With GPT-4 reveal, AI race goes into hyperdrive

STORY: The AI race went into hyperdrive on Tuesday with two major announcements from the two archrivals in the fast-moving industry, Microsoft and Alphabet.

First, the Google-owner unveiled a range of artificial intelligence tools for its Gmail, Workspace and cloud software, aiming to jump ahead of Microsoft just days before it's expected to make a similar announcement.

Then, just hours later, OpenAI, which is funded by Microsoft, said it's starting to release a powerful AI model known as GPT-4, setting the stage for even more human-like technology to proliferate.

Reuters Technology Reporter Jeffrey Dastin explains.

"There is just this crazy competition happening right now in the technology sector where Google was long the winner and at the forefront of AI, and suddenly Microsoft comes in here with its Bing chat bot and Microsoft is going to reinvent search, which is the core of Google's business. Now, Microsoft is about to talk about Microsoft Word, we expect, and how it's going to reinvent productivity with AI and Google two days before it comes in with its announcement. So there is so much intensity right now about who is going to have the best technology in people's hands the soonest. But there is a second dialog happening that's that's equally interesting, which is on the research and more experimental front. So, on the same day, Open AI, which created Chat GPT - the chat bot that has spurred this race - it just put out its newest technology and it is saying that this is at a different human level than we've witnessed before. So this this new technology called GPT-4. It had to take a simulated bar exam. This is what law school students take before entering professional practice. And this new technology scored in the top 10% of test-takers, human test-takers, when it tried doing the exact same exam. And that's that's relative to its prior version of this technology called GPT 3.5 that it scored in the bottom 10%. So we're seeing lots of advances in the research space and it's only a matter of time before those advances end up in users hands."

Meanwhile, Google attempted to get out in front of the race to win business from such advances, with AI tools designed to "transform" the work of lawyers, as well as marketers, scientists and - yes - journalists.

"Google announced what it thinks is the future for productivity. So instead of you having to write some blog post or marking content or whatever by yourself at work or even in a personal context, it is giving you AI to do that on your behalf. And it's putting that I into Gmail to create Google Docs. Google slides virtually any tool that people use from Google to create content. Google demonstrated to reporters what this looks like. So one executive opened up a Google Doc, looks just like any Google Doc we would see today, except there is this purple wand, what the Google executive called a magic wand. And you click it and it can draft any sort of text for you and then update that text at your discretion with whatever tone you set. So you can say, please write a news story, please write a marketing blog, write a training plan, take some notes that that you just jotted down in between meetings and turn those notes into a full fledged write up. And then you can edit that as you see fit with the help of AI."

Alphabet is giving approved test users access to new Google Workspace features on a rolling basis throughout the year, before a wider launch.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has teased a Thursday event about how it is "reinventing productivity with AI," which is expected to showcase its competing Word processor.