Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Working together. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and the navigation company TomTom released a free mapping dataset in a bid to compete with Google Maps and Apple Maps. Developers can use the data, which includes 59 million places of interest, to create their own navigation products.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Decoupling. The U.S. Senate backed a plan that would require American companies to inform government agencies of their investments in certain Chinese tech sectors, including artificial intelligence. The measure was attached to a defense spending bill, possibly giving it a better shot of passing.

News flash: AI “preachers” don’t get as many donations as human ones. That’s the result of a recent study. Researchers looked at robotic preachers in Singapore and Japan, and found that people trusted them less than human preachers and were less likely to give them financial support. I mean, obviously. Why would someone donate money to a software program?

But that’s not really the point. It’s more a sign of how much consternation there is about this new technology. If some academics are wondering whether AI might replace religious leaders, then every profession is up for grabs.

Facing more nimble rivals, OpenAI won’t bend … yet

THE SCOOP

Customers have asked to run OpenAI models on non-Microsoft cloud services or on their own local servers, but OpenAI has no immediate plans to offer such options, according to people familiar with the matter.

That means there’s one area where rivals of the ChatGPT creator have an edge: flexibility.

To use OpenAI’s technology, paying customers have two choices: They can go directly through OpenAI or through investment partner Microsoft, which has inked a deal to be the exclusive cloud service for OpenAI.

Microsoft will not allow OpenAI’s models to be available on other cloud providers, according to a person briefed on the matter. Companies that exclusively use rivals, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud or Oracle, can’t be OpenAI customers.

But Microsoft would allow OpenAI models to be offered “on premises” in which customers build their own servers. Creating such solutions would pose some challenges, particularly around OpenAI’s intellectual property. But it is technically feasible, this person said.

Spokespeople from OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment.

Right now, every time customers access OpenAI models, they are sending data to Sam Altman’s company or Microsoft. They are also paying for the cloud computing costs for each query.

For companies with sensitive data or that can’t send data to the cloud because of regulatory reasons, OpenAI isn’t an option. And companies that would rather build their own servers instead of paying cloud computing costs might opt for alternatives.

Microsoft does offer a “hybrid cloud” option to customers, where companies can take advantage of the cloud while storing sensitive data on local servers. But even with that solution, companies would still be required to send some data to Microsoft in order to utilize OpenAI models.

REED’S VIEW

The AI landscape is increasingly competitive. Claude 2, a competing model developed by Anthropic, a company founded by former OpenAI employees, is available on multiple cloud providers, including AWS, the industry leader. By some measures, Claude 2 is a higher performing model.

And rivals are becoming widely available. AWS, Google and Oracle are intent on offering customers a plethora of AI options, both open source and closed source.

The ace up OpenAI’s sleeve is that it may be able race ahead of competitors. GPT-4, the most advanced model available to consumers, was released to the public in March, but it was in use over a year ago, a person close to the company said. And GPT-4, this person said, is not the most advanced technology OpenAI has developed.

The idea is that future models from OpenAI will leapfrog competitors, thanks in large part to ever-growing datasets that improve accuracy and sophistication, this person said.

But even assuming OpenAI can keep improving its models and stay ahead of the competition, there’s still a question of how much better they are.

There are a myriad of benchmarks that assess the abilities of these foundational models and rank them — such as how well they do on medical and legal exams. But the real question is whether the average consumer can tell the difference.

If they’re all good enough, then businesses will gravitate toward the cheapest and most convenient options and some will go for the most secure or private. OpenAI wouldn’t be the top choice by any of those measures.

But if large language models like GPT are about to see an exponential increase in abilities that’s noticeable to consumers, then OpenAI will still be the industry leader, regardless of whether it’s only available on some cloud providers.

Exponential improvements are not a given. Some AI researchers believe that in order to make big advances beyond where we are today, a whole new architecture is needed. There’s no guarantee OpenAI will make such a discovery.

For the Room for Disagreement and the rest of the story, read here.

Price increase of Sam Altman’s new cryptocurrency, Worldcoin (WLD), since it began trading on Monday. The token, which is not available in the U.S. due to regulatory uncertainty, jumped from an initial low of $1.70 to roughly $2.25 on Wednesday. As we told you in a scoop over the weekend, Worldcoin is part of a controversial identity management project that involves scanning people’s irises in order to distinguish them from bots. The startup behind the idea, Tools for Humanity, has raised some $215 million in venture capital funding.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts yesterday that Google’s experimental new search engine, known as “Search Generative Experience” is a better option for consumers. That’s good, right? Well, it’s not that simple.

Pichai was asked several times by analysts about what kind of revenue SGE might generate. If you read between the lines, they were asking Pichai to assure them that Google’s core business — those blue hyperlinked ads that fill the upper half of Google search results — will be okay. The division made up nearly 60% of Alphabet’s overall revenue for the second quarter.

For the first time since Google’s launch, there’s a better way to search the internet. Still, Pichai was confident the platform would end up on top. “We have a lot of experience working through these transitions, and we’ll bring all those learnings here as well,” Pichai said.

The obvious reference is the shift to mobile, which was also supposed to kill the search ad, but never did. But large language models in some ways represent a more fundamental change and an even bigger test for Alphabet.

• The biggest names in artificial intelligence banded together to create the Frontier Model Forum, a new group focused on AI safety. It plans to develop “a public library of solutions to support industry best practices and standards.”
• Meta added new features to its Twitter competitor Threads, including a feed that displays posts from people you are following in chronological order. But it has yet to add labels to state-backed propaganda outlets on the platform, which it started doing on Facebook and Instagram in 2020.
• Bumble released a standalone version of Bumble BFF, its feature for finding new friends in your area. The service makes up 15% of Bumble’s monthly active users, and those in relationships no longer need to have a dating app on their phones to use it.

• House Freedom caucus members sound like they’re spoiling for a shutdown fight, Joseph Zeballos-Roig reported.
• Hunter Biden is a scandal machine. Democrats aren’t worried — yet.
• What’s a security? For once, the SEC won’t say.