit: Microsoft)

At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called "Recall" for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. To make it work, Recall records everything users do on their PC, including activities in apps, communications in live meetings, and websites visited for research. Despite encryption and local storage, the new feature raises privacy concerns for certain Windows users.

"Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds," Microsoft says on its website. "The snapshots are encrypted and saved on your PC’s hard drive. You can use Recall to locate the content you have viewed on your PC using search or on a timeline bar that allows you to scroll through your snapshots."

By performing a Recall action, users can access a snapshot from a specific time period, providing context for the event or moment they are searching for. It also allows users to search through teleconference meetings they've participated in and videos watched using an AI-powered feature that transcribes and translates speech.

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Since the launch of its latest AI language model, GPT-4o, OpenAI has found itself on the defensive over the past week due to a string of bad news, rumors, and ridicule circulating on traditional and social media. The negative attention is potentially a sign that OpenAI has entered a new level of public visibility—and is more prominently receiving pushback to its AI approach beyond what it has seen from tech pundits and government regulators.

OpenAI's rough week started last Monday when the company previewed a flirty AI assistant with a voice seemingly inspired by Scarlett Johansson from the 2013 film Her. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman alluded to the film himself on X just before the event, and we had previously made that comparison with an earlier voice interface for ChatGPT that launched in September 2023.

While that September update included a voice called "Sky" that some have said sounds like Johansson, it was GPT-4o's seemingly lifelike new conversational interface, complete with laughing and emotionally charged tonal shifts, that led to a widely circulated Daily Show segment ridiculing the demo for its perceived flirty nature. Next, a Saturday Night Live joke reinforced an implied connection to Johansson's voice.

Enlarge / Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix attend Her premiere during the 8th Rome Film Festival at Auditorium Parco Della Musica on November 10, 2013, in Rome, Italy. (credit: Franco Origlia / Contributor | Getty Images Entertainment)

OpenAI has paused a voice mode option for ChatGPT-4o, Sky, after backlash accusing the AI company of intentionally ripping off Scarlett Johansson's critically acclaimed voice-acting performance in the 2013 sci-fi film Her.

In a blog defending its casting decision for Sky, OpenAI went into great detail explaining its process for choosing the individual voice options for its chatbot. But ultimately, the company seemed pressed to admit that Sky's voice was just too similar to Johansson's to keep using it, at least for now.

"We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice—Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice," OpenAI's blog said.

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In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and one of the company’s co-founders, was named as the co-lead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20 percent of its computing power.

Now OpenAI’s “superalignment team” is no more, the company confirms. That comes after the departures of several researchers involved, Tuesday’s news that Sutskever was leaving the company, and the resignation of the team’s other co-lead. The group’s work will be absorbed into OpenAI’s other research efforts.

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Stuff posted on Reddit is getting incorporated into ChatGPT, Reddit and OpenAI announced on Thursday. The new partnership grants OpenAI access to Reddit’s Data API, giving the generative AI firm real-time access to Reddit posts.

Reddit content will be incorporated into ChatGPT "and new products," Reddit's blog post said. The social media firm claims the partnership will "enable OpenAI’s AI tools to better understand and showcase Reddit content, especially on recent topics." OpenAI will also start advertising on Reddit.

The deal is similar to one that Reddit struck with Google in February that allows the tech giant to make "new ways to display Reddit content" and provide "more efficient ways to train models," Reddit said at the time. Neither Reddit nor OpenAI disclosed the financial terms of their partnership, but Reddit's partnership with Google was reportedly worth $60 million.

Enlarge / An image Ilya Sutskever tweeted with this OpenAI resignation announcement. From left to right: New OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, President Greg Brockman, Sutskever, CEO Sam Altman, and CTO Mira Murati. (credit: Ilya Sutskever / X)

On Tuesday evening, OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever announced that he is leaving the company he co-founded, six months after he participated in the coup that temporarily ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Jan Leike, a fellow member of Sutskever's Superalignment team, is reportedly resigning with him.

"After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI," Sutskever tweeted. "The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati and now, under the excellent research leadership of @merettm. It was an honor and a privilege to have worked together, and I will miss everyone dearly."

Sutskever has been with the company since its founding in 2015 and is widely seen as one of the key engineers behind some of OpenAI's biggest technical breakthroughs. As a former OpenAI board member, he played a key role in the removal of Sam Altman as CEO in the shocking firing last November. While it later emerged that Altman's firing primarily stemmed from a power struggle with former board member Helen Toner, Sutskever sided with Toner and personally delivered the news to Altman that he was being fired on behalf of the board.

Enlarge / A video still of Project Astra demo at the Google I/O conference keynote in Mountain View on May 14, 2024. (credit: Google)

Just one day after OpenAI revealed GPT-4o, which it bills as being able to understand what's taking place in a video feed and converse about it, Google announced Project Astra, a research prototype that features similar video comprehension capabilities. It was announced by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on Tuesday at the Google I/O conference keynote in Mountain View, California.

Hassabis called Astra "a universal agent helpful in everyday life." During a demonstration, the research model showcased its capabilities by identifying sound-producing objects, providing creative alliterations, explaining code on a monitor, and locating misplaced items. The AI assistant also exhibited its potential in wearable devices, such as smart glasses, where it could analyze diagrams, suggest improvements, and generate witty responses to visual prompts.

Google says that Astra uses the camera and microphone on a user's device to provide assistance in everyday life. By continuously processing and encoding video frames and speech input, Astra creates a timeline of events and caches the information for quick recall. The company says that this enables the AI to identify objects, answer questions, and remember things it has seen that are no longer in the camera's frame.

Enlarge / Oh you silly, silly human. Why are you so silly, you silly human? (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

At this point, anyone with even a passing interest in AI is very familiar with the process of typing out messages to a chatbot and getting back long streams of text in response. Today's announcement of ChatGPT-4o—which lets users converse with a chatbot using real-time audio and video—might seem like a mere lateral evolution of that basic interaction model.

After looking through over a dozen video demos OpenAI posted alongside today's announcement, though, I think we're on the verge of something more like a sea change in how we think of and work with large language models. While we don't yet have access to ChatGPT-4o's audio-visual features ourselves, the important non-verbal cues on display here—both from GPT-4o and from the users—make the chatbot instantly feel much more human. And I'm not sure the average user is fully ready for how they might feel about that.

It thinks it’s people

Take this video, where a newly expectant father looks to ChatGPT-4o for an opinion on a dad joke ("What do you call a giant pile of kittens? A meow-ntain!"). The old ChatGPT4 could easily type out the same responses of "Congrats on the upcoming addition to your family!" and "That's perfectly hilarious. Definitely a top-tier dad joke." But there's much more impact to hearing GPT-4o give that same information in the video, complete with the gentle laughter and rising and falling vocal intonations of a lifelong friend.

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On Monday, OpenAI employee William Fedus confirmed on X that a mysterious chart-topping AI chatbot known as "gpt-chatbot" that had been undergoing testing on LMSYS's Chatbot Arena and frustrating experts was, in fact, OpenAI's newly announced GPT-4o AI model. He also revealed that GPT-4o had topped the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, achieving the highest documented score ever.

"GPT-4o is our new state-of-the-art frontier model. We’ve been testing a version on the LMSys arena as im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot," Fedus tweeted.

Chatbot Arena is a website where visitors converse with two random AI language models side by side without knowing which model is which, then choose which model gives the best response. It's a perfect example of vibe-based AI benchmarking, as AI researcher Simon Willison calls it.

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On Monday, OpenAI debuted GPT-4o (o for "omni"), a major new AI model that can ostensibly converse using speech in real time, reading emotional cues and responding to visual input. It operates faster than OpenAI's previous best model, GPT-4 Turbo, and will be free for ChatGPT users and available as a service through API, rolling out over the next few weeks, OpenAI says.

OpenAI revealed the new audio conversation and vision comprehension capabilities in a YouTube livestream titled "OpenAI Spring Update," presented by OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and employees Mark Chen and Barret Zoph that included live demos of GPT-4o in action.

OpenAI claims that GPT-4o responds to audio inputs in about 320 milliseconds on average, which is similar to human response times in conversation, according to a 2009 study, and much shorter than the typical 2–3 second lag experienced with previous models. With GPT-4o, OpenAI says it trained a brand-new AI model end-to-end using text, vision, and audio in a way that all inputs and outputs "are processed by the same neural network."