ChatGPT gets a voice

Welcome back to The Daily Update — OpenAI is giving ChatGPT some major updates as the AI race heats up. Here’s the full lineup:

🗞️ The Latest: OpenAI gives ChatGPT a voice

🤖 AI Training: How to create viral text illusions

📸 Business Spotlight: Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic

🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

Read time: 2 minutes

🗞️ The Latest: OpenAI gives ChatGPT a voice

OpenAI is giving its popular generative AI assistant several updates, and users will soon be able to have voice conversations with ChatGPT.

What you need to know:

• The move marks a significant milestone in the evolution of generative AI, with OpenAI merging voice assistant technology with its powerful large language model (LLM).

• Users will now be able to verbally ask questions, with ChatGPT giving a spoken response.

• The voice feature is powered by a new text-to-speech model that can generate human-like voices from text. OpenAI teamed up with established voice actors to create five unique voices.

• Spotify was unveiled as a launch partner. The music-streaming platform will use OpenAI’s tech to clone podcasters’ voices and translate them into other languages.

• Users will also be able to prompt ChatGPT with images.

The bottom line: Remember yesterday’s spotlight on interactive AI? This is a huge step toward AI assistants that integrate voice, text, image and video.

🤖 AI Training: How to create viral text illusions

Illusion art has been trending on X for the past couple of weeks, and creators have already found a way to incorporate text. Here’s how you can create your own:

Create your text: Use Photoshop, Canva, or another tool of your choice to create a blank white page with the text you want to incorporate into the design. Choose a thick font for better results.

Upload and prompt: Upload your text to Illusion Diffusion as the input illusion. Next, write the prompt for your design. I used “a rainforest in South America.”

Refine the result: Tweak your prompt and the “illusion strength” scale until you get the result you want.

Show me what you create @jbsdailyupdate on Twitter!

📸 Business Spotlight: Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic

Yesterday Amazon agreed to invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic. The tech giant hopes to keep pace with rivaling Microsoft, Google and Meta.

What you need to know:

• Amazon will initially invest $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic, with the option to increase its investment to a total of $4 billion.

• Anthropic, which is behind the Claude chatbot, has positioned itself as one of the industry’s more responsible actors.

• The startup plans to build a “frontier model” called Claude-Next that is 10x more capable than today’s most powerful AI.

• As part of the investment agreement, Anthropic will have access to Amazon’s cloud giant AWS to build, train and deploy future models.

Why it matters: Anthropic has found a deep-pocketed investor that can provide it with the computing power to build future AI models. Amazon will be able to keep up with Microsoft and Google as it tries to establish itself more deeply in AI.

Crucial quote: “We look forward to working closely with Amazon to responsibly scale adoption of Claude and deliver safe AI cloud technologies to organizations around the world,” Anthropic said in a statement.

🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

• New Audiences: Spotify will use OpenAI’s tech to clone podcasters’ voices and translate them to other languages.

• Personalized AI: Meta plans to launch AI chatbots with distinct personalities to attract young users to its social media apps.

• My AI ads: Snapchat partners with Microsoft to insert ads into its “My AI” chatbot.

• Next-Gen Camera: Google Pixel 8 leak shows off AI camera updates.

Have questions or thoughts on today’s newsletter? Reply to this email and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for reading The Daily Update!

Jack

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