“This is probably the most announcement-rich week that artificial intelligence has seen”, marvels on twitter Lior Sinclair, founder of a newsletter for engineers in this sector which has been in turmoil since the arrival, at the end of November 2022, of the chatbot ChatGPT. Tuesday, March 14 alone saw three important publications: the launch by the start-up AnthropicAI, supported by Google, of a rival of ChatGPT, baptized Claude, then, to everyone’s surprise, the presentation of GPT-4, the new version of the software used by ChatGPT, and finally the deployment, by Google, of its own conversational agent in its entire office software suite, from Gmail to Workspace. The online search giant seems to have wanted to pull the rug out from under Microsoft, which had planned a similar demonstration on Thursday of the integration into Word, PowerPoint, Outlook or Teams of OpenAI text-generating robots, the creator of ChatGPT…
With these innovations, which will be available within a few months, Google and Microsoft promise to make conversational agents such as ChatGPT useful in the world of work, capable of generating stunning texts in response to questions or written commands. “Write a draft email to say I agree with the proposal”, “create a 10-page pictorial presentation from this document”, “Tell me which are the most profitable products this quarter in this table of figures” are examples of queries given by Google.
Microsoft also offers in its famous Office 365 suite, an assistant called Copilot: it can transform a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation, summarize a meeting from its automatically generated script with its audio recording in Teams, etc. It will also be accessible through separate software access, called Business Chat.
An accelerating race
This race should only accelerate: GPT-4 already promises improved writing performance and the possibility – soon – of inserting images into requests: the software could thus describe, comment, or compare visual documents or photos taken with a smartphone…
No major player intends to be overtaken: the search giant Baidu presented its conversational robot Ernie this same Thursday, but the absence of a live demonstration and a launch date caused its stock price to fall… Meta , the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has, launched at the end of February LLaMa, a language processing model equivalent to the OpenAI GPT series, but reserving its access to the world of research for the time being.
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