AI News roundup: Elon Musk working on ChatGPT rival, Snapchat eyes slice of AI pie, Zoom's AI integrations and more

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Elon Musk is recruiting Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who recently left Google's parent company Alphabet's AI unit, to develop an alternative to ChatGPT.

• The tech billionaire has approached AI (artificial intelligence) researchers in recent weeks to form a new research lab for it, the Information reported on February 27, citing people with direct knowledge of the effort.
• Musk and Babuschkin have discussed assembling a team to pursue AI research but the project is still in the early stages.

Facebook parent Meta is streamlining its generative AI efforts across the company into a single product group that will focus on integrating the technology into all of its products.

• This product group will initially focus on building creative and expressive tools, and later look at developing "AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on February 27.
• "We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I'm excited about all of the new things we'll build along the way," he said.

Snapchat is jumping in on the AI craze with a customized chatbot of its own, called My AI.

• Snapchat is introducing the chatbot as an experimental feature for Snapchat+ subscribers.
• Snapchat+ is a subscription service that offers users experimental, pre-release or exclusive features for Rs 49 per month.
• Snapchat made it clear that My AI suffers from the same problems that other chatbots suffer from right now, namely, it is “prone to hallucination and can be tricked into saying just about anything”.

Nearly half of US companies currently using ChatGPT said the chatbot has already replaced workers, a recent survey revealed.

• Earlier this month, job advice platform Resumebuilder.com surveyed 1,000 business leaders in the US who either use or plan to use ChatGPT, Fortune reported. It found that nearly 50 percent of the US leaders claimed that ChatGPT has already replaced workers at their companies.
• According to the ResumeBuilders.com survey, US companies use ChatGPT for a variety of reasons: 66 percent for writing code, 58 percent for copywriting and content creation, 57 percent for customer support, and 52 percent for meeting summaries and other documents, Fortune reported.

The news sent the company's shares up 8% in extended trading.

• Analysts predict that AI tech will be a major driver for future growth for the tech industry, which has been grappling with slowing demand amid recessionary fears.
• The company expects 2024 revenue between $4.44 billion and $4.46 billion, below average Street estimate of $4.60 billion.