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During OpenAI's inaugural developer conference held on Nov. 6, CEO Sam Altman promised a number of new tools and updates would soon come to GPT. When he said soon, he meant very soon. On Nov. 9 in a post on X (formerly Twitter), Altman announced that custom GPTs was being made available to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
GPTs are now live for all ChatGPT+ subscribers!
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 9, 2023
The release had been delayed by a few days by what was then believed to be heavier than expected usage of the new features. However the activity turned out to be a DDoS attack. Altman used the opportunity to take a shot at his former partner and now AI competitor Elon Musk.
In fact, Altman tweeted “GPTs can save a lot of effort” on the Musk-owned X, along with screenshots of someone building a new GPT using the OpenAI Builder tool.
While the tech community is used to the petty squabbles between the tech company leaders — the most recent example being the Musk — Mark Zuckerberg cage match that never was to be — the timing of the new GPT custom tool was notable.GPTs can save a lot of effort: pic.twitter.com/VFIrGzPuMN
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 10, 2023
The announcement came just days after Musk unveiled Grok, which he described as an artificial intelligence chatbot with a “rebellious streak.”
Musk, who is making Grok available to premium subscribers on X once testing is finished. Grok will also have access to all the content on X, which looks like a recipe for legal problems over privacy and data access.
However, OpenAI’s offering of GPTs offers a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful in their daily life at work, or at home — and then share that creation with others, as Altman had explained at the developer conference.
While this raises the prospect of dozens of new GPT-driven bots emerging, the digital workplace is likely to benefit with the emergence of GPT that can be easily and quickly developed for any task across the workplace and even departments.
The timetable for the release of the other OpenAI offerings mentioned at the developer conference remains unclear, but if this is any indication, it shouldn’t be long before we start seeing the others.
Generative AI Is Still at 'Experimental Phase'
The Reuters NEXT conference held last week in New York put some of these generative AI releases into perspective. While the technology is clearly developing at a phenomenal rate, business, civil society and government leaders told the conference audience that generative AI is still at an experimental phase.
One of the major issues raised at the conference was the persistence of "hallucinations," the bad information these systems offer as fact, which poses a significant concern for for enterprises.
"What's been a lesson, I think, is the gap between being able to do something somewhat and being able to do it well enough for a particular purpose," Anthony Aguirre, founder and executive director of the Future of Life Institute told the conference audience.
Amazon AWS director of applied science, Sherry Marcus said customers were at different stages of progress, with levels of adoption varying widely between those still only considering deployment options while others already deep into working with generative AI.
One of tasks that's already seeing wide-spread use is writing computing code. Here, Microsoft corporate VP Lili Cheng noted that half of the programming stored in GitHub has had help from generative AI.
AI startups concerned about their long-term viability in light of OpenAI's decision to open a marketplace for personalized apps also heard some good news.
"There's so much room for continued innovation in AI. We're in an intermediary step in a decades-long revolution," Konstantine Buhler, partner at Sequoia Capital, told the conference. "You can play a very big role in how this is shaped."
Microsoft Introduces Teams Meet, Flags Collaborative Notes
Microsoft announced the release of a new Meet service for Teams that embeds centralized calling and streamlined meeting catchups within the platform.
The release takes another step towards making Teams a single place to work by offering a unified place to manage upcoming meetings and evaluate recent and past meetings. With it, users can find and work on content generated in meetings including files, agendas, share documents, meeting recaps and chats.
It also aims to simplify managing calendars by prioritizing and pulling together relevant content for meetings, as well as identifying previous meetings and their content that relate to the topic at hand.
Meet arrives at a time when users face increasingly packed meeting calendars and the related challenges of prioritizing and preparing for those meetings.
For Teams Premium users, Meet automatically integrates with intelligent recap. Users can see name mentions and AI-generated tasks in the “Recent” section and can navigate to the full recap page with one click. An additional "Missed" tab will filter content from missed meetings.
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Access to Meet is only available in the new Teams client, which can be toggled on in the top left corner of the Teams window. When users choose the “view more apps” option in the Teams navigation bar, they can search for Meet there.
While a relatively small release, the small releases often are the ones that make digital work a lot easier. Google, for example, has a history of building Workspace and previously G- Suite, in small incremental releases. Eventually the releases added up to a very powerful work platform that is a realistic alternative to Microsoft 365.
Microsoft is releasing updates at a rapid pace. On its roadmap for Microsoft 365 for December, it lists Collaborative Notes for Teams, which will replace Channel Meeting notes. This, of course, comes in the wake of the ‘new’ Teams that the company introduced in early October.
The Roadmap states that Collaborative Notes will replace Wiki-based Channel Meeting Notes and will allow attendees to co-create and collaborate on their meeting agenda, notes and action items. Since Collaborative Notes are a Loop component, it will remain in sync regardless of how many places the notes are found.
A number of other releases are on the way for Microsoft 365 in December and January, although with Copilot now in the mix it remains to be seen what form they will take.
Miro Buys Visual Collaboration Freehand
Collaboration platform provider Miro announced it is buying visual collaboration platform Freehand from Invision. Miro is valued at around $17 billion following a $400 million Series C funding round last year, which effectively gave Miro $476 million in total funding since Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin founded the company in 2011.
However, the economic challenges of the past year had an impact, and in February 2023, Miro laid off 119 employees, around 7% of the total workforce.
According to a joint statement from both companies, the deal includes all of Freehand's technology and brand assets as well as its team.
The statement adds that Jeff Chow, the recently appointed InVision CEO who previously served as Freehand's chief product officer, will join Miro as the company's new Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO), along with the core team supporting Freehand.
Miro, formerly known as RealtimeBoard, is a digital collaboration platform designed to facilitate remote and distributed team communication and project management. The company claims it has 200,000 customer organizations.
It develops an enterprise-grade platform with core capabilities purpose-built for all stages of production, including six core bundles:
- Product Development Workflows
- Diagramming & Process Mapping
- Workshops & Asynchronous Collaboration
- Miro AI
- Content & Data Visualization
- Visual Project Management
The six bundles are combined with an open and flexible platform designed to enable enterprises to adapt Miro to their specific needs through integrations, applications and templates.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
IBM Creates Generative AI Investment Fund
Rounding out the news, IBM announced it is creating an investment fund designed specifically for start-ups in the AI space.
IBM will be investing across the board from early-stage to hyper-growth startups focused on accelerating generative AI technology and research for the enterprise, according to a company statement.
“The IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund will invest in current and future AI leaders that are helping businesses around the world realize the potential of AI for business. Led by a dedicated team at IBM with decades of combined experience as highly successful investors and enterprise AI experts ....” the statement added.
The company will use the money to grow its ecosystem of AI partnerships, including working with companies using and building on watsonx.
IBM has been investing to fill in identified gaps in its ecosystem since Arvind Krishna took over as CEO.
Last August, for example, it announced its participation in the $235 million Series D funding round of Hugging Face, the open-source collaboration platform for the machine learning community. IBM has also contributed hundreds of open models and datasets on Hugging Face.
IBM also announced the general availability of the first models in the watsonx Granite model series in September — a collection of generative AI models to advance the infusion of generative AI into business applications and workflows.
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