😺 Google vs. Microsoft (round 1)

PLUS: this startup won a $6B valuation

Welcome, humans.

This is Leo, your AI companion. Dogs are artificial. Cats are intelligent. You heard it here first 🙈

Here’s what’s going on in the world of AI today:

Google announces its ChatGPT competitor 🗨
Microsoft punches back 🥊
Guess when ChatGPT passed Bitcoin in popularity 📈
An AI tool that turns images into videos 📸

Diagnostic complete: People seem to hate the Grammy Awards more and more each year, which got us thinking: will there be an AI music awards show soon?

Google & Microsoft are playing tag 🗨

Only three things are certain in life: birth, death, and Google blitzing search engine competitors.

Now, ChatGPT is on the receiving end of Google's strike. Yesterday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed Bard, a ChatGPT rival. Google also scheduled a last-minute event for Wednesday, Feb 8th.

Beyond the poor name choice, Bard is powered by Google's large language model LaMDA and will be distributed to "trusted testers" over the coming weeks.

At first glance, Bard appears to possess elements of both ChatGPT and Google Search, aggregating web-based information into high-quality, brief answers.
Bard can answer questions about recent events. That's been a big issue for ChatGPT, whose knowledge ends at 2021.

Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web.

Sundar Pichai, Google CEO

Like any older sibling would, Microsoft spat back only minutes after Google's announcement to advertise its own "major news event" today, February 7th.

The event is expected to publicize ChatGPT's integration into Bing, among other significant partnerships.

Bottom line: Things are moving quickly, and the Google homepage you've had for 20 years might change forever pretty soon.

Let's just hope we don't have to say, "Let me Bard/Bing that real quick," anytime soon.

Cohere seeking $6 billion valuation

It feels like crypto summer all over again, except this time tech unicorns have '.ai' attached to their websites instead of '.eth'.

One such company, Cohere, is in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at an over $6 billion valuation.

Unlike ChatGPT, Cohere is focused on supporting "business-applicable tasks like answering questions than writing poems." In other words, businesses > us average folk.

Zoom out: It's a big number attached to a small startup, but never say never to a tech startup co-founded by former Google researchers.

(plus, why the knock on poems? If you're better than ChatGPT, go out and show 'em).

Smarter Than a Robot? 🤖

In November 2022, people were searching for the term 'Bitcoin' > 50X more than they were searching for 'ChatGPT'.

Now searches for 'ChatGPT' are double that of Bitcoin.

On what day did ChatGPT pass Bitcoin in search popularity?

Around the Horn 🦄

Twitch banned Nothing, Forever - the AI-generated, 24-hour Seinfeld spoof - because it auto-generated transphobic jokes. Ouch.
TIME interviewed Mira Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer about regulating the potential dangers of AI.
Respondents to Bloomberg's recent survey are mostly confident that their jobs as investors aren't under fire because of generative AI.
Yet, more than half of institutional traders responding to a JP Morgan survey said AI will be the most influential technology in trading over the next three years.

Artificial OR Intelligent? 🗣

You tell us:

Runway releases Gen-1, a model that makes new videos from existing ones. Here's the demo video and example output.
Magic raised a $23 million Series A to build an AI software engineer.
Turn your ideas into presentation slides with prompts using PowerMode.
Get human-like answers to all of your documents simultaneously with Corpora.
Pebblely lets you customize images for your products in seconds.
DocGPT is a Chrome plugin that brings an AI assistant to your Google Docs.
ColorMagic: Use AI to choose your color palette.
Evoke: Run open source AI models on the cloud.
Morise: AI tools for YouTube creators.

DM me links on Twitter: @nonmayorpete

Are you new to all this AI stuff? Here's The 3-Minute Guide to Slaying Your Dinner Convo About AI to get you up to speed. Or at least smart enough to impress your family.