chatbot

Amazon launches ‘Q’ — a ChatGPT competitor purpose-built for business

November 28, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Employees in HR, legal, product management, design, manufacturing and operations departments will benefit from Q, said AWS CEO Adam Selipsky.

Amazon has launched its own artificial intelligence-powered assistant built for business, “Amazon Q.”

The AI chatbot can be used to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, gain insights and connect with a company’s information repositories, code, data and enterprise systems, Amazon Web Services said in a Nov. 28 announcement.

Meet your new #generativeAI assistant designed for work that can be tailored to your business.

With Amazon Q, you can solve problems, generate content, get insights from data, build faster on #AWS, while helping keep your data private & secure. ☁️

https://t.co/ZKKQs9gzEc pic.twitter.com/4H0xagrgfI
— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) November 28, 2023

Q is part of Amazon’s broader strategy to integrate generative AI across its product ecosystem on both consumer and private sector fronts an hopes the tool will prove handy to employees.

“Amazon Q provides immediate, relevant information and advice to employees to streamline tasks, accelerate decision-making and problem-solving, and help spark creativity and innovation at work.”

Employees in HR, legal, product management, design, manufacturing and operations will benefit from Q, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in a Nov. 28 CNBC interview.

He noted that Q is trained on 17 years of AWS data.

*Conversation tab on Amazon Q. Source: Amazon Web Services*

AWS’s largest customers include financial firms Vanguard and Deloitte along with telecommunication companies Samsung and Verizon and entertainment conglomerate Disney — whose employees could leverage the AI chatbot when a more complete version is rolled out.

It is currently only offered in preview mode in Oregon and northern Virginia in the United States.

Amazon’s Q is unrelated to Q*, an AI project by ChatGPT creator OpenAI — which was rife with controversy last week when founder and CEO Sam Altman was sacked and then reinstated as CEO.

Amazon has been a big investor in the AI space, placing a $4 billion bet on Anthropic — the team behind Claude 2 chatbot — across several investments. Anthropic leverages much of its computational power from AWS.

Two of Amazon’s largest competitors, Google and Meta, released their own AI chatbots named Google Bard and LLaMA earlier in 2023, while Microsoft has invested about $13 billion into OpenAI.

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Consumer surveys show a growing distrust of AI and firms that use it

August 29, 2023 Coin Telegraph

A global consumer survey from Salesforce shows a growing distrust toward firms that use AI, while an Australian survey found most believe it creates more problems than it solves.

Consumers are developing a widening “trust gap” with companies using artificial intelligence, with many airing concerns about the potential unethical use of the technology, according to a new Salesforce survey.

On Aug. 28 the customer relationship software firm released survey results from over 14,000 consumers and firms in 25 countries that suggested nearly three-quarters of customers are concerned about the unethical use of AI.

Over 40% of surveyed customers do not trust companies to use AI ethically and nearly 70% said it's more important for companies to be trustworthy as AI tech advances.

One thing’s clear: there’s risk of an AI trust gap.

As more and more businesses use AI, it’s on the brands to earn their customers’ trust.

Check out more findings from the new State of the Connected Customer Report: https://t.co/YJhtaHQQZk pic.twitter.com/Roa0BJjFoQ
— Salesforce (@salesforce) August 28, 2023

Salesforce highlighted that respondents have become less open to using AI since last year.

In its 2022 survey, over 80% of business buyers and 65% of consumers were open to using AI to improve experiences — both have dropped respectively to 73% and 51%.

Is ChatGPT king? How top free AI chatbots fared during field testing

May 18, 2023 Coin Telegraph

artificial intelligence

Competition is heating up with several new AI chatbots flooding the market, and if you don’t want to pay a monthly subscription, OpenAI may not be the best choice.

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the first artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot to captivate the world after its public release in November 2022, a variety of competitors have entered the marketplace since then.

Tech giants Google and Microsoft have launched their AI chatbots, with Google’s Bard removing its waitlist, and opening up to over 180 countries and territories on May 10, after Microsoft beat it to the punch and fully released its AI-powered Bing search engine on May 4.

With several chatbots to choose from, Cointelegraph decided to put some of the most well-known through their paces to see which held up best during field testing, as well as comparing some of their features.

To test the chatbots, they were each asked a series of questions, riddles and more complex prompts to determine their accuracy and speed of responses.

Many AI chatbots available today are powered by OpenAI’s GPT models. While these AI chatbots may give similar results to ChatGPT, the app developers can also add additional commands, which may change the results.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5

While OpenAI has already released ChatGPT-4, which is available to Plus plan users for $20 per month, ChatGPT-3.5 is free to use and is tested here.

ChatGPT-4 significantly outperforms its predecessor with faster response speeds, more accurate responses and less server downtime.

The first AI chatbot to take the world by storm can help with tasks like essay writing, code debugging and even personal finances after only a second or so of processing time.

However, one area where ChatGPT underperforms is its lack of ability to search the internet.

This means the model is only as good as the training data fed into it, which goes up until September 2021. OpenAI is rolling out plugins that allow it to source online information using Bing’s search API, but this will be limited to users on the Plus plan.

ChatGPT has a brand new plugin that uses the Bing API to access the current, up-to-date internet.

This changes everything. pic.twitter.com/Izknqp1UgC
— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) March 23, 2023

Despite this shortcoming in the free version, the chatbot is still usually able to suggest resources to help the user with their query, as highlighted in the interaction below.

*A screenshot illustrating ChatGPT-3.5’s inability to speak of recent events. Source:* *OpenAI*

ChatGPT-3.5 correctly answered most of the riddles it was given and all the simple math problems, but the answers were less consistently correct when it was asked more complex problems.

For example, when asked to solve the quadratic equation 2t^2 + 0.3t - 0.4 = 0, ChatGPT-3.5 returned the correct answer in one out of three attempts and had similar issues multiplying larger numbers.

ChatGPT-3.5 can also be inaccurate when answering other questions. According to OpenAI’s testing, it was only able to correctly answer 213 of 400 questions in the Uniform Bar Exam, which graduated law students in the United States are required to pass before they can become practicing lawyers.

Outside of factual inaccuracies, ChatGPT-3.5 also struggled with questions to test its logical ability, such as the one below.

*ChatGPT incorrectly answers a question aimed to test its logical ability. Source: OpenAI*

Microsoft’s Bing

Bing’s ChatGPT is based on the GPT-4 language model created by OpenAI, but the two chatbots have several key differences.

The first noticeable difference is that it takes Bing’s chatbot much longer to respond to questions, with an average response time of approximately five seconds compared with OpenAI’s ChatGPT taking only one second.

It also requires users to use the Microsoft Edge web browser, which is nowhere near as popular as Google Chrome.

On the positive side, Bing’s chatbot utilizes the Bing search engine in its responses, allowing it to answer questions about current events, unlike any other chatbot using GPT-4. It’s also currently available for free.

Additionally, it provides sources for its answers, letting users more easily verify claims made by the chatbot.

*Microsoft’s Bing ChatGPT in action. Source:* *Bing*

Using the same quadratic equation 2t^2 + 0.3t - 0.4 = 0, Bing linked to Microsoft Math Solver but often gave an incorrect answer and had similar issues correctly answering larger multiplications.

In the same logical question about the bookmark posed to ChatGPT-3.5, Bing correctly answered that you would expect to see the bookmark on page 120.

Google’s Bard

Google’s recently released AI chatbot called Bard, which runs on its PaLM 2 language model.

2/ Bard now also gets plugins

Get instant access to these apps amongst others:
・Spotify (Music)
・Walmart (retail)
・Indeed (job hunting)
・Uber Eats (meal delivery)
・Adobe Firefly (image creation)
・And all Google Apps pic.twitter.com/WyRBBYbYbR
— Moritz Kremb (@moritzkremb) May 11, 2023

As pointed out in a Twitter thread by AI enthusiast Moritz Kremb, it can both respond and be prompted with images, supports numerous programming languages and, like Bing’s chatbot, can connect to the internet.

When asked how PaLM 2 compares with GPT-4, Bard said that GPT-4 is better at generating text, but PaLM 2 is better at reasoning and logic, adding:

“Ultimately, the best language model for you depends on your needs. If you need an LLM that’s strong at reasoning and logic, then Palm 2 is the better choice. If you need an LLM that’s fast, good at generating text and has proved itself, then GPT-4 is the better choice.”

Bard correctly answered the bookmark question and it explained its answer in more depth than Bing, but the explanations were often nonsensical.

It solved most of the riddles it was given and performed well on the math questions, correctly solving the complex multiplication questions and the quadratic equation in two of the three draft answers it prepared.

YouChat

While it also uses OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, there are some differences between You.com’s YouChat and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

It lists sources for most of the text it generates and also provides links to several web pages related to the query.

It also connects to the internet, allowing it to access current events, and because it doesn’t have the same level of popularity as OpenAI’s chatbot, downtime is not an issue.

It incorrectly answered both the bookmark question, the quadratic equation and the more complex multiplication problem.

It was able to solve most of the riddles given to it but incorrectly answered some.

HuggingChat

HuggingChat is an open-source AI chatbox from the AI firm Hugging Face, released in April.

Some people said that closed APIs were winning...

but we will never give up the fight for open source AI ⚔️⚔️

Today is a big day as we launch the first open source alternative to ChatGPT:

HuggingChat

Powered by Open Assistant's latest model – the best open source chat… pic.twitter.com/LjKN78XaI7
— Julien Chaumond (@julien_c) April 25, 2023

Asked to solve the same quadratic equation, HuggingChat returned 684 words of text and failed to provide an answer to the question. While it could correctly answer simple problems, it could not multiply larger numbers.

While it sometimes gave direct answers, HuggingChat often returned vast walls of text, which were relevant initially but devolved into something akin to rambling.

For example, it was asked to solve the following riddle: “A barrel of water weighed 60 pounds. Someone put something in it, and now it weighs 40 pounds. What did the person add?”

The correct answer is a hole, but the HuggingChat replied ice cubes before launching into a 545-word monologue.

What about the rest?

There are many other AI chatbots currently available, designed for more limited use cases than the ones mentioned here, with the market likely to continue growing rapidly.

For example, Socratic is another AI chatbot from Google that can be downloaded onto a smartphone to help users answer questions on science, math, literature and more. It also provides visual explanations of concepts in different subjects and is a useful tool to aid learning.

DeepAI is an AI chatbot that specializes in writing text such as programming code, poems, stories or essays.

Conclusion

While it might be unfair to compare OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 to Bing’s AI chatbot — given they are using different language models — this article intends to only look at AI chatbots available for free.

Through Bing, users can take advantage of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 language model, which is a huge improvement from its predecessor.

While Google’s Bard was promising, Bing generally performed the best of the current freely available AI chatbots, but still made some mistakes.

Other chatbots appear to have more limited use cases that could be more useful, but these three seem to lead the way as development progresses.

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The above represents an informal field testing of different AI solutions and is by no means exhaustive or representative of Cointelegraph’s position on a particular AI solution.

AIs and fries: Wendy’s to trial chatbot drive-thru operator

May 10, 2023 Coin Telegraph

artificial intelligence

Wendy’s says its "FreshAI" bot reduces costs allowing funds to be focused elsewhere, others worry that eventually, those less skilled will be jobless.

An artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot dubbed "Wendy’s FreshAI," will take orders from Wendy's drive-thru customers after the fast-food chain partnered with Google Cloud to create the bot.

Over three-quarters of Wendy’s customers prefer to place their orders via drive-thru, according to a May 9 announcement from Google Cloud and the Tech Giant claimed using a chatbot to service these customers will “revolutionize the quick service restaurant industry.”

AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT use natural language processing to understand what people are saying, and then use machine learning algorithms to generate a response.

"Generative AI helps companies transform applications and services. @Wendys is at the forefront of applying #generativeAI into their business in ways that help transform the customer, employee, and overall restaurant experience"—@MaribelLopez https://t.co/bS2IQXZdWU
— Google Cloud (@googlecloud) May 9, 2023

In a statement to Wall Street Journal, Wendy’s CEO and president Todd Penegor said the chatbot “will be very conservational,” adding “you won’t know you’re talking to anybody but an employee.”

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted, however, there many challenges associated with using chatbots to service drive-thru customers though, and said:

“You may think driving by and speaking into a drive-through is an easy problem for AI, but it’s actually one of the hardest”

The diversity of customers' orders is one challenge that Wendy’s and Google Cloud will have to overcome, as many customers might call menu items by a different name or have special requests. Additionally, the chatbot will also have to filter out any background noise.

To help refine the AI chatbot before it is rolled out to multiple stores, Wendy’s FreshAI will undergo a pilot launch at a Columbus, Ohio, restaurant in June. Customers will still have the option to speak to a human too.

Not everyone is impressed with the announcement though, with some arguing it's the latest way companies are “systematically eradicating jobs” and highlighted teenagers and others who are less skilled looking to gain employment would be the most affected by the change.

@Wendys joining the ever growing list of companies systemically eradicating jobs. Guess high school kids can just suck it for part time jobs to give them a start in the world. Enjoy your AI and bankruptcy. I'm not talking to a computer. #DeathofFastFood pic.twitter.com/BbggeblhOz
— -PAPatriot--- (@PAPatriot14) May 10, 2023

While AI has enormous potential to improve efficiency, increase productivity, and reduce costs in various industries, its unprecedented growth has many worried that it will bring about massive falls in employment as AI is used for tasks previously assigned to humans.

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