Generative AI went mainstream, drawing investment, lawsuits, strikes, new laws

Chatbots built on large language models became a mass product. Microsoft shipped GPT-4 inside Bing, Google answered with Bard and then Gemini, and Anthropic launched Claude. Meta’s LLaMA leaked days after release, seeding an open-weight ecosystem Meta later joined with Llama 2. The year also brought sharp public alarm: a pause letter, a Turing Award laureate’s resignation from Google, and a statement putting AI risk beside pandemics and nuclear war. Governments began to act. Italy briefly blocked ChatGPT, the FTC opened an inquiry, and Hollywood unions struck partly over AI. The year closed with a US executive order, a UK safety summit, a preliminary EU AI Act, an OpenAI boardroom crisis, and a Times copyright suit.

20 entries recorded

December

  1. The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright

    The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on 27 December 2023 in the Southern District of New York, case 1:23-cv-11195, alleging they trained models on millions of its articles without permission and that ChatGPT and Copilot could reproduce its reporting.

  2. EU negotiators reach a political deal on the AI Act

    After trilogue talks that ran into the early morning of 9 December 2023, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU reached provisional political agreement on the Artificial Intelligence Act, setting risk tiers for AI systems and separate rules for general-purpose models.

  3. Google launches Gemini, built to be multimodal from the start

    Google and Google DeepMind announced Gemini 1.0 on 6 December 2023 in three sizes, Ultra, Pro and Nano. Google described it as built to be multimodal from the start rather than adapted afterward, and said Ultra was the first model past human-expert performance on MMLU, at 90.0%.

November

  1. OpenAI’s board fires Sam Altman and reinstates him five days later

    OpenAI’s board removed Sam Altman as chief executive on 17 November 2023, saying it no longer had confidence in his leadership, and named Mira Murati interim chief executive. After nearly all staff threatened to resign and Microsoft pressed, Altman was back on 22 November.

  2. Twenty-eight countries sign the Bletchley Declaration on AI

    The United Kingdom held the first AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park on 1 and 2 November 2023. Representatives of 28 countries and the European Union, along with the major AI companies, signed the Bletchley Declaration on developing and using AI safely and responsibly.

October

  1. Biden signs an executive order on AI safety and security

    President Biden signed Executive Order 14110 on 30 October 2023, directing federal agencies to set safety testing standards for the most capable models and requiring the developers of certain large models to report their training runs and safety test results to the government.

September

  1. Hollywood writers end a 148-day strike with limits on AI

    The Writers Guild of America ended a 148-day strike on 27 September 2023 with a contract barring studios from using AI to write or rewrite literary material, from training AI on writers’ work without consent, and from crediting AI as a writer. SAG-AFTRA settled on 9 November.

July

  1. Meta releases Llama 2 with weights free for commercial use

    Meta released Llama 2 on 18 July 2023 at 7, 13 and 70 billion parameters, with the weights and code free for research and for most commercial use. Microsoft was named Meta’s preferred partner, and the models were distributed through Azure, Amazon Web Services and Hugging Face.

  2. FTC opens an investigation into OpenAI over consumer harm

    The US Federal Trade Commission opened a non-public investigation into OpenAI, reported on 13 July 2023 by The Washington Post. A 20-page civil investigative demand asked how ChatGPT handles personal data and whether what it says about people is unfair or deceptive.

May

  1. AI researchers and executives sign a statement on extinction risk

    The Center for AI Safety published a one-sentence statement on 30 May 2023, saying that reducing the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority beside pandemics and nuclear war. Hundreds signed, among them Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman.

  2. Nvidia’s market value passes $1 trillion

    Nvidia’s market capitalization reached $1 trillion at the opening bell on 30 May 2023, the first time the chipmaker had been valued that highly. The shares had to hold above $404.86 to sustain it, and the company closed the day worth about $990 billion.

  3. Geoffrey Hinton resigns from Google to speak about AI risk

    Geoffrey Hinton, a Turing Award winner for his work on deep learning and a vice president at Google, said on 1 May 2023 that he had left the company after a decade. He told The New York Times he wanted to speak freely about the risks of the systems he had helped build.

April

  1. Google merges Brain and DeepMind into Google DeepMind

    Google said on 20 April 2023 that it was combining the Brain team from Google Research with DeepMind into a single unit called Google DeepMind, led by DeepMind’s co-founder and chief executive Demis Hassabis. Google said the move would accelerate its progress in AI.

March

  1. Italy’s privacy regulator orders ChatGPT to stop processing data

    Italy’s data protection authority, the Garante, ordered OpenAI on 30 March 2023 to stop processing Italian users’ data through ChatGPT, citing no legal basis for training data, no age check for minors, and inaccurate output about named people. The order was lifted on 28 April.

  2. An AI image of Pope Francis in a puffer coat is taken for real

    A photorealistic image of Pope Francis in a white puffer coat, made with version 5 of Midjourney’s image model, spread across social media in late March 2023 and was widely taken for a photograph. Forbes and BuzzFeed News traced it to a Chicago construction worker.

  3. Future of Life Institute letter calls for a six-month pause

    The Future of Life Institute published “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter” on 22 March 2023, asking every laboratory to stop training systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. It gathered more than 30,000 signatures.

  4. Anthropic launches Claude, its first public assistant

    Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers, released Claude on 14 March 2023 through a chat interface and an API, after a closed alpha with partners including Notion, Quora and DuckDuckGo. Two versions shipped: Claude, and the faster and cheaper Claude Instant.

  5. OpenAI releases GPT-4, its first model to accept images

    OpenAI released GPT-4 on 14 March 2023 to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and to developers through a waitlist. The model accepted images as well as text. OpenAI reported it placing near the top 10 percent on a simulated bar exam, against roughly the bottom 10 percent for GPT-3.5.

February

  1. Meta releases LLaMA; the weights leak online within days

    Meta AI published LLaMA on 24 February 2023, a family of language models at 7, 13, 33 and 65 billion parameters, licensed for noncommercial research and granted case by case. On 3 March the full weights were posted as a BitTorrent link on 4chan and spread from there.

January

  1. Microsoft announces multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI

    Microsoft said on 23 January 2023 that it had agreed the third phase of its partnership with OpenAI, which it described as a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment. Microsoft gave no figure; Semafor and other outlets had reported a proposed investment of roughly $10 billion.