TL;DR: Microsoft and OpenAI announced a new version of Bing featuring “a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model [..] more powerful than ChatGPT”, and that Microsoft Edge will feature a Copilot-like assistant that helps with composing and summarizing content.
Brief thoughts/comments/notes:
Microsoft’s attitude during their press meeting seemed pretty aggressive and targeted directly at racing with Google. This seems kind of bad. For example, a quote from Nadella:
“The race starts today, and we’re going to move and move fast. Most importantly, we want to have a lot of fun innovating again in search, because it’s high time.”
Microsoft built a scaffold for the new LM called “Prometheus”, that lets them “best leverage its power”.
Microsoft has also used the new LM in their Bing search engine, though it’s not clear exactly how.
This seems way more hype than Google’s Bard announcement.
You can register for the new Bing beta on the Bing.com site.
This is a series of events where you would expect powerful AI built in the near future. Not a world where it’s a few hyping small startups promising AGI if they get just a little more funding, but one where billions are spent on it in a race.
Google’s event where they’re presumably unveiling their response will happen Feb 8th at 2:30 PM CET/5:30 AM PT:
An interesting aspect of this “race” is that it’s as much about alignment as it is about capabilities. It seems like the main topic on everyone’s minds right now is the (lack of) correctness of the generated information. The goal “model consistently answers queries truthfully” is clearly highly relevant to alignment.
Although I find this interesting, I don’t find it surprising. Productization naturally forces solving the problem “how do I get this system to consistently do what users want it to do” in a way that research incentives alone don’t.
It appears that Microsoft and Google are know in a high-stakes race. That somehow must be increasing the likelihood of catastrophe.