Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards )

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.

Enlarge / A press photo of the Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU. (credit: Nvidia )

The US acted aggressively last year to limit China’s ability to develop artificial intelligence for military purposes, blocking the sale there of the most advanced US chips used to train AI systems.

Big advances in the chips used to develop generative AI have meant that the latest US technology on sale in China is more powerful than anything available before. That is despite the fact that the chips have been deliberately hobbled for the Chinese market to limit their capabilities, making them less effective than products available elsewhere in the world.

The result has been soaring Chinese orders for the latest advanced US processors. China’s leading Internet companies have placed orders for $5 billion worth of chips from Nvidia, whose graphical processing units have become the workhorse for training large AI models.

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On Tuesday, OpenAI released an official ChatGPT app for Android, now available in the Google Play Store in four countries: the US, India, Bangladesh, and Brazil, with more coming soon. As a client for OpenAI's language model family, the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models run on the cloud and provide results to your Android device. It also integrates OpenAI's Whisper model for speech recognition.

ChatGPT, launched in November, is a conversational AI language model interface. As an AI assistant, it can help with summarization, text composition, and analysis. OpenAI bills its use cases as a way to seek "instant answers," "tailored advice," "creative inspiration," "professional input," and "learning opportunities."

A series of images showing OpenAI's proposed uses of the ChatGPT Android app, taken from the Google Play Store. (credit: OpenAI)

However, as we've noted in the past , ChatGPT is occasionally prone to confabulation (that is, making things up)—especially the GPT-3.5 model—so it's not entirely trustworthy as a factual reference. It can come in handy as a way to analyze data you provide yourself, though, so long as you're familiar with the subject matter and can validate the results.

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.