- The Big Tech AI race is intensifying as major tech companies unveil competing tools, with more likely to emerge in the future.
- Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI all announced new AI capabilities in May.
- Business Insider has put together a guide to help you better understand how the leading AI models work.
The AI race among big tech companies is heating up after Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google announced new features in May.
New AI tools are being released all the time, resulting in a plethora of chatbot and model names to keep in mind.
It doesn't look like it's slowing down anytime soon: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Apple plan to spend billions more on AI infrastructure, further strengthening their ability to roll out more products. And with that, the AI jargon will grow.
Business Insider has put together a handy guide to keep you up to date on AI products from some of the biggest companies in tech, as well as when their rollout didn't go as planned, so you can feel confident knowing your AI lingo for impromptu water cooler chats.
Here are some of the AI models and capabilities from major tech companies you should know about.
Microsoft
Microsoft has partnered with OpenAI and is investing billions of dollars in the ChatGPT maker, but is also reportedly building its own AI models separate from OpenAI.
The in-house AI model, called MAI-1, is said to be trained using ChatGPT's public dataset and text, sources told The Information. The project is being overseen by Mustafa Suleiman, who was recently appointed CEO of Microsoft AI, the report added.
The company has a text-to-image generation tool called “Microsoft Designer,” which was tested in December 2022 and released last year.
At the time, Microsoft software engineer Shane Jones wrote letters to the Federal Trade Commission and Microsoft's board of directors about the image generator, raising awareness of potential risks, including its potential to generate “harmful content.”
Microsoft researchers are also developing a text-to-video tool called VASA-1 that can bring still images to life, which was demonstrated in April but not yet available to the public.
At the Microsoft Build developer conference in May, CEO Satya Nadella unveiled the company's latest generative AI products, including updates to Copilot, an AI chatbot, and Team Copilot, a work productivity tool that brings an AI agent to workplace chats and meetings within Microsoft Teams.
The other big AI feature announced at the conference was Recall, which Microsoft likens to giving your PC a “photographic memory,” by taking screenshots of your laptop every few seconds and allowing you to search them later.
Open AI
OpenAI's ChatGPT burst onto the AI scene in November 2022. Since then, it has released several updated versions of its flagship model, including GPT-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4 Turbo.
Some users criticized the GPT-4 version as a “lazy” and “stupid” model compared to its predecessors in terms of inference capabilities and other outputs.
OpenAI's text-to-image generation tool is called Dall-E 3. The company also has a video generation tool called Sora, which wowed many audiences when OpenAI released a teaser video generated by the tool in February. However, the tool has also come under scrutiny after Google CEO Sundar Pichai said OpenAI may have violated YouTube's terms of service by using YouTube videos to train its model.
More recently, OpenAI released a multimodal model called GPT-4o, which is essentially a voice assistant that can perform searches and act as a companion when working or performing other tasks.
GPT-4o has already caused controversy since its release in early May due to its starring role in the film, Scarlett Johansson. She said that OpenAI's chatbot, Sky, sounds “eerily similar” to her, and that the company had asked her for permission to use her likeness.
CEO Sam Altman responded by saying that OpenAI never intended for “Sky” to sound like Johansson.
Google's AI chatbot is called Gemini and was released in March 2023.
The search giant has suspended Gemini's AI image generation
The company began producing the historically inaccurate images earlier this year.
Google then announced several new AI features at its I/O conference in May, including AI Overviews, which are summaries of AI-generated search results. Since the feature was introduced, users on social media have shared their experiences with the app generating inaccurate answers, including one case where it told users to put glue on their pizza to stop the cheese from sticking.
A Google representative previously told Business Insider that these examples were “extremely rare queries and are not representative of the majority of people's experiences.”
In response to a Verge report that Google was manually disabling some of the answers provided by its new AI search feature, a spokesperson told the outlet that the company was “taking swift action” to remove AI summaries for certain queries.
Google announced a text-to-video tool called Lumiere in January, but has yet to announce a release date.
Meta
Meta has an AI assistant called Meta AI, which runs on the open source LLM Llama. The AI tool is built into platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta's video generation tool, Make-A-Video, was announced in 2022.
The company also offers an AI image-generating tool called “Imagine,” which was released in December and trained on public photos from Facebook and Instagram, but in April was criticized by some users as racist because it couldn't create images of interracial couples.
Amazon
To stay competitive in the AI race, Amazon is reportedly creating a law master's program called Olympus, which the company is developing with the goal of incorporating into its online store and Alexa smart speakers, The Information reported last year.
Titan is an image generator from Amazon that is integrated into Amazon's service Amazon Bedrock, which allows users to access underlying models from players such as Anthropic, Meta, Stability AI, and Cohere to build generative AI applications on Amazon's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services.
Last September, Amazon committed to investing up to $4 billion in Anthropik, a startup in which Amazon holds a minority stake, co-founded by two former OpenAI employees.
