ChatGPT turns to business as popularity wanes

OpenAI on Monday said it was launching a business version of ChatGPT as its artificial intelligence sensation grapples with declining usership nine months after its historic debut.

ChatGPT Enterprise will offer business customers a premium version of the bot, with "enterprise grade" security and privacy enhancements from previous versions, OpenAI said in a blog post.

The question of data security has become an important one for OpenAI, with major companies, including Apple, Amazon and Samsung, blocking employees from using ChatGPT out of fear that sensitive information will be divulged.

"Today marks another step towards an AI assistant for work that helps with any task, is customized for your organization, and that protects your company data," OpenAI said.

The ChatGPT business version resembles Bing Chat Enterprise, an offering by Microsoft, which uses the same OpenAI technology through a major partnership.

ChatGPT Enterprise will be powered by GPT-4, OpenAI's highest performing model, much like ChatGPT Plus, the company's subscription version for individuals, but business customers will have special perks, including better speed.

"We believe AI can assist and elevate every aspect of our working lives and make teams more creative and productive," the company said.

It added that companies including Carlyle, The Estée Lauder Companies and PwC were already early adopters of ChatGPT Enterprise.

The release came as ChatGPT is struggling to maintain the excitement that made it the world’s fastest downloaded app in the weeks after its release.

That distinction was taken over last month by Threads, the Twitter rival from Facebook-owner Meta.

According to analytics company Similarweb, ChatGPT traffic dropped by nearly 10 percent in June and again in July, falls that could be attributed to school summer break, it said.

Similarweb estimates that roughly one quarter of ChatGPT's users worldwide fall in the 18-24 demographic.

OpenAI is also facing pushback from news publishers and other platforms -- including X, as Twitter is now known, and Reddit -- that are now blocking OpenAI web crawlers from mining their data for AI model training.

A pair of studies by pollster Pew Research Center released on Monday also pointed to doubts about AI and ChatGPT in particular.

Two-thirds of the US-based respondents who had heard of ChatGPT say their main concern is that the government will not go far enough in regulating its use.

The research also found that the use of ChatGPT for learning and work tasks has ticked up from 12 percent of those who had heard of ChatGPT in March to 16 percent in July.

Pew also reported that 52 percent of Americans say they feel more concerned than excited about the increased use of artificial intelligence.

Agence France-Presse

Meta guru says ChatGPT-style AI is out-of-date

PARIS — The chief scientist for Facebook-owner Meta said that generative AI, the technology behind ChatGPT, was already at a dead end, instead promising new artificial intelligence resembling human rationality.

"Today AI and machine learning really sucks. Humans have common sense, machines don't," Yann LeCun told reporters at a Meta launch event in Paris.

LeCun spoke as Meta announced its latest AI project -- called image-based Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, or JEPA.

The project seeks to move beyond ChatGPT-like generative AI and give machines the ability to conceptualize abstract ideas and not just regurgitate what exists online.

"Generative models are the past, we will abandon them in favor of joint embedding predictive architecture," LeCun said, touting the Meta project he will lead.

"My prediction is that in a few years, generative large language models will not be used any more, we will have a better thing to replace them," he added.

LeCun is considered a major thinker on AI and has been a critic of the hype around the generative AI models that power ChatGPT or the image-based Dall-E since they launched last year.

LeCun believes that the fears and excitement surrounding generative AI grossly inflate its actual capabilities.

In a Facebook post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the JEPA tool was open source, meaning it would be available to researchers to tinker with.

He said the aim was to develop AI that "more closely reflects how people understand the world."

"We need models that perceive the world and make predictions. This research is another step in that direction," Zuckerberg added.

Compared to its rivals, Meta has taken a more discrete approach to ChatGPT-style AI for its social media platforms Facebook and Instagram.

Meta infused generative AI in its products, but without the same publicity as Microsoft or Google.

In parallel, it has also released open source AI models that require less computing power than the technology that powers ChatGPT.

Agence France-Presse

Dark cloud over ChatGPT revolution: the cost

WASHINGTON — The explosion of generative AI has taken the world by storm, but one question all too rarely comes up: Who can afford it?

OpenAI bled around $540 million last year as it developed ChatGPT and says it needs $100 billion to meet its ambitions, according to industry media The Information.

"We're going to be the most capital-intensive startup in Silicon Valley history," OpenAI's founder Sam Altman told a panel recently.

And when Microsoft, which poured billions of dollars in investment into OpenAI, is asked about how much its AI adventure will cost, the company answers with assurances that it is keeping an eye on its bottom line.

Building something even near the scale of what OpenAI, Microsoft or Google have on offer would require an eye-watering investment on state-of-the-art chips and recruiting prize-winning researchers.

"People don't realize that to do a significant amount of AI things like ChatGPT takes huge amounts of processing power. And training those models can cost tens of millions of dollars," said Jack Gold, an independent analyst.

"How many companies can actually afford to go out and buy 10,000 Nvidia H100 systems that go for tens of thousands of dollars a piece?" asked Gold.

The answer is pretty much no one and in tech, if you can't build the infrastructure, you rent it and that is what companies already do massively by outsourcing their computing needs to Microsoft, Google and Amazon's AWS.

And with the advent of generative AI, this dependency on cloud computing and tech giants deepens, leaving the same players in the driver's seat, experts warned.

'Heavily underestimated' 

The unpredictable costs of cloud computing, "is a heavily underestimated problem for many companies,” said Stefan Sigg, Chief Product Officer at Software AG, which develops software for businesses.

Sigg compares cloud costs to electricity bills and says companies that don’t know better are in for "a big surprise" if they let their engineers run up bills in the mad rush to build tech, including AI.

Microsoft’s signature cloud offer is Azure and some observers believe the giant’s all-in bet on AI is really about protecting Azure success and guaranteeing the cash cow's future.

Azure has been the giant's unsexy bread-winner for years, bringing in huge profits but without attracting the headlines of an iPhone or social media that go straight to the consumer.

For Microsoft, "the golden goose is monetizing cloud with Azure because we're talking about what could be a $20, $30, $40 billion opportunity annually down the road if the AI bet is successful,” said Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella insists that generative AI is "moving fast in the right direction."

Deeply respected on Wall Street, Nadella will have a six- or nine-month grace period to show his bet is a winner, Ives predicted.

Microsoft acknowledges the risk, but insists that on AI, it must "lead this wave," CFO Amy Hood told analysts this month.

"We will charge for those AI capabilities, and then ultimately, we’ll deliver operating profit," she said.

'Squashed out' 

Piling up profit at the company founded by Bill Gates can only mean passing on the cost of AI to customers.

From Main Street to Fortune 500, the dependency on the AI-amped will be an expensive one and companies and investors are drumming up alternatives to at least reduce the bill.

"AI training, GPT training will become a very important cloud service going forward," said Spectro Cloud CEO Tenry Fu.

His company, like many others in the sector, helps companies optimize cloud technology to reduce expenses.

"But after training, a company will be able to get their model back for real AI application" and the dependence on the cloud giants will hopefully be reduced, he added.

Regulators are hoping that they can keep up, and not leave the giants in charge, imposing their terms on smaller companies.

"Law enforcers (must) ensure that... opportunities and openings for competition... are not getting squashed out by the incumbents," FTC chairwoman Lina Khan told CNBC.

But it might be too late, at least when it comes to which companies have the means to provide the groundwork of generative AI.

"It is absolutely true that the number of companies that can train the true frontier models is going to be small just because of the resources required," OpenAI’s Altman told a US Senate panel on Tuesday.

"And so I think there needs to be incredible scrutiny on us and our competitors," he added.

Agence France-Presse