January

3 events

Editors' summary

ChatGPT goes mainstream, Microsoft invests billions in OpenAI

ChatGPT was already a social phenomenon by the start of the year. Third-party estimates put it at 100 million monthly users two months after launch, and it took on a reputation as the fastest-spreading service ever. Amid that heat, on 23 January, Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar follow-on investment in OpenAI. Neither side disclosed the figure; reports put it near $10 billion. Google had reportedly declared an internal "code red" back in December. The undisputed king of the internet was now the one chasing.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record3 events

13
PolicySarah Andersen / Kelly McKernan / Karla Ortiz / Stability AI
Three artists file a class action over training data
Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz filed a class action against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, alleging copyright infringement and violations of the right of publicity over the use of their work in the training data behind Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DreamStudio, and DreamUp. It was the first suit in which creators organised to challenge a generative AI company's ingestion of their work directly. Less than five months after the weights were published, the decision to publish them was a question for a court. The copyright cases that followed — the lyrics suit in October 2023, the New York Times filing in December — all run along this line.
23
BusinessReportedOpenAI / Microsoft / Sam Altman / Satya Nadella
Microsoft announces major new investment in OpenAI (reportedly about $10 billion)
Microsoft and OpenAI announced an extension of their partnership, with Microsoft making a "multi-year, multi-billion dollar" additional investment following its 2019 and 2021 rounds. Azure would remain the exclusive cloud provider for all OpenAI workloads. Neither company disclosed the amount, but multiple major outlets including Bloomberg and CNBC reported it at about $10 billion, and the deal was seen as emblematic of the race to invest in generative AI.
30
ProductElevenLabs
ElevenLabs clamps down after its voice cloning is misused
A beta that ElevenLabs opened in January made plain that a few dozen seconds of audio were enough to produce a convincing copy of someone's voice, and within about a week it was being misused. Motherboard reported that 4chan users had posted clips of Emma Watson's and Joe Rogan's voices reading racist and homophobic material. The company said it was seeing "an increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases" and set out its response: restricting voice cloning to paid accounts, and providing a way to tell whether a clip had come from its own tools. Founded in 2022, it was a young company at this point. Synthetic speech was not new, but a tool anyone could pick up to clone a particular person's voice from that little material was, at the time, something new.

↑ 2023

Three artists file a class action over training data

Microsoft announces major new investment in OpenAI (reportedly about $10 billion)

ElevenLabs clamps down after its voice cloning is misused