#56: Meta’s Incredible New (Free!) ChatGPT Competitor, Elon Musk Changes Twitter to X, GPT-4 Might Be Getting Dumber, and AI Can Now Build Entire Websites

With MAICON 2023 just around the corner, Paul Roetzer and Mike
Kaput break down very different directions of AI this week. From
incredible to dumb, from thorough to questionable, there’s lots to
break down. Meta’s incredible new (free!) ChatGPT competitor is
here Meta’s latest announcement has big implications for the world
of AI. The company announced that its new, powerful large language
model, LLaMA 2, will be available free of charge for research and
commercial use. The model is “open source,” which means anyone can
copy it, build on top of it, remix it, and use it however they see
fit. This puts an extremely powerful large language model into
anyone’s hands—and gives them the appropriate permissions to build
products with it. But that’s not all. It signals a major strategic
direction that Meta is taking to compete with other AI
companies—one that could have an effect on AI safety. Some major AI
players place serious restrictions on the use and release of their
models, often due to concerns about how models might be misused if
they’re put in the wrong hands without guardrails. Meta is taking
the opposite approach, believing that getting the technology into
anyone and everyone’s hands will make the technology better much
faster—and more quickly help Meta reveal and address issues that
contribute to safety, like the use of the model to produce
misinformation or toxic content. Will this new approach be
successful?  Elon Musk changes Twitter to X Musk is in this
news again. As of the morning of the podcast recording (July 24,
2023), he has formally rebranded Twitter as X. The platform
formerly known as Twitter hasn’t changed much aside from its logo,
but it seems like Musk and leadership are viewing it as just one
piece of a much larger entity.  In a somewhat cryptic set of
tweets, CEO Linda Yaccarino said: “X is the future state of
unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging,
payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods,
services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all
in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.” In the past couple weeks,
Musk has also announced xAI, his new company dedicated to building
“good” artificial general intelligence and competing with OpenAI,
among others. Time will tell what this means for the future of the
brand. Meta, Google, and OpenAI Make AI Responsibility Promises to
the White House Seven major AI companies—Amazon, Anthropic, Google,
Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—have all agreed to safety
commitments proposed by the White House. The commitments include
promises to engage in “security testing” carried out by independent
experts, using digital watermarking to identify AI-generated vs.
human-generated content, testing for bias and discrimination in AI
systems, and several other safety-related actions. It should be
noted these are simply voluntary commitments publicly announced by
the companies and the White House, not any type of formal
regulation or legislation. We discuss this on this week’s episode
and will keep our eyes on this for you. Tune into the last
pre-MAICON 2023 episode! We’ll be back next week with more news,
more insights, and lots of MAICON takeaways to share with you all.