From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet

OpenAI says that more than 200 million people use ChatGPT each week, as first reported by Axios. OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson confirmed the number to The Verge, which is now double the 100 million weekly active users OpenAI reported last November.

Additionally, Christianson says that 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using OpenAI’s products, while API usage has doubled following the release of the company’s cheaper and smarter model GPT-4o Mini.

The California State Assembly and Senate have passed the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act (SB 1047), one of the first significant regulations of artificial intelligence in the US.

The bill, which has been a flashpoint for debate in Silicon Valley and beyond, would obligate AI companies operating in California to implement a number of precautions before they train a sophisticated foundation model. Those include making it possible to quickly and fully shut the model down, ensuring the model is protected against “unsafe post-training modifications,” and maintaining a testing procedure to evaluate whether a model or its derivatives is especially at risk of “causing or enabling a critical harm.”

Google is letting its users generate images of people through its Gemini AI chatbot again after pulling the feature earlier this year amid reports of historically inaccurate images, like racially diverse Nazis. In an announcement, Google says it will roll out an early access version of the capability to Gemini Advanced, Business, and Enterprise users in English “over the coming days.”

This upgrade will be powered by Imagen 3, the latest version of Google’s AI text-to-image generator. Google quietly launched Imagen 3 through its AI Test Kitchen earlier this month, and now it’s coming to Gemini across all languages. The upgraded tool is capable of generating anything from photorealistic landscapes to textured oil paintings with a description of “just a few words.”

So, all those faked review quotes from the Megalopolis trailer that got pulled last week were apparently AI, after all. Not only that, but the person who was in charge of the materials for the trailer, Eddie Egan, has been removed from the movie’s marketing team.

That’s all according to Deadline, which reported on Friday that the AI-ness of it all was confirmed in an investigation after the fact. Neither Egan nor Megalopolis studio Lionsgate meant to fake the quotes, which had purported to be critical notes from contemporaneous reviews of Megalopolis director Francis Ford Coppola’s past films.

In a new letter, OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon insists that AI regulations should be left to the federal government. As reported previously by Bloomberg, Kwon says that a new AI safety bill under consideration in California could slow progress and cause companies to leave the state.

The letter is addressed to California State Senator Scott Wiener, who originally introduced SB 1047, also known as the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act.

Google is upgrading its Gemini writing tools in Gmail to help you polish drafts that you’ve already written. Now, among other Gemini-powered “Help me write” options like Formalize and Elaborate, you can tap “Polish” to refine your emails, Google says in a blog post. The company has also added shortcuts that appear in the body of your emails on Android and iOS, making it more obvious that there are AI writing tools to use.

The tools are available to people who pay for Google One AI Premium accounts or who have paid for Google’s Gemini add-on for Workspace. If that’s you, when you open an empty draft, you’ll see a “Help me write” shortcut appear that you can tap to have Gemini draft text for you. Once you have 12 or more words in a draft — AI-written or not — you should see a new “Refine my draft” shortcut, shown in gray letters below the words.

A demonstration of Nvidia ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) for Games, an AI-powered system for giving voices and conversation skills to in-game characters, was shown running in a mech battle game called Mecha Break during Gamescom 2024. The demo shows a player asking questions about an upcoming mission and getting AI-generated advice from one of the characters on which mech will be the best choice for it.

After the demo video went out, Mecha Break’s developers replied to social media posts criticizing the use of AI by saying, “We were honored to work with NVIDIA to create a tech demo showcasing their ACE technology in a beta build of Mecha Break. However, we need to clarify that at launch Mecha Break will have a cast of human voice-acted characters.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed a new set of rules this week that would require robocallers to disclose when they’re using artificial intelligence for phone calls and text messages.

The proposal builds on the FCC’s ban on making AI-generated robocalls without the express prior consent of the person being called. The agency now hopes to require callers to say, while seeking that consent, whether they plan to use AI for future calls and messages, the FCC writes. Similar disclosures would have to be added to any AI-generated phone calls, which the agency says “contain an enhanced risk of fraud and other scams.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) are calling for answers about how OpenAI handles whistleblowers and safety reviews after former employees complained that internal criticism is often stifled.

“Given the discrepancy between your public comments and reports of OpenAI’s actions, we request information about OpenAI’s whistleblower and conflict of interest protections in order to understand whether federal intervention may be necessary,” Warren and Trahan wrote in a letter exclusively shared with The Verge.

Apple’s latest developer betas launched last week with a handful of the generative AI features that were announced at WWDC and are headed to your iPhones, iPads, and Macs over the next several months. On Apple’s computers, however, you can actually read the instructions programmed into the model supporting some of those Apple Intelligence features.

They show up as prompts that precede anything you say to a chatbot by default, and we’ve seen them uncovered for AI tools like Microsoft Bing and DALL-E before. Now a member of the macOS 15.1 beta subreddit posted that they’d discovered the files containing those backend prompts. You can’t alter any of the files, but they do give an early hint at how the sausage is made.

OpenAI has had a system for watermarking ChatGPT-created text and a tool to detect the watermark ready for about a year, reports The Wall Street Journal. But the company is divided internally over whether to release it. On one hand, it seems like the responsible thing to do; on the other, it could hurt its bottom line.

OpenAI’s watermarking is described as adjusting how the model predicts the most likely words and phrases that will follow previous ones, creating a detectable pattern. (That’s a simplification, but you can check out Google’s more in-depth explanation for Gemini’s text watermarking for more).

Judi Dench, Keegan-Michael Key, and Awkwafina are among multiple “actors and influencers” whose voices could become part of Meta’s AI offering, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The company is apparently working to wrap up deals quickly so it can develop and show off the new voices at its Meta Connect conference in September.

Specifically, at least one tool will be “a digital assistant product called MetaAI,” according to multiple unnamed sources in a New York Times report. Meta is negotiating with all of the top talent agencies in Hollywood to secure the voices, the Times writes. And it may pay the actors who sign on “millions of dollars.” Meta doled out similarly fat stacks to the celebrities represented by the recently-discontinued Meta AI chatbots from last year’s Connect.

After striking deals with Google and OpenAI, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is calling on Microsoft and others to pay if they want to continue scraping the site’s data.

“Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used,” Huffman said in an interview this week. He specifically named Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for refusing to negotiate, saying it has been “a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”

Meta’s AI assistant incorrectly said that the recent attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump didn’t happen, an error a company executive is now attributing to the technology powering its chatbot and others.

In a company blog post published on Tuesday, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s global head of policy, calls the responses of its AI to questions about the shooting “unfortunate.” He says Meta AI was first programmed to not respond to questions about the attempted assassination but the company removed that restriction after people started noticing. He also acknowledges that “in a small number of cases, Meta AI continued to provide incorrect answers, including sometimes asserting that the event didn’t happen – which we are quickly working to address.”

Meta is opening up the ability for anyone in the US to create AI versions of themselves in Instagram or on the web with a new tool called AI Studio.

The pitch is that creators and business owners will use these AI profiles to talk to their followers on their behalf. They’ll be able to talk directly with humans in chat threads and respond to comments on their author’s account. Meta says Instagram users in the US can get started with AI Studio via either its website or by starting a new “AI chat” directly in Instagram.