14 events
GPT-4 and Claude land the same day, researchers call for a halt
On 14 March, OpenAI announced GPT-4. The same day, Anthropic made Claude publicly available. The race picked up speed. The ChatGPT API had opened at the start of the month, letting anyone build it into their own products, and Microsoft 365 Copilot was announced on the 16th.
Image generation grew more active around this time too. Midjourney v5 and Adobe Firefly both shipped that month.
The LLaMA weights Meta had released for research the previous month leaked online in early March. A culture of running large models on your own PC spread with them.
As development and adoption accelerated, prominent researchers published an open letter calling for a six-month halt to giant AI experiments.
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OpenAI released gpt-3.5-turbo, the same model family used in the ChatGPT product, as an API, alongside an API for its Whisper speech recognition model. Priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens, it was 10x cheaper than the existing GPT-3.5 models. A new chat-completions-style endpoint consuming sequences of messages was introduced, letting developers embed conversational AI in any application and rapidly expanding the developer ecosystem.
A week after release, LLaMA's weights were circulating as a torrent. A magnet link posted to 4chan spread through AI communities, and the same day someone opened a pull request on the official repository asking to add the link to the documentation. Meta did not deny the leak and stood by its approach, saying that "while the model is not accessible to all, and some have tried to circumvent the approval process, we believe the current release strategy allows us to balance responsibility and openness" — while also filing takedown requests on the grounds that unauthorized redistribution infringed its copyright. The gated design was effectively broken, and a model anyone could run locally was loose. The wave of quantization and fine-tuning that followed was built on the leaked LLaMA, not the released one.
Anthropic released its first product, the AI assistant Claude, offering two models through its API: the high-performance Claude and the lighter, faster, cheaper Claude Instant. The company described Claude as built on its research into training helpful, honest, and harmless AI systems, and said early customers found it less likely to produce harmful output, easier to converse with, and more steerable. Launch partners included Quora (Poe), Notion, DuckDuckGo (DuckAssist), Robin AI, Juni Learning, and AssemblyAI. OpenAI announced GPT-4 the same day, making it a pivotal date in the generative AI race.
OpenAI announced GPT-4, a large multimodal model accepting image and text inputs and emitting text outputs. It exhibited human-level performance on many professional and academic benchmarks, including passing a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers. It launched via ChatGPT Plus and a waitlisted API. Citing the competitive landscape and safety, the technical report withheld details such as model size and training methods, a break from OpenAI's earlier openness that drew intense debate.
Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, embedding large language models into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and other Office apps. Combining LLMs including GPT-4 with business data in the Microsoft Graph, it assists with drafting documents, analyzing data, and summarizing meetings. It marked the full-scale integration of OpenAI's technology into Microsoft's flagship productivity apps under the vision of a "copilot for work."
Runway announced Gen-2, a video generation model. Where Gen-1, announced the month before, applied a different look to an existing video, Gen-2 could produce video from text alone, or from an image together with text. The output was a clip a few seconds long; reporters shown a demonstration described generation taking minutes and the motion as choppy. In March it was open only to selected testers through a Discord waiting list, and it reached anyone with a browser or an iPhone in June. Runway was started in 2018 by three people who met at NYU, and in 2022 it was among the co-developers of Stable Diffusion. Text-to-video already existed in research announcements at the time, but not in a form you could go and try.
Adobe announced Firefly, its first model covering image generation and text effects. What distinguished it was not the output but the provenance of the training data: only Adobe Stock, the company's own royalty-free library, together with openly licensed and public-domain material whose copyright had expired. The pitch was that what you made with it was safe to use commercially. Adobe said it was working on a way to compensate Stock contributors and would let creators attach a "do not train" credential to exclude their work. Coming weeks after a run of lawsuits over training data, it argued for a generative model's legitimacy through sourcing rather than capability — a framing others would borrow.
Google opened early access to Bard, letting users in the US and UK join a waitlist at bard.google.com, with more countries and languages to follow. It was the first time Google had released a large language model chat service to the general public. The launch came about four months after ChatGPT and a week after GPT-4, and the initial Bard ran on a lightweight version of LaMDA rather than PaLM — widely judged to fall short of ChatGPT. For Google it was a release that prioritized shipping something, and the generations turned over quickly afterward with PaLM 2 and then Gemini.
GitHub, a Microsoft subsidiary, announced GitHub Copilot X, a plan to extend Copilot from code completion across the whole development lifecycle, adopting OpenAI's GPT-4 as its model. Copilot Chat, a conversational assistant inside the editor, went into technical preview, alongside Copilot for Pull Requests for generating PR descriptions, Copilot for Docs for asking questions of documentation (starting with React, Azure Docs, and MDN), Copilot Voice for spoken prompts, and Copilot CLI for the command line. CEO Thomas Dohmke said Copilot was already writing 46% of code and helping developers work up to 55% faster.
The Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit, posted an open letter titled "Pause Giant AI Experiments". It called on all AI labs to pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, and to use that time to draw up safety protocols audited by independent experts. If labs would not act voluntarily, the letter said, governments should impose a moratorium. Signatories included Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell; by 29 March, when press coverage spread, the letter had passed 1,000 signatures.
OpenAI announced initial support for plugins in ChatGPT, tools that let the chatbot access up-to-date information, run computations, and use third-party services. Alongside OpenAI's own web browsing and code execution plugins, companies such as Expedia and Zapier joined as early partners. Rolled out gradually via a waitlist, plugins fueled expectations of ChatGPT becoming an "app store" platform.
OpenAI shut off API access to its Codex code models — code-davinci-002, code-davinci-001, code-cushman-002, and code-cushman-001 — having announced it three days earlier on 20 March. Users were pointed to GPT-3.5 Turbo, which OpenAI said was better at programming anyway. Codex had launched on the API in August 2021 and became the foundation of GitHub Copilot; it was retired without ever leaving its free limited beta. The sharpest objections came not from developers but from researchers, who pointed out that work built on Codex would no longer be reproducible. OpenAI replied that "Codex was free and in a limited beta, with heavy rate limits from the get go," but within days Sam Altman said the company had not realized how much people liked the model and would keep supporting it for researchers, and access continued through the Researcher Access Program. OpenAI announced ChatGPT plugins the same day.
An image made with Midjourney by Pablo Xavier, a construction worker from the Chicago area, was posted to the r/midjourney subreddit: Pope Francis in a white puffer jacket. It spread across Twitter and Reddit over the weekend, and a great many people took it for a photograph without realising it had been generated. Days earlier, Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative outlet Bellingcat, had posted around fifty images of Donald Trump being arrested. He said plainly in the thread that they were AI-generated, and they carried visible errors — in one, Trump has three legs — but they travelled widely before anyone pointed that out. Midjourney suspended Higgins's account and blocked the word "arrested" in prompts. Behind both was version 5, released on 15 March, whose realism had reached the point of imitating a press photograph. At the time it read as a shift in what image generation was taken to be: from a tool for making pictures to one for making things indistinguishable from the real thing.
Italy's data protection authority (Garante) ordered a temporary limitation on ChatGPT's processing of Italian users' personal data, citing suspected GDPR violations including the lack of a legal basis for collecting training data and inadequate protections for minors. OpenAI suspended the service in Italy. It was the first time a major country's regulator had actually halted ChatGPT.