From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet

Apple is gearing up to reveal a new AI system on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac next week at WWDC 2024 — and it will be called Apple Intelligence, according to a report from Bloomberg. In addition to providing new “beta” AI features across Apple’s platforms and apps, it will reportedly offer access to a new ChatGPT-like chatbot powered by OpenAI.

Apple reportedly won’t focus on buzzy AI features like image or video generation and will instead focus on adding AI-powered summarizations, reply suggestions, and an AI overhaul for Siri that could give it more control over apps while chasing applications with “broad appeal.”

ElevenLabs already offers AI-generated versions of human voices and music. Now, it will let people create sound effects for podcasts, movies, or games, too. The new Sound Effects tool can generate up to 22 seconds of sounds based on user prompts that can be combined with the company’s voice and music platform, and it gives users at least four downloadable audio clip options.

The company says it worked with the stock media platform Shutterstock to build a library and train its model on its audio clips. Shutterstock has licensed its content libraries to many AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta, and Google.

OpenAI is making ChatGPT more accessible to schools and nonprofit organizations. In a pair of blog posts, the company shared that it’s launching a version of ChatGPT for universities, along with a program that lets nonprofits access ChatGPT at a discounted rate.

OpenAI says ChatGPT Edu will allow universities to “responsibly deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations.” It’s built on its faster GPT-4o model, which offers improved multimodal capabilities across text, vision, and audio.

Last week, Google rolled out its AI search results for millions of users to tinker with. The goal was to deliver a better search experience. Instead, AI delivered all sorts of weird results, like saying people should put glue on their pizza to help the cheese stick and eat rocks.

Google worked quickly to remove some inaccurate AI results, which it calls AI Overviews, but the damage — and meme-ification — was already done.

Apple is planning a big AI update for Siri, and it could give you the ability to control specific iPhone app features with your voice, according to a report from Bloomberg. The revamped Siri will reportedly arrive next year as an update to iOS 18.

As noted by Bloomberg, the update will allow Siri to analyze the activity on your phone while turning on Siri-controlled features automatically. You’ll only be able to use Siri to control features in apps made by Apple to start, but the company plans on supporting “hundreds” of commands within its apps, Bloomberg reports.

Free ChatGPT users can now access custom GPTs, analyze charts, ask questions about photos, and other features added with GPT-4o in early May. 

Features like model and web responses, data analytics, chart creation, vision, file upload, memory, and custom GPTs were available to paid users — ChatGPT Plus, Teams, and Enterprise — but are now open to anyone using ChatGPT.

Apple will finally tell its own AI story at WWDC 2024, but it may not mean the sorts of showy features demoed by the likes of Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI. Instead, the event may see Apple rolling out basic AI features like transcribing voice memos or auto-generated emoji — and announcing a rumored partnership with OpenAI, according to Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg today.

Recent rumors have held that Apple will be allowing chatbots to integrate more deeply into its operating systems, and it seems that OpenAI is getting the first crack at that with ChatGPT. But Apple is still working on an agreement with Google to do the same with Gemini, according to Gurman. It’s also been rumored to be talking to Anthropic. (Those talks started before OpenAI’s ongoing Scarlett Johansson dust-up, but they underscore why Apple might want more than one iPhone chatbot deal.) Outside of whatever those potential partnerships will mean, Apple’s approach to AI will apparently focus on being practical.

Imagine this: you’ve carved out an evening to unwind and decide to make a homemade pizza. You assemble your pie, throw it in the oven, and are excited to start eating. But once you get ready to take a bite of your oily creation, you run into a problem — the cheese falls right off. Frustrated, you turn to Google for a solution.

“Add some glue,” Google answers. “Mix about 1/8 cup of Elmer’s glue in with the sauce. Non-toxic glue will work.”

OpenAI has struck a deal with News Corp, the media company that owns The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Daily Telegraph, and others. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI’s deal with News Corp could be worth over $250 million in the next five years “in the form of cash and credits for use of OpenAI technology.”

The multi-year agreement gives OpenAI access to current and archived articles from News Corp publications for AI training and to answer user questions.

Gannett, the media company that owns hundreds of newspapers in the US, is launching a new program that adds AI-generated bullet points at the top of journalists’ stories, according to an internal memo seen by The Verge.

The AI feature, labeled “key points” on stories, uses automated technology to create summaries that appear below a headline. The bottom of articles includes a disclaimer, reading, “The Key Points at the top of this article were created with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and reviewed by a journalist before publication. No other parts of the article were generated using AI.” The memo is dated May 14th and notes that participation is optional at this point.

OpenAI has signed a deal for access to real-time content from Reddit’s data API, which means it can surface discussions from the site within ChatGPT and other new products. It’s an agreement similar to the one Reddit signed with Google earlier this year that was reportedly worth $60 million.

The deal will also “enable Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to Redditors and mods” and use OpenAI’s large language models to build applications. OpenAI has also signed up to become an advertising partner on Reddit. 

“Google will do the Googling for you.” 

Out of everything said onstage at Google I/O this year, I’ve been thinking the most about that line from Search executive Liz Reid. It summarizes not only how Google is fundamentally changing Search but also how the company is increasingly on a collision course with OpenAI.

As Anthropic tries to take on the AI giants, it has a new big-name executive on board: the company announced this morning that Mike Krieger is its new chief product officer. Krieger, of course, was one of the co-founders of Instagram and spent the last few years working on Artifact, an AI news-reading app that was recently acquired by Yahoo.

Krieger will oversee all of Anthropic’s product efforts going forward. It’s an important moment for the company to push hard on product, too: it recently released the Claude app for iOS, long after a bunch of its competitors were available on mobile, and just announced support for use in Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has been seemingly primarily focused on building out its core technology for the last few years but seems to understand that it needs to turn all that tech into products — and there’s no time to waste.

Google I/O introduced an AI assistant that can see and hear the world, while OpenAI put its version of a Her-like chatbot into an iPhone. Next week, Microsoft will be hosting Build, where it’s sure to have some version of Copilot or Cortana that understands pivot tables. Then, a few weeks after that, Apple will host its own developer conference, and if the buzz is anything to go by, it’ll be talking about artificial intelligence, too. (Unclear if Siri will be mentioned.)

AI is here! It’s no longer conceptual. It’s taking jobs, making a few new ones, and helping millions of students avoid doing their homework. According to most of the major tech companies investing in AI, we appear to be at the start of experiencing one of those rare monumental shifts in technology. Think the Industrial Revolution or the creation of the internet or personal computer. All of Silicon Valley — of Big Tech — is focused on taking large language models and other forms of artificial intelligence and moving them from the laptops of researchers into the phones and computers of average people. Ideally, they will make a lot of money in the process.

OpenAI is launching GPT-4o, an iteration of the GPT-4 model that powers its hallmark product, ChatGPT. The updated model “is much faster” and improves “capabilities across text, vision, and audio,” OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said in a livestream announcement on Monday. It’ll be free for all users, and paid users will continue to “have up to five times the capacity limits” of free users, Murati added.

In a blog post from the company, OpenAI says GPT-4o’s capabilities “will be rolled out iteratively,” but its text and image capabilities will start to roll out today in ChatGPT.