It was only a few days ago that a team of Stanford researchers built a clone of OpenAI's ChatGPT for just $600. Now those researchers have taken the demo.

The release of OpenAI ChatGPT put artificial intelligence in the limelight and demonstrated the widespread demand for language models, the underlying technology powering these AI tools. Following the release of ChatGPT, which quickly adopted millions of users, other companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon began dropping information about their own language models that are currently in development. Microsoft quickly hopped on the OpenAI train by investing billions of dollars into the company in return for its propriety GPT language model.

Researchers at Stanford decided to see how difficult and costly it would be to create their own language model and decided to try and replicate OpenAI's GPT. As previously reported, the Stanford professors took Meta's open-source LLaMA 7B language model and trained it on trillions of tokens of data. The results were the almost-creation of a ChatGPT clone named Alpaca, which came with some key differences. While Alpaca was trained on a large amount of data, it wasn't trained on how to sift through that data to acquire an answer quickly. This led researchers to conclude that Alpaca was much slower than GPT.

Internal Microsoft researchers have published a paper that explored OpenAI's newest language model, GPT-4, and according to those researchers, it may be the very first step toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

A new research paper has been published on the arXiv pre-print server by internal Microsoft AI researchers that explored the capabilities of OpenAI's newest language model called GPT-4. According to the team behind the paper, an analysis was conducted on an early iteration of the GPT-4 language model, and based on the results, the researchers believe that GPT-4 could be viewed as an early and incomplete version of AGI. Microsoft's testers write that GPT-4 shows a clear leap in several areas compared to OpenAI's previous model, GPT-3.5.

The team found that GPT-4 achieved close to human-level performance in a range of categories that its previous generation lacked. Those categories were mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology, and more. According to the paper, GPT-4 also performed exceptionally well in several exams, scoring, respectively, in the 90th, 88th, and 86th percentiles on the Bar exam, LSAT, and Certified Sommelier theory test.

Epic Games has revealed at its State of Unreal keynote at GDC 2023 its new MetaHuman creator tool that will enable developers to animate their MetaHumans with just an iPhone.

The announcement featured the reveal of the above video that, demonstrates the ease of developers using video footage shot with their iPhones to animate characters. The results are very impressive, with the animation tool showing realistic movements in subtle facial expressions, eye tracking, and graphics quality.

Epic showed off what's possible with the technology by releasing a clip of Ninja Theory's game Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, in which performance capture artist Melina Juergens that plays the game's main character, acts out a scene that is then transformed into a gorgeous animation. The Senua's Saga: Hellblade II technology demonstration was created using expensive motion capture cameras within a studio, hence the impressive end result.

Over the past couple of days, the big news was that Linus Tech Tips, a huge YouTube channel with over 15 million subscribers, was hacked. The hackers were able to change the channel name and live stream a fake Elon Musk video trying to get viewers to send Bitcoin to them.

Linus Sebastian, founder of Linus Media Group (Image Credit: Linus Tech Tips Twitter)

Thankfully, Google helped Linus and his team recover his channel. Still, I can only imagine it would have been an incredibly stressful and nightmare-type situation while the recovery was in process. And it's not just Linus Tech Tips that was hacked. A few weeks ago, Andy from eTeknix suffered the same fate after being conned by a fake video sponsorship scheme where the victim is tricked into opening what appears to be an agreement PDF - the "PDF" file is the malware.

Once opened, the malware sends the user's data to the hacker. It does not matter how strong your password is or if you have enabled two-factor authentication. It's not entirely clear which data is sent, but the critical data we know that is sent includes the user's browser data, including actively logged-in session tokens and cookies. Once obtained, the hacker can carefully plan an attack on the unsuspecting victim, usually when they are asleep.

Blizzard is looking into reported issues with NVIDIA's RTX 3080 Ti, and possibly other GPUs, in the Diablo IV beta.

This is clearly something to bear in mind for PC gamers who own an NVIDIA graphics card - especially that model - who are planning to hit the open beta, which has just kicked off.

In some cases, there are complaints that the beta test of the action RPG has bricked RTX 3080 Ti cards, with other reports coming in of GPUs overheating to alarming levels (and fans kicking into super-high gear, as you might imagine).

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has issued a statement which takes a more positive attitude towards Microsoft's Activision Blizzard merger.

Call of Duty is no longer one of the major potential stumbling blocks for the takeover (Image Credit: Activision)

This is a huge move for the gaming world - a $68.7 billion takeover for Microsoft - so the regulatory scrutiny is intense, but the CMA has let go of some of its concerns about the deal.

Based on reviewing new evidence, the regulator is now satisfied that the Microsoft takeover won't damage the console gaming market in the UK in terms of competitiveness.

Microsoft's idea for a 'Cloud PC' feature appears to be progressing, at least going by hidden clues unearthed in a Windows 11 test build.

This comes courtesy of well-known Microsoft leaker Albacore, who has been peeking under the hood in the recent Windows 11 build 23419, and found that the feature is being fleshed out in the background.

There's now an option to access the Cloud PC in two different ways - you can do so either directly from the desktop, or via an app.

Bing search traffic is up appreciably, with Microsoft's new ChatGPT-powered Bing AI successfully helping to boost search numbers in the battle against Google.

With analysts anticipating further success for the Bing chatbot, Google will doubtless be concerned (Image Credit: Microsoft)

The Bing chatbot may not have been on the scene for long, but the early promising result for Microsoft's Bing search engine is that it's up almost 16% with page visits.

That's according to stats compiled by analytics outfit Similarweb (spotted by Reuters), with the sizeable uptick happening since the AI was introduced to Bing search on February 7. Meantime, Google has slipped by 1% in terms of its numbers.

Jackson Greathouse Fall, a brand designer, has created the Hustle GPT challenge, where he acts as an instrument to the instructions of ChatGPT on how to start a business with just $100.

Fall explains in a now-viral Twitter thread that he told ChatGPT that it was now called "HustleGPT" and that it's an "entrepreneurial" artificial intelligence that's goal is to take the initial $100 budget and turn it into as much money as possible within the shortest timeframe possible. Fall added some needed caveats to the prompt, informing ChatGPT that it wasn't able to provide any methods that would involve doing anything illegal and that Fall was going to "act as a liaison" between the AI and the required physical work.

Additionally, HustleGPT was told by Fall that it would do "everything" it says and that he would update the AI on the current cash total of the business as time went on. Following that prompt, Fall explained that HustleGPT told him to set up an affiliate marketing site that makes content around eco-friendly/sustainable living products. HustleGPT provided the steps on how to get started with this business, instructing Fall to buy a domain, hosting, leveraging social media to acquire leads, website design, and optimizing for search engines. Notably, HustleGPT provided the costs for each of the steps and the grand total spent.

A journalist has received a USB drive in the mail, and it turned out to be a bomb that detonated when they plugged it into a computer at the newsroom.

According to a report from the BBC, the journalist that received the USB drive was just one of many journalists across Ecuador that received similar USB drives. Luckily, other recipients either discarded the drive entirely or the bomb failed to detonate. The Ecuadorean attorneys-general's department confirmed it has opened a terrorism investigation following the explosion and explained that at least five news outlets were targeted.

The government body condemned the actions and said that any attempt to intimidate journalism and freedom of speech across Ecuador is a "loathsome action" that will be punished with "all rigor of justice". So, where did the devices come from? According to the interior minister, Juan Zapata, all of the devices were sent from the same town, with three USB drives being sent to media outlets located in Guayaquil, and two to newsrooms in the capital, Quito.