ChatGPT One Year Later
November 30th marked one year anniversary of the release of ChatGPT, the model and the service created and run by OpenAI. ChatGPT took the World by storm, and surprised even its creators in terms of its popularity and virality. It is impossible to understate the importance of ChatGPT for all the subsequent interest and work in AI. Pretty much everything that has happened in this domain since then has been largely driven by this product. AI has been moving at a breakneck speed ever since then, and it’s been nearly impossible even for those of us who are working in this or adjacent domains to keep up with everything that was going on. Even thought things have become a bit more “sane” in terms of overall expectations, especially in the second half of 2023, the overall growth has been relentless. OpenAI has kept innovating and releasing products, but plenty of collbaoprators and rivals have been doing thneir fair share of development as well. In this post I’ll try to highlight some of the most significant events since the release of ChatGPT. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list by any measure, just my own impression of the stories that have mattered over this period.. However, as they like to say, the situation is fluid and evolving.
Google has launched an AI chatbot named Bard, developed as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Bard, which was initially based on the LaMDA family of large language models, was later upgraded to PaLM and then Gemini.
The chatbot was first announced on February 6, 2023, and was released in a limited capacity on March 21, 2023. The initial response to Bard was lukewarm, but it was later expanded to other countries in May.
Microsoft launched the new AI-powered Bing and Edge on February 7, 2023. The new Bing was designed to improve how the world benefits from the web by reinventing the tools billions of people use every day, the search engine and the browser. It provides more relevant results for simple things like sports scores, stock prices, and weather, along with a new sidebar that shows more comprehensive answers if you want them. Bing also offers a new chat experience for more complex searches.
On March 14 Anthropic, a startup co-founded by former OpenAI employees, launched a new AI chatbot named Claude. This chatbot has been seen as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Claude can perform a variety of tasks such as searching across documents, summarizing, writing and coding, and answering questions about specific topics. Anthropic claims that Claude is less likely to produce harmful outputs, easier to converse with, and more steerable compared to ChatGPT. They believe that Claude is the right tool for a wide range of customers and use cases.
On May 2nd Inflection AI launched new AI chatbot called Pi, which is designed to serve as a personal assistant. Inflection AI is a startup co-founded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.
Pi, which stands for “personal intelligence,” is designed to be conversational and offer emotional support. It prompts users to ask for advice or answers, or to talk about whatever’s on their mind. Suleyman described Pi as a “neutral listener” that asks follow-up questions and offers advice.
On July 18 Meta and Microsoft introduced Llama 2, an advanced, open-source large language model. Available for both research and commercial use, Llama 2 is the result of the expanded partnership between the two tech giants. It aims to democratize access to AI technologies and foster innovation across various sectors. Emphasizing responsible AI development, Meta has incorporated safety measures, such as red-teaming exercises and transparency schematics. Llama 2 is accessible on Microsoft Azure and other platforms, supporting a wide range of applications and advancements in AI.
Microsoft CoPilot was announced on September 21, 2023, and was generally available for enterprise customers on November 1, 2023. Microsoft CoPilot is a digital companion that creates a single user experience across Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365, and Windows. It was designed to empower users to create faster and complete tasks with ease. Microsoft 365 Copilot includes enterprise-grade security, privacy, compliance, and responsible AI to ensure all data processing happens inside your Microsoft 365 tenant. It also features Microsoft 365 Chat, which goes far beyond simple questions and answers. It combs across your entire universe of data—all your emails, meetings, chats, documents, and more, plus the web—to solve your most complex problems at work. It’s integrated into the Microsoft 365 Apps millions of people use every day—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more.
O n November 4, 2023 xAI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk, announced a chatbot named Grok. Grok is modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and is designed to answer almost anything. It even suggests what questions to ask and answers questions with a bit of wit.
Grok is powered by Grok-1, a large language model (LLM) developed over four months. The initial prototype, Grok-0, had 33 billion parameters. Over the last two months, significant improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities were made leading up to Grok-1.
Grok was first released to select testers on November 4 It was later made available to subscribers of X’s top-tier subscription service, Premium+. The goal of Grok is to serve as a powerful research assistant, helping users to quickly access relevant information, process data, and come up with new ideas.
Mistral AI, a French artificial intelligence company, made significant strides in 2023 with its launch and subsequent developments. In December 2023, the company announced a substantial fundraising achievement, securing 385 million euros ($414.41 million) in its second funding round within a span of seven months. This funding, led by notable investors such as Andreessen-Horowitz and LightSpeed Ventures, has placed Mistral AI's valuation at around 2 billion euros. The company, founded by former researchers from Meta and Google, had previously raised 105 million euros just a month after its establishment.
In conjunction with this financial milestone, Mistral AI launched the Mixtral 8x7B model and opened beta access to its platform services. This move provides developers with easy access to its top-performing generative and embedding models. Mistral AI's platform launch includes three main services: Mistral-tiny, Mistral-small, and Mistral-medium, each catering to different needs and performance levels. Additionally, Mistral AI introduced Mistral-embed, an embedding model designed for data retrieval and analysis.
Mistral AI's developments represent significant progress in the AI industry, positioning it as a notable competitor to other AI platforms such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. The company aims to achieve frontier-level AI capacities and develop products oriented towards developers and enterprises. Mistral AI's efforts also extend to influencing legislation, as it has been lobbying for changes to the EU AI Act with the support of the French government