OpenAI throws open challenge to Google by launching SearchGPT

Here is the top trending news from the world of technology. News that every tech enthusiast should keep a tab on.

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OpenAI throws open challenge to Google by launching SearchGPT

It was been long rumored that OpenAI was working on a product that would directly challenge Google’s monopoly in online search market. On Thursday, OpenAI validated these rumors by launching SearchGPT. Currently available only to limited number of users, SearchGPT has a very similar UI like ChatGPT where user types a query and SearchGPT will pull out a timely and accurate answer from the web world along with relevant links. People who want to try OpenAI’s search feature, they will have to join the waitlist. The company has said that it plans to integrate some features of SearchGPT into ChatGPT but there is still no clarity whether these features will be made available to free users.

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Google’s chatbot Gemini is all set to become much faster and efficient

In a bid to keep pace with its arch rival ChatGPT, Google on Thursday launched an important update for its flagship chatbot Gemini. This update comes in the form Gemini 1.5 Flash, which will now be powering its chatbot. Google has promised that Gemini 1.5 Flash will improve its chatbot’s quality and latency, with especially noticeable improvements in reasoning and image understanding. In another major announcement, Gemini will be now more widely available. It will be now available in 40 languages around 230 countries.  Google is hoping that these updates will position its chatbot as a formidable competitor in the generative AI market.

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Runway in hot soup; accused of YouTube data scrapping

Runaway AI, a prominent video generation AI startup, is currently facing an embarrassing situation after a leading news portal 404 Media accused that it illegally scrapped YouTube videos to train its AI models. The report claimed that Runaway scrapped videos from YouTube channels belonging to major entertainment companies like Netflix, Disney, Nintendo and Rockstar. It even targeted channels belonging to prominent news channels like Reuters and Wired. Runaway has so far not responded to these accusations. However, Runway is not the only platform that is facing heat over the contentious issue of plagiarism. OpenAI, which recently launched its video generation tool Sora, has also been unofficially accused of scrapping data from platforms like YouTube.

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Microsoft’s Phi-3 gets a serverless fine-tuning feature

In a major advancement in AI development, Microsoft has just announced serverless fine-tuning for its Phi-3, its small language model that was announced earlier this year. This means that now developers can customize the model for specific task without worrying about the complexities involved in server management. Previously, fine-tuning Phi 3 mandated setting up a Microsoft Azure server or running the model locally. The feature will be available in pay-as-you go pricing model where developers will be charged $4 per million tokens. Launched in April, Phi-3 boosts only 3 billion parameters, making smaller than GPT 4 and Meta’s Llama 3.