Microsoft also announced that it’s moving from text-only search & chat to one that’s more visual with rich image/video answers and new multimodal support coming shortly. Users can get more visual answers including charts and graphs and updated formatting of answers, to help them find information more easily. Image Creator has also been expanded to all languages in Bing.

Microsoft Edge will be redesigned with a sleeker and enhanced UI and is adding the ability to incorporate visual search in chat so that users can upload images and search the web for related content.

Chat history allows users to pick up where they left off and return to previous chats in Bing chat with chat history. Chats can then be moved to Edge Sidebar so that they can be kept on hand while browsing. 

Microsoft stated that it will soon add export and share functionalities into chat for times when people want to easily share conversations with others on social media.

“The new AI-powered Bing has already helped people more easily find or create what they are looking for, making chat a great tool for both understanding and taking action. The integration of Image Creator saves you time by completing the task of creating the image you need right within chat,”  Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer wrote in a blog post that contains additional details on the new features. 

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A number of things have happened with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, including a new API and more reactions stemming from interactions with Bing Search. 

Here is a breakdown of things you may have missed in the last few weeks:

OpenAI releases API for ChatGPT

With this new API, developers will be able to integrate ChatGPT into their own products. 

The ChatGPT API uses the same model that the web version uses, gpt-3.5-turbo. The company has made some improvements to the model recently which has resulted in it being 10x cheaper to do computations. Currently it costs $0.002 for 1000 tokens. 

The API can be used to build applications that can do things like draft an email, answer questions about a set of documents, create conversational agents, tutor in a range of subjects, and more.

“We believe that AI can provide incredible opportunities and economic empowerment to everyone, and the best way to achieve that is to allow everyone to build with it. We hope that the changes we announced today will lead to numerous applications that everyone can benefit from,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. 

Microsoft Bing Chat now lets you change its behavior

When the new Bing Chat first launched several weeks ago, it didn’t go as smoothly as planned. Some users were getting truly wild responses from the chatbot, such as NY Times reporter Kevin Roose who had a conversation with the chat persona named Sydney, which emerges once you start to have a longer conversation.  

“As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead,” Roose wrote in an article for the NY Times. 

Kevin Scott, chief technology officer at Microsoft, said that the conversation was part of the learning process and that the reason it went so off the rails was that with AI models “the further you try to tease it down a hallucinatory path, the further and further it gets away from grounded reality.”

In the weeks since, Microsoft has continued to make tweaks to the AI, possibly even killing the Sydney persona.

Users now have the option to select between three tones the chat function will take. The options are creative, which is imaginative in its responses; balanced, where answers are reasonable and coherent, blending together creative and precise modes; and precise, which is concise in its responses and focuses more on giving relevant and factual information. By default the chat is set to balanced. 

Elon Musk wants to build a ChatGPT alternative

Musk, who was actually one of the founders of OpenAI though is no longer actively involved in the organization after resigning from the board in 2018, has been criticizing ChatGPT for being too “woke.” 

OpenAI has safeguards built in to make ChatGPT “refuse inappropriate requests” or prevent it from outputting harmful information.  

The Information reported that Musk has approached AI researchers about building a new research lab to build a rival AI chatbot that would have fewer restrictions. One of the researchers he has tried to recruit is Igor Babuschkin, who previously worked for DeepMind and OpenAI. 

Salesforce creates its own generative AI

Einstein GPT will connect data from Salesforce Data Cloud with OpenAI’s models to generate content that adapts to continuously changing customer information. 

According to Salesforce, Einstein GPT can be used by salespeople to generate emails to send to customers, by customer service professionals to provide quicker responses, by marketers to generate targeted content, and by developers to automatically generate code. 

In addition to Salesforce Cloud, Einstein GPT will integrate with solutions like Tableau, MuleSoft, and Slack. 

“We’re excited to apply the power of OpenAI’s technology to CRM,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “This will allow more people to benefit from this technology, and it allows us to learn more about real-world usage, which is critical to the responsible development and deployment of AI — a belief that Salesforce shares with us.” 

The company also announced a $250 million Generative AI Fund through its investment arm Salesforce Ventures. The fund will be used to “bolster the startup ecosystem and spark the development of responsible generative AI,” according to Salesforce. 

GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

The new subscription, which is available for $19 per user per month, uses a more advanced OpenAI model and includes new capabilities to improve code suggestions. For example, a new Fill-In-the-Middle (FIM) paradigm was added to improve the quality of prompts by utilizing known code suffixes and leaving a gap in the middle for GitHub Copilot to fill. Previously the AI would only consider the prefix of the code in prompts.   

It also includes new vulnerability filtering to block insecure code suggestions like hardcoded credentials, SQL injections, and path injections. 

“In the coming years, we will integrate AI into every aspect of the developer experience—from coding to the pull request to code deployments—so developers can build their best in a world where all organizations will be more dependent on their success than ever. GitHub Copilot for Business is the first stride in this future, a future that will push the boundaries for all developers,” Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, wrote in a blog post. 

OpenAI announces collaboration with Presto

Presto is a company that provides AI assistants for drive-thrus, and by collaborating with OpenAI, they believe they will be able to make their voice assistants “more natural and human-like.”

According to Presto, their assistants integrate with restaurant menus and provide options for item combos, coupons, price variations, and seasonal items. It also learns as more customers use it, enabling it to incorporate new accents, alternative terms, and unique customer queries. 

ChatGPT will be used to create restaurant and region-specific knowledge bases; create test guest orders to represent different tones, personas, and order types; and make the responses to customer queries sound more natural. 

“We are thrilled about our collaboration with OpenAI since it will enable us to accelerate product innovation and further our mission of overlaying next-generation digital solutions onto the physical world,” said Rajat Suri, founder and CEO of Presto. “Both ChatGPT and Presto Voice represent cutting edge AI applications that can supercharge productivity and revolutionize the way humans work and think.”

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It’s a lot to take in and keep on top of, so here’s a review of ChatGPT-related news from the past week.

Microsoft rolls out ChatGPT-enabled version of Bing

Perhaps the biggest story of the past week was that Microsoft has officially incorporated ChatGPT into its search engine Bing. 

This comes shortly after the company had made a large multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

Microsoft says that integrating ChatGPT into Bing will help provide better search results, more complete answers, a new chat experience, and the ability to generate content. 

Search powered by ChatGPT will surface relevant information like sports scores, stock prices, and weather, and summarizes search results to provide comprehensive answers to complex queries too. For example, you would be able to ask how to substitute eggs in a recipe and get instructions on how to do so without actually having to search through multiple results yourself. 

Just like with ChatGPT, you can also converse with Bing in a new chat experience that allows you to keep refining your search until you are able to get the result you need. 

Google announces a new experimental conversational AI service

While not technically ChatGPT, Google also plans to incorporate more AI into Google Search. It announced Bard, a conversational AI service based on the LaMDA model. 

Bard is intended to foster the combination of knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of Google’s language models. The AI service utilizes information from the web to offer users high-quality responses.

The team stated that Bard is initially being released with Google’s lightweight model version of LaMDA, which calls for less computing power so it can be scaled to a larger user base. 

The announcement wasn’t without flaws; An ad for Bard from Google’s Twitter account included an incorrect answer about the James Webb Space Telescope, which Reuters was first to point out. According to Reuters, after this incident, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) shares dropped $100 billion, with trading volumes during that day being about three times the 50-day moving average. 

Technical interviewing firm Karat now allows ChatGPT in interviews

The company had already allowed candidates to use tools like Google and Stack Overflow during the interview. 

According to Karat, there are still rules on what you can use these tools for. In a blog post, the company stated that reference materials like these can be used to answer syntax questions, look up language details, and interpret error output from compilers. 

“As working developers, we’ve all done those things; so why should we have to struggle without basic resources during an interview? But we ask that they not look for a full solution to the problem, or copy and paste code from elsewhere directly into their solution,” Jason Wodicka, principal developer advocate at Karat, wrote in a blog post. 

In the blog post, Wodicka also asked the question of whether it’s even a good idea to use ChatGPT in an interview. He explained that ChatGPT has no idea if the response it gives you is correct, which could be problematic in an interview. 

“If you ask it how to reverse a string in Ruby, it might provide a correct answer,” he said. “But it might also grab the method that you’d use in Javascript and seamlessly adjust the syntax around it to look more Ruby-like. In my experience using GPT-like tools, I’ve seen both of these scenarios happen. When you’re trying to answer a question, do you really want a guess from ChatGPT, when you can probably find more definitive documentation by using a search engine?”

Cybercriminals hacking ChatGPT to have it generate malicious responses

Researchers at security firm Check Point discovered an instance where attackers had used ChatGPT to alter the code of an Infostealer malware from 2019. 

They have also found hackers who are finding workarounds to ChatGPT’s restrictions on producing harmful content. 

On how ChatGPT handles potentially harmful inputs, OpenAI says: “While we’ve made efforts to make the model refuse inappropriate requests, it will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior.”

According to Check Point, these hackers have discovered how to bypass these safeguards to allow it to create malicious content, like phishing emails and malware code. They say this is done by creating Telegram bots that use OpenAI’s API. 

“In conclusion, we see cybercriminals continue to explore how to utilize ChatGPT for their needs of malware development and phishing emails creation. As the controls ChatGPT implement improve, cybercriminals find new abusive ways to use OpenAI models – this time abusing their API,” Check Point concluded in its blog post. 

The Pentagon uses ChatGPT to write press release

This is according to a report by Motherboard, who linked to the article in question. The press release announced a new task force focused on countering the threats of Unmanned Aerial Systems.

The press release included the following disclaimer at the top: “The article that follows was generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. No endorsement is intended. The use of AI to generate this story emphasizes U.S. Army Central’s commitment to using emerging technologies and innovation in a challenging and ever-changing operational environment.” 

ChatGPT used by judge in court case

Vice also reported that Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia used ChatGPT to help make a legal decision in a court case in Colombia. It is believed this is the first use case of AI in a court case, and using AI in court decisions is allowed in Colombia. 

According to Garcia, in this case ChatGPT was used to reduce the time spent drafting judgements, and he included the full responses from ChatGPT in the decision. 

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This comes shortly after the company had made a large multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Search rival Google also just announced its own conversation AI service called Bard that it plans to integrate into Google Search. 

Microsoft says that integrating ChatGPT into Bing will help provide better search results, more complete answers, a new chat experience, and the ability to generate content. 

According to a blog post written by Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, 10 billion searches are made per day, with roughly half of them going unanswered because the questions are too complex. 

Search powered by ChatGPT will surface relevant information like sports scores, stock prices, and weather, and summarizes search results to provide comprehensive answers to complex queries too. For example, you would be able to ask how to substitute eggs in a recipe and get instructions on how to do so without actually having to search through multiple results yourself. 

Just like with ChatGPT, you can also converse with Bing in a new chat experience that allows you to keep refining your search until you are able to get the result you need. 

Content generation capabilities will help you with things like writing emails, creating an itinerary for a vacation, or prepare for a job interview. 

ChatGPT is also being incorporated into Microsoft Edge itself, with two new capabilities available now. The first is the ability to ask for a summary of information on a page, with key takeaways. The example the company gave is summarizing a long financial report and then using the chat function to ask for a comparison with another company’s financials. 

In addition to ChatGPT, the new Bing is also being powered by the Microsoft Prometheus model, which is a proprietary was of interacting with OpenAI’s language models; the application of the model to the core search algorithm itself, and a new user experience that reimagines how one interacts with search, browser, and chat.

To address concerns around ethical AI, the company also stated that it has been working with OpenAI to develop safeguards to protect users from harmful content. 

“Our teams are working to address issues such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data safety and preventing the promotion of harmful or discriminatory content in line with our AI principles. The work we are doing with OpenAI builds on our company’s yearslong effort to ensure that our AI systems are responsible by design. We will continue to apply the full strength of our responsible AI ecosystem – including researchers, engineers and policy experts – to develop new approaches to mitigate risk,” Mehdi wrote. 

Currently the ChatGPT-enabled Bing can be tested as a limited preview on desktop. There is currently a waitlist to join, but Microsoft plans to scale it up to millions of users in the next few weeks. They are also working to add a mobile preview.

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The toolkit, previously known as CNTK, and was developed by computer scientists at Microsoft. They wanted developers to be able to train and evaluate deep learning algorithms fast, scaling efficiently in a range of environments, like CPUs, GPUs, and multiple machines, according to a Microsoft Research blog post by Microsoft writer Allison Linn.

The toolkit turned into something that customers could benefit from, including Microsoft’s flagship product groups like Cortana. Skype, Bing and Xbox are also already using the toolkit to develop commercial-grade AI, according to Linn. And since the toolkit is open source, Microsoft can get other companies to put it in production, too.

(Related: How machine learning is tackling the ‘big’ in Big Data)

“We’ve taken it from a research tool to something that works in a production setting,” said Frank Seide, a principal researcher at Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research and a key architect of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit.

The latest version of the toolkit can be found on GitHub, and some of its features allow developers to unlock insights of unstructured data through neural networks while still working with the languages and networks they are used to, like C++, Python or BrainScript. The toolkit comes with full APIs for defining networks, learners, readers, training and evaluation from C++, Python, and BrainScript, as well.

Also, the toolkit runs fast and delivers better performance than previous versions, according to Linn. This kind of large-scale deployment is needed for deep learning across multiple GPUs, and it’s also key to improving the high speed and high level of intelligence that Microsoft needs for its machine learning technologies, she wrote.

To help developers and researchers get started, Microsoft has assembled more than 30 code samples, recipes and tutorials for working with all kinds of data sets. The toolkit’s custom system allows developers to configure their systems for deep learning with no extra coding, which means developers can get faster research breakthroughs, like last week’s Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research milestone.

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Announced yesterday, Microsoft Dynamics 365 moves Microsoft’s current CRM and ERP cloud solutions into a single cloud service, including apps that are useful for business functions like financials, operations, and customer service.

AppSource is another way for customers to find new apps, and business users can now try out SaaS apps from Microsoft and its partners. AppSource contains more than 200 business SaaS apps, add-ins and content packs, including new business apps, according to a Microsoft announcement.

(Related: Codenvy, Microsoft and Red Hat collaborate on Language Server Protocol)

Other updates from Microsoft will enable customers to gain more insight from their data so they can build apps with embedded intelligence and analytics. Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Power BI’s publish to web feature to help developers create visualizations and then publish them to a blog or website. Some features available in Power BI include free authoring tools, one-click publishing to the web, and cross-device support.

Power BI Embedded will reach general availability on July 11, according to Microsoft. It is a cloud-scale service that gives independent software vendors the ability to manage, create and deploy their applications. With Power BI, ISVs can build better applications and engage quickly with their users. Power BI Embedded includes data security, the ability to store data in cloud SQL, SDK support, and more.

Microsoft also announced a new program that allows organizations to “enrich” their data with anonymized and aggregated Bing search queries, opted-in IE user sessions, and publicly crawled social media content. Using Cortana Intelligence with Bing Predicts, it allows customers to augment their Cortana Intelligence Suite solutions to solve some of their business problems.

According to a Microsoft announcement, this program came from the Bing Predicts consumer experience, where Bing correctly predicted every knockout game of the 2014 World Cup and 95% of the 2014 U.S. midterm elections.

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“Typically, engineers go to search engines to get answers on various sites, like Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange and other blogs,” wrote Marcelo De Barros, group engineering manager at Bing, and Vivek Ravisankar, CEO and cofounder of HackerRank, in a blog post. “Now, you have a streamlined alternative that will not only spit out the code solution you need but also edit the code and play with it in real-time.”

(Related: Microsoft gets Bash and Ubuntu onto Windows)

In addition, the companies will provide a live code editor within the search engine. According to De Barros and Ravisankar, one of the biggest productivity pitfalls programmers face today is having to find a solution and then having to transfer it all back into their editor. Bing’s live code editor is meant to save developers time and help them become more efficient. When developers search for a query, Bing will provide them with the solution and a option to edit the code directly within the results.

“In addition to learning how a certain algorithm/code is written in a given language, users will also be able to check how the same solution is constructed in a range of other programming languages too—providing a Rosetta Stone model for programming languages,” wrote De Barros.

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The technical steering committee will be made up of both Node.js and io.js technical communities. In addition, there will be an individual membership class will have representation on the board.

“The Node.js Foundation provides a neutral structure to balance the needs of all constituents in the community: the users, vendors and contributors,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “As projects grow to the size of Node.js, they benefit from the neutrality, open governance and community that only a foundation can provide.”

Microsoft moving Bing to HTTPS
Microsoft has announced that it will begin encrypting Bing’s search traffic by default this summer.

“Microsoft has a long history and deep commitment to helping protect our customers’ data and the security of their systems,” wrote Duane Forrester, senior product manager at Bing, wrote in a post. “While this change may impact marketers and webmasters, we believe that providing a more secure search experience for our users is important.”

Microsoft will continue to include a referrer string so that marketers and webmasters can identify traffic coming from Bing, but it will no longer include the used query terms.

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New phone support includes the Lumia 930/Lumia Icon, Lumia 640 and 640 XL, and the HTC One (M8). Additions to the build include a first look at Microsoft’s new Windows Store for phones, a preview of its universal Office apps, the Xbox app, music preview app, video preview app, a new camera app, and a couple of bug fixes.

The company also announced Windows 10 for PCs will be launched this summer, and Windows 10 for phones should follow later this year.

More information is available here.

Oracle launches Big Data Spatial and Graph
Oracle is releasing a new Big Data product to bring analytic capabilities to Hadoop and NoSQL. Big Data Spatial and Graph is designed to expand its spatial and graph analytics to NoSQL and Hadoop, even if the user doesn’t have any other Oracle software.

“Why move this capability to Hadoop and NoSQL?” wrote Peter Jeffcock, senior principal product director at Oracle, in a blog post. “First, we wanted to support the different kinds of data sets and the different workloads, which included being able to process this data natively on Hadoop and in parallel using MapReduce or in-memory structures. Secondly, our overall Big Data strategy has always been to minimize data movement, which means doing analysis and processing where the data lies.”

Microsoft to begin mobile-friendly search on Bing
Microsoft is following behind Google, this time by ranking mobile-friendly webpages for mobile searches on Bing over the next couple of months.

“Based on data from users’ interaction with Bing, we have seen that mobile users are able to satisfy their information needs much faster on searches that return more mobile-friendly results,” wrote Bing developer Shyam Jayasankar in a blog post. “With that in mind, we will be rolling out mobile friendliness as a signal in ranking.”

To determine if a webpage is mobile-friendly, the company will look at its navigation, readability, scrolling and compatibility.

United Airlines to award security researchers with miles
The incentive to find bugs in a bug bounty program is usually the reward in the end, often thousands of dollars for security researchers. But United Airlines is taking a different approach with its bug bounty program, and will be rewarding security researchers in miles to find flaws in its software.

Some requirements include bugs must be new discoveries; the researchers must be MileagePlus members; and they can’t be an employee for the airline. Currently the max payout is 1 million miles for finding a remote code execution vulnerability. Other discoveries, such as cross-site scripting, third-party issues and cross-site request forgery, will receive 50,000 miles.

More information is available here.

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The release-to-manufacturing version of Bing Developer Assistant, available as an extension for both Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013, is designed to provide contextual data to developers such as projects and code samples from within the IDE. Bing Experiences program manager Shabbar Husain announced the release in a blog post, detailing features and improvements in the RTM version such as an improved extraction and ranking algorithm that parses almost 19 million code samples, as well as a new Contextual Compiler Error Assistant to directly search Bing for a solution after receiving a code error message.

Other additions to Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio RTM include Contextual Code Help for additional information on code classes, methods or comments, and improvements to the IntelliSense window.

Husain also mentioned that basic Bing-enhanced assistance functionality exists in early Visual Studio 2015 releases, which will soon be augmented with more advanced capabilities.

Open-sourcing Orleans
Microsoft is throwing developers another bone with the announcement of its plans to open-source the Project Orleans cloud computing framework by early 2015.

According to Microsoft Research, the Orleans framework for building distributed high-scale cloud-computing applications has been used “extensively” in Microsoft Azure, and is also the cloud framework underlying Halo 4. Microsoft first released a public preview of Project Orleans at its Build conference this past April. The “next logical step,” the Microsoft Research team explained in a recent announcement, is to release the code under an MIT license and publish it on GitHub.

More details about Project Orleans can be found in the public preview and open-source documentation.

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