Technology giants are leaving no stone unturned in gearing up for the AI race. The launch of Open AI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 which gained close to a million users already opened a pandora's box. From finding Tinder matches to cracking Wharton’s MBA exam, the Internet was left astounded at the chatbot’s achievements (at times sinister) in a short span of time.
And then came Google’s Bard AI in February this year. A blog post by Google revealed how its chatbot was built on its existing large language model Lamda. Its specialty? So human-like in its responses, an engineer thought it was sentient.
And now Elon Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter is now reportedly trying to build a rival to ChatGPT. In an exclusive report carried by The Information, Musk has approached AI researchers recently to form a research lab to develop the chatbot.
Elon Musk's Chatbot
Elon Musk’s dislike for ChatGPT is not unknown. The Tesla CEO called the bot “extremely concerning” responding to a story that claimed that ChatGPT "praised democrats but not republicans and claimed that nukes are less dangerous than racism".
On another occasion, Isaac Latterell, former Republican member of the South Dakota House of Representatives tweeted that ChatGPT listed Trump, and Elon Musk as controversial, but not Biden and Bezos.
It's worth reminding that Elon Musk was a co-founder of Open AI which developed the chatbot. Musk left the board in 2018.
The Information report said that Musk has been in talks to hire Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet's DeepMind AI unit, to lead the development of the chatbot that will give competition to Open AI's ChatGPT.
Meta To Develop AI Persona Tools For Facebook, Instagram
With all of this, can Zuckerberg be far behind?
In a brief statement Mark Zuckerberg on Monday stated that Meta will be combining many of its teams working on AI into one top-level product.
"Over the longer term, we'll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways. We're exploring experiences with text (like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger), with images (like creative Instagram filters and ad formats), and with video and multi-modal experiences. We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I'm excited about all of the new things we'll build along the way," the Facebook CEO wrote.
Meta introduced chatbots to Messenger in 2016.
It's worth noting that Meta's plans to create this AI tool come at a time when its revenues are still shrinking. Its initial pivot towards the metaverse cost the company 36 billion dollars. It recently slashed over 11,000 jobs in cost-cutting measures to weather a rough economy.
Snapchat Is Also In The Race
Snapchat, in a press statement, announced that they have launched their own chatbot My AI using Open AI's ChatGPT tool.
"My AI can recommend birthday gift ideas for your BFF, plan a hiking trip for a long weekend, suggest a recipe for dinner, or even write a haiku about cheese for your cheddar-obsessed pal," the company said while announcing the new features. For now, only Snapchat + subscribers can get access to it and will have to pay $3.99 (Rs 329) per month.