Meta's answer to ChatGPT, Browse with Bing is back

Dario’s Picks

I.

Meta announced a bunch of new AI experiences across their devices and apps at their recent Connect event. This is huge.

Here’s the most interesting launches:

• Meta AI – a conversational assistant similar to ChatGPT. Will be available on WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and the new Ray-Ban Smart Glasses. Powered by the Llama 2 model.
• 28 custom AI characters, with unique personalities and areas of expertise. Many are represented by AI versions of celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Mr Beast and Kendall Jenner.

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• New Ray-Ban Smart Glasses with built in camera, speakers and microphone. Notably, they will have natural language chat through Meta AI and, over the next months, also get the ability to understand what you are looking at.
• Emu – Meta’s new image generation model. Will be enable a variety of image features in Meta’s apps, including AI Stickers for WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook Stories as well as image editing with AI for Instagram.

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II.

Browse with Bing inside ChatGPT is back – in a new and improved version. It now also gives you direct links to sources, making the information more verifiable. This puts ChatGPT’s native functionality for real-time web access up to the level of Bing and Bard, which has already had this feature since the beginning.

To activate it on iOS, you have to select the three dots menu, go to Settings, New Features and tap the switch for Browse with Bing. It will then be possible to select under GPT-4 when you start a new chat.

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In Focus

The way we relate to AI is evolving

AI is becoming more human-like, and more available in the same exact place as our regular social interactions. I’m referring to ChatGPT’s new voice and image features, and Meta AI with its universe of virtual characters becoming directly available on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.

The idea that most people will start to bond in human-esque ways with AI has seemed somewhat faint to me up to this point, but is quickly becoming more believable as AI assistants start to have realistic, empathetic voices, can see and understand the world visually, and have personalities.

AI characters for companionship, role play, support and entertainment is already an immense hit on platforms like Character.ai. As a purely text-based platform for AI characters that is not part of a bigger social ecosystem, it has grown to 200 million visitors in just a few months.

The notion of AI being able to offer authentic companionship was compellingly illustrated in a recent article on Platformer:

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“You can imagine the next steps here. A bot that gets to know your quirks; remembers your life history; offers you coaching or tutoring or therapy; entertains you in whichever way you prefer. A synthetic companion not unlike the real people you encounter during the day, only smarter, more patient, more empathetic, more available.” - Casey Newton, Platformer, 29 Sept 2023

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While AI has already demonstrated its value for productivity, a new frontier explores to what extent we will bond and form human-like relationships with it.

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ChatGPT plugins

There’s now 1,074 ChatGPT plugins, of which 16 were launched in the past 7 days.

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Notable launches:

• Tripadvisor - Helps users discover the best hotels, restaurants, and experiences for their travels.

Official plugin for Tripadvisor – somewhat slow but works pretty well!

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Categories with most new launches:

• Web Development Tools - 69 plugins (2 new)
• Data & Research - 56 plugins (2 new)
• Entertainment - 50 plugins (2 new)

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Bytes

• People are experimenting with ways to use ChatGPT’s new image feature.
• You can now try DALL-E 3 in Bing's Image Creator for free.
• Spotify’s AI is launching a voice translation pilot for podcasts. Want a taste? Here’s Lex Fridman dubbed in Spanish.
• A global survey of what news organisations are doing with artificial intelligence has been released.
• Amazon Bedrock is now generally available. Bedrock is an easy way for developers to build AI applications with leading foundation models.
• Cloudflare launching Workers AI: serverless GPU-powered inference. Enables developers to easily run AI models using a few lines of code, powered by a global network of GPUs.
• Multi-Modal AI is a UX Problem.
• Jony Ive and OpenAI’s plan to build the ‘iPhone of artificial intelligence’
• Getty made an AI generator that only trained on its licensed images. Not freely available, though, you have to request a demo to be able to try it.
• Snap partners with Microsoft on ads in its “My AI” chatbot feature.
• Google was accidentally leaking its Bard AI chats into public search results.

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