August

9 events

Editors' summary

OpenAI opens up to enterprises, publishers move to block its crawler

On 7 August, OpenAI published the specification for GPTBot, its training crawler, along with instructions for blocking it via robots.txt. News organisations and creators began adding the block.

On the 28th came ChatGPT Enterprise. Alongside removing usage caps and offering a 32k context window, OpenAI stated plainly that it would not train on business data — the point that had been holding companies back. On the 16th it acquired Global Illumination; on the 22nd it opened fine-tuning for GPT-3.5 Turbo.

Anthropic took a $100 million investment from SK Telecom on the 15th, with plans to build a language model for telecommunications operators together.

At Google Cloud Next '23, which opened on the 29th, Duet AI became generally available in Workspace and Google introduced Cloud TPU v5e. The next day generative AI in Search reached Japan and India, working in Japanese.

Meta released Code Llama on the 24th. NVIDIA's quarterly results on the 23rd showed revenue more than doubling year on year, putting a number on the demand for AI silicon.

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

Record9 events

–
ProductMicrosoft
The Cortana app in Windows reaches end of support
Microsoft ended support for Cortana as a standalone app in Windows. It had given notice in June, when the timing was described as later in 2023; the date was pulled forward to August. Users were pointed to voice access in Windows 11, the new Bing, Windows Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Cortana inside Teams, Outlook mobile, and Microsoft 365 mobile survived for the moment and was retired over the following autumn. The assistant announced at Build in 2014 and named after the AI in Halo had been replaced by a Copilot built on generative models — the end of the era of assistants you gave commands to, handed over to assistants you work alongside.
7
ProductOpenAI
OpenAI documents GPTBot, its training crawler, with a robots.txt opt-out
OpenAI published documentation for GPTBot, the web crawler it uses to gather data for training future models. Pages behind paywalls, pages that gather personally identifiable information, and pages containing text that violates its policies would be filtered out, the company said. Site owners could refuse the crawler by naming GPTBot in robots.txt or by blocking its IP addresses. Publishers and creators began adding the block within days of the documentation appearing.
9
ModelAnthropic
Anthropic releases Claude Instant 1.2
Anthropic released Claude Instant 1.2, a new version of its low-latency model, through its API. Incorporating improvements from Claude 2, it scored 58.7% on the Codex coding evaluation (up from 52.8%) and 86.7% on the GSM8K math benchmark (up from 80.9%), the company said, along with better quote extraction and multilingual performance. Anthropic said the model hallucinated less and was more resistant to jailbreaks.
15
BusinessAnthropic / Ryu Young-sang / SK Telecom
SK Telecom invests $100 million in Anthropic
SK Telecom of South Korea invested an additional $100 million in Anthropic, following an earlier investment by its venture capital arm. The two companies said they would jointly develop a large language model tailored to telecommunications operators, fine-tuning Claude for customer service, marketing, and sales, with support for Korean, English, Japanese, Spanish, and other languages. SK Telecom CEO Ryu Young-sang said the company aimed to gain leadership in the AI ecosystem alongside its global telco partners.
16
BusinessOpenAI / Thomas Dimson / Taylor Gordon / Joey Flynn
OpenAI acquires Global Illumination
OpenAI acquired Global Illumination, a company building creative tools, infrastructure, and digital experiences with AI, and said the entire team had joined to work on core products including ChatGPT. Global Illumination was founded by Thomas Dimson, Taylor Gordon, and Joey Flynn, and its team had designed and built early products at Instagram and Facebook and contributed at YouTube, Google, Pixar, and Riot Games. Terms were not disclosed. It was reported as the first acquisition OpenAI had ever announced.
22
ModelOpenAI
Fine-tuning becomes available for GPT-3.5 Turbo
OpenAI opened its fine-tuning API for GPT-3.5 Turbo, letting developers customize the model with their own data. On certain narrow tasks a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 Turbo could match or exceed base GPT-4, the company said. Typical uses were steerability and reliable output formatting; some early testers cut prompt length by up to 90% by baking instructions into the model. OpenAI said fine-tuning data belonged to the customer and would not be used to train other models, and that fine-tuning for GPT-4 would follow in the autumn.
28
ProductOpenAI
ChatGPT Enterprise launched
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Enterprise for businesses. It removed usage caps, ran up to twice as fast, and extended the context window to 32k tokens, with an admin console offering SSO, domain verification, and usage insights. OpenAI stated that it did not train on business data or conversations, that the product was SOC 2 compliant, and that conversations were encrypted in transit and at rest. Nine months after ChatGPT's launch, the company said teams at more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies had adopted it, and named Block, Canva, Carlyle, The Estée Lauder Companies, PwC, and Zapier as early customers. Pricing was not disclosed.
29
ProductGoogle / Thomas Kurian
At Cloud Next '23, Google makes Duet AI generally available in Workspace
At Cloud Next '23, Google made Duet AI in Google Workspace generally available, covering drafting in Gmail and Docs, image generation in Slides, data work in Sheets, and summaries and translation in Meet. Duet AI in Google Cloud moved to a wider preview, with general availability promised later in the year. On the infrastructure side Google introduced Cloud TPU v5e, claiming up to 2x training performance per dollar and 2.5x inference performance per dollar over TPU v4, added Llama 2, Code Llama, and Falcon to Vertex AI, and pre-announced Anthropic's Claude 2. It also presented SynthID, a watermarking technique for identifying AI-generated images. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian delivered the opening keynote.
30
ProductGoogle
Google's generative AI in Search expands to Japan and India
Google opened its Search Generative Experience (SGE), which answers queries with generative AI, to users in Japan and India. These were the first two countries outside the United States where Search Labs, the opt-in home for experimental features, became available; in Japan it worked in Japanese. Voice input was supported. In India, Google added a toggle between English and Hindi and the option to have answers read aloud. Ads would continue to appear in dedicated slots, the company said.

↑ 2023