The recent events at OpenAI have captured the attention of the tech industry, keeping entrepreneurs, journalists, and avid followers glued to their timelines for the latest updates. Amidst the turmoil, several leading AI companies, including OpenAI, have continued to unveil new products, in line with Silicon Valley’s characteristic innovation.
The sudden departure of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, was swiftly followed by a flurry of new AI features from competitors such as Anthropic and Stable Diffusion. Despite the internal upheaval, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT with voice capabilities for free to all users, a feature previously available only to paid users. This move marked a significant expansion in its accessibility.
While OpenAI has been a dominant force in Silicon Valley with groundbreaking products like Dall-E 3 and ChatGPT powered by GPT-4, the chaos resulting from the board’s decision to sideline Altman and swiftly appoint new CEOs may have inadvertently created an opportunity for other AI companies, even though Altman eventually returned to lead OpenAI. This upheaval may have unnerved some of OpenAI’s enterprise customers, prompting them to consider switching to alternatives such as Anthropic or other providers while the leadership was in flux.
According to Dharmesh Shah, the CTO and cofounder of HubSpot and an OpenAI shareholder, the timing of the launches of Stable Video Diffusion and Claude 2.1 from other major players in the AI space may have been coincidental.
Claude Tells the Truth
Following Altman’s departure, Anthropic announced an enhanced version of its Claude chatbot, while Stability AI introduced a text-to-video generator called Stable Video Diffusion.
Claude 2.1 from Anthropic comes with key updates allowing the chatbot to process larger amounts of data at once and exhibit increased honesty. The token limit for Claude has now been set at 200,000 tokens, approximately the length of a 500-page book, in contrast to the 128,000 token rate limit for the GPT-4 Turbo model previously announced by Altman. Anthropic also claims that the updated Claude is more likely to admit uncertainty rather than providing erroneous information, addressing the issue of chatbot “hallucinations.”
Pivot to AI Video
Stability AI has introduced Stable Video Diffusion, currently available only to researchers, with plans to make it accessible to the general public in the future. Unlike OpenAI’s focus, Stability AI specializes in releasing open source software. The new AI tool shares similarities with Runway, another text-to-video model, and has the capability to transform still images into dynamic videos.
With regards to OpenAI, the company introduced ChatGPT with voice capabilities to all users during Altman’s absence as CEO, a feature previously exclusive to subscribers of OpenAI’s $20-a-month service, ChatGPT Plus.
While these developments reflect the ongoing rapid pace of AI innovation, with news of Altman’s return as OpenAI’s CEO and the announcement of an upgraded model for its Pi chatbot by another competitor, Inflection AI, it’s evident that the onslaught of AI news shows no signs of slowing down as the year draws to a close.