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On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it will provide legal protection for customers who are sued for copyright infringement over content generated by the company's AI systems. This new policy, called the Copilot Copyright Commitment, is an expansion of Microsoft's existing intellectual property indemnification coverage, Reuters reports .

Microsoft's announcement comes as generative AI tools like ChatGPT have raised concerns about reproducing copyrighted material without proper attribution. Microsoft has heavily invested in AI through products like GitHub Copilot and Bing Chat that can generate original code, text, and images on demand. Its AI models have gained these capabilities by scraping publicly available data off of the Internet without seeking express permission from copyright holders.

By offering legal protection, Microsoft aims to give customers confidence in deploying its AI systems without worrying about potential copyright issues. The policy covers damages and legal fees, providing customers with an added layer of protection as generative AI sees rapid adoption across the tech industry.

Enlarge / The Anthropic Claude logo. (credit: Anthropic / Benj Edwards)

On Thursday, AI-maker and OpenAI competitor Anthropic launched Claude Pro , a subscription-based version of its Claude.ai web-based AI assistant, which functions similarly to ChatGPT. It's available for $20/month in the US or 18 pounds/month in the UK, and it promises five-times-higher usage limits, priority access to Claude during high-traffic periods, and early access to new features as they emerge.

Like ChatGPT, Claude Pro can compose text, summarize, do analysis, solve logic puzzles, and more.

Claude.ai is what Anthropic offers as its conversational interface for its Claude 2 AI language model, similar to how ChatGPT provides an application wrapper for the underlying models GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. In February, OpenAI chose a subscription route for ChatGPT Plus , which for $20 a month also gives early access to new features, but it also unlocks access to GPT-4, which is OpenAI's most powerful language model.

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Last week, OpenAI published tips for educators in a promotional blog post that shows how some teachers are using ChatGPT as an educational aid, along with suggested prompts to get started. In a related FAQ , they also officially admit what we already know: AI writing detectors don't work, despite frequently being used to punish students with false positives.

In a section of the FAQ titled "Do AI detectors work?", OpenAI writes , "In short, no. While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated content."

In July, we covered in depth why AI writing detectors such as GPTZero don't work, with experts calling them "mostly snake oil." These detectors often yield false positives due to relying on unproven detection metrics. Ultimately, there is nothing special about AI-written text that always distinguishes it from human-written, and detectors can be defeated by rephrasing. That same month, OpenAI discontinued its AI Classifier, which was an experimental tool designed to detect AI-written text. It had an abysmal 26 percent accuracy rate.

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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it will host its first-ever developer conference, OpenAI DevDay, on November 6, 2023, in San Francisco. The one-day event hopes to bring together hundreds of developers to preview new tools and discuss ideas with OpenAI's technical staff.

Launched in November, ChatGPT has driven intense interest in generative AI around the world, including tech investments, talk of regulations, a GPU hardware boom , and the emergence of competitors. OpenAI says in a blog post that since launching its first API in 2020, over 2 million developers now use its models like GPT-3, GPT-4 , DALL-E , and Whisper for a variety of applications, "from integrating smart assistants into existing applications to building entirely new applications and services that weren't possible before."

While OpenAI's DevDay event will mostly take place in person, the keynote and potentially some parts of the conference will be streamed online. "The one-day event will bring hundreds of developers from around the world together with the team at OpenAI to preview new tools and exchange ideas," writes OpenAI. "In-person attendees will also be able to join breakout sessions led by members of OpenAI’s technical staff."

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On Wednesday, TurboTax-maker Intuit launched an AI assistant called "Intuit Assist" that can provide AI-generated financial recommendations and assist with decision-making when using the company's software, Reuters reports . Inuit Assist uses a custom large language model platform called GenOS , and it is available now to all TurboTax customers and select users of Intuit's other products, including Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, with a wider rollout planned in the coming months.

"Consumers will find it easier than ever to manage and improve their financial lives," the company writes on its promotional website. "They’ll be able to get personalized recommendations throughout the year, with actions they can take to maximize their tax refund and accurately file taxes in record time with TurboTax. And they’ll be given the tools to make smart money decisions throughout their financial journey with Credit Karma."

Intuit also sees Intuit Assist as a way to level the playing field for small and medium-sized businesses, which often lack the resources of larger companies. The AI assistant will reportedly help shorten the time it takes to file taxes and provide faster access to refunds, as well as offer personalized financial advice. Intuit Chief Data Officer Ashok Srivastava told Reuters that the company's AI models "competed favorably" against other AI systems in internal accuracy tests.

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On Tuesday, Meta announced SeamlessM4T , a multimodal AI model for speech and text translations. As a neural network that can process both text and audio, it can perform text-to-speech, speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, and text-to-text translations for "up to 100 languages," according to Meta. Its goal is to help people who speak different languages communicate with each other more effectively.

Continuing Meta's relatively open approach to AI, Meta is releasing SeamlessM4T under a research license (CC BY-NC 4.0) that allows developers to build on the work. They're also releasing SeamlessAlign, which Meta calls "the biggest open multimodal translation dataset to date, totaling 270,000 hours of mined speech and text alignments." That will likely kick-start the training of future translation AI models from other researchers.

Among the features of SeamlessM4T touted on Meta's promotional blog, the company says that the model can perform speech recognition (you give it audio of speech, and it converts it to text), speech-to-text translation (it translates spoken audio to a different language in text), speech-to-speech translation (you feed it speech audio, and it outputs translated speech audio), text-to-text translation (similar to how Google Translate functions), and text-to-speech translation (feed it text and it will translate and speak it out in another language). Each of the text translation functions supports nearly 100 languages, and the speech output functions support about 36 output languages.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a chatbot in front of library shelves. (credit: Benj Edwards / Stable Diffusion)

On Thursday, OpenAI announced a new beta feature for ChatGPT that allows users to provide custom instructions that the chatbot will consider with every submission. The goal is to prevent users from having to repeat common instructions between chat sessions.

The feature is currently available in beta for ChatGPT Plus subscription members, but OpenAI says it will extend availability to all users over the coming weeks. As of this writing, the feature is not yet available in the UK and EU.

The Custom Instructions feature functions by letting users set their individual preferences or requirements that the AI model will then consider when generating responses. Instead of starting each conversation anew, ChatGPT can now be instructed to remember specific user preferences across multiple interactions.

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On Thursday, OpenAI announced that all paying API customers now have access to the GPT-4 API. It also introduced updates to chat-based models, announced a shift from the Completions API to the Chat Completions API, and outlined plans for deprecation of older models.

Generally considered its most powerful API product, the GPT-4 API first launched in March but has been under closed testing until now. As an API, developers can use a special interface to integrate OpenAI's large language model (LLM) into their own products for uses such as summarization, coding assistance, analysis, and composition. The model runs remotely on OpenAI's servers and provides output to other apps over the Internet.

OpenAI says the GPT-4 API with 8K context is accessible to existing developers who have a successful payment history, with plans to open access to new developers by the end of July. And in a move to distance itself from older GPT-3-style models, OpenAI has also opted to begin retiring "Completions API" models in favor of newer Chat Completions API models. Since its March launch , OpenAI says that its Chat Completions API models now account for 97 percent of OpenAI's API GPT usage.