AI News roundup: Microsoft opens Bing AI public preview, UK's CMA launches review into AI and more

Representative Image

Microsoft's Bing AI now in open preview, no waitlist required

You just need to sign in to Bing using your Microsoft account on the Edge browser and you can try the AI bot for yourself.

• Microsoft has also announced new features for the bot. For starters, Bing AI (powered by OpenAI's GPT-4) can now display rich "visual answers", using graphs, charts and rich formatting.
• The Bing Image Creator (powered by OpenAI's DALL-E) has been updated to support more than 100 languages. The Image Creator can generate AI images based on text prompts and visual examples.
• Bing AI will also boast a chat history, which will allow you to return to your previous chats with the bot. The Edge browser will automatically move your chat to the sidebar, in case you need to dig a little deeper. Microsoft said that it was exploring more features such as the ability to retain context for a previous chat.

UK's Competition and Markets Authority opens review into AI models

In a press release, the CMA said it seeks to understand how the technology is developing, so that it can draw guidelines for the models. The watchdog said it wants to ensure "that innovation in AI continues in a way that benefits consumers, businesses and the UK economy".

• The review will seek to assess if the advancement of AI can be supported by five principles: "fairness; accountability and governance; and contestability and redress".
• The review will examine the potential competitive markets that may emerge within the AI field, and assess what possibilities and risk they might bring. Lastly, the review will establish guidelines for fair competition and data rights for citizens.

What are the risks posed by ChatGPT? 

Conscious, self-aware, truly intelligent or just useful tools, the debate on artificial intelligence rages on and will be the defining question of our era. For lawyers and policy specialists, the core issue is ‘risk’. To assess, allocate and audit risk within a matrix of potential harms and desired outcomes.

• A number of concerns have been raised specifically with regard to the data privacy and security aspects of using ChatGPT. The chatbot actively uses conversations that occur on its platform to train the model further, unless the feature is explicitly disabled by the user.
• Chatbots such as ChatGPT will proliferate in numbers, with an exponential rise in usage. Both corporations and users should be cognisant of and prepared for such privacy and security risks and take steps to prevent or minimise them, in order to harness the technology to its full potential.