AI News roundup: Chinese students lean on ChatGPT, Google building USM to compete with Microsoft and more

ChatGPT is available in China only via a virtual private network.

Chinese students turn to ChatGPT for homework

"Teachers use ChatGPT to generate customised lesson plans within seconds," said Tim Wallace, a teacher in Beijing. "We can't tell students not to use it while using it ourselves."

• In China, where the service is unavailable without a virtual private network (VPN), over a dozen students told AFP they have used it to write essays, solve science and maths problems, and generate computer code.
• It has also prompted concern from teachers, worried over the possibilities for cheating and plagiarism.

OpenAI and Salesforce buddy up to bring ChatGPT to Slack

The new app built by OpenAI using Slack's platform tools is in testing and has a waitlist for people who want to try it.

• Salesforce, creators of enterprise instant messaging solution Slack, have announced a partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI to integrate the chatbot sensation with the platform and also bring more generative AI to it.
• ChatGPT will help find answers to any project or topic directly from within the app and can also draft messages for users, helping them craft "replies, status updates, and meeting notes".

Google is building 1,000-language AI model to take on Microsoft

The main goal of the Universal Speech Model is to support the world's most spoken languages.

• Part of an ambitious plan to support the world's most spoken languages, Universal Speech Model (USM) is a state-of-the-art family of speech models with 2 billion parameters trained on 12 million hours of speech, 28 billion sentences of text spanning more than 300 languages.
• Google uses USM to generate live captions for videos on YouTube, and the search giant says that it can not only recognise "widely-spoken languages like English and Mandarin" but also "under-resourced languages like Amharic, Cebuano, Assamese, and Azerbaijani to name a few".