Showing posts with label DigitalHelpers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DigitalHelpers. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

From GPT-4o To Gemini The AI Assistants are Getting Better Fast

David Pierce / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 38, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and you can also read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been writing about iPads and the future of Google, watching American Fiction and Bodkin, rewatching Her because of reasons, endlessly replaying the songs of Windows95man, learning how to make better sandwiches, testing Claude for AI stuff, and listening to the new-old Childish Gambino album…..Story continues…

By: David Pierce

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Critics:

Originally, multiple versions of GPT-4o were secretly launched under different names on Large Model Systems Organization’s (LMSYS) Chatbot Arena as three different models. These three models were called gpt2-chatbot, im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot, and im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot. On 7 May 2024, Sam Altman tweeted “im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot”, which was commonly interpreted as a confirmation that these were new OpenAI models being A/B tested.

GPT-4o achieved state-of-the-art results in voice, multilingual, and vision benchmarks, setting new records in audio speech recognition and translation. GPT-4o scored 88.7 on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark compared to 86.5 by GPT-4. Unlike GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, which rely on other models to process sound, GPT-4o natively supports voice-to-voice. Sam Altman noted on 15 May 2024 that GPT-4o’s voice-to-voice capabilities were not yet integrated into ChatGPT, and that the old version was still being used.

GPT-4o has knowledge up to October 2023, but can access the Internet if up-to-date information is needed. It has a context length of 128k tokens with output token limit capped to 4,096, and after a later update (gpt-4o-2024-08-06) to 16,384. As of May 2024, it is the leading model in the LMSYS Elo Arena Benchmarks by the University of California, Berkeley.

In August 2024, OpenAI introduced a new feature allowing corporate customers to customize GPT-4o, their most advanced AI model, using proprietary company data. This customization, known as fine-tuning, enables businesses to adapt GPT-4o to specific tasks or industries, enhancing its utility in areas like customer service and specialized knowledge domains. Previously, fine-tuning was available only on the less powerful model GPT-4o mini.

The fine-tuning process requires customers to upload their data to OpenAI’s servers, with the training typically taking one to two hours. Initially, the customization will be limited to text-based data. OpenAI’s focus with this rollout is to reduce the complexity and effort required for businesses to tailor AI solutions to their needs, potentially increasing the adoption and effectiveness of AI in corporate environments.

On July 18, 2024, OpenAI released a smaller and cheaper version, GPT-4o mini. According to OpenAI, its low cost is expected to be particularly useful for companies, startups and developers that seek to integrate it into their services, which often make a high amount of API calls. Its API costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.6 per million output tokens, compared to $5 and $15 respectively for GPT-4o.

It is also significantly more capable and 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo, which it replaced on the ChatGPT interface. The price after fine-tuning doubles: $0.3 per million input tokens and $1.2 per million output tokens. GPT-4o mini is the default model for users not logged in and use ChatGPT as guests and for those who have hit the limit for GPT-4o. GPT-4o mini will become available in fall 2024 on Apple’s mobile devices and Mac desktops, through the Apple Intelligence feature.

On May 20, 2024, OpenAI disabled the Sky voice, issuing a statement saying “We’ve heard questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT, espe cially Sky. We are working to pause the use of Sky while we address them.”Scarlett Johansson starred in the sci-fi movie Her in 2013, playing the role of Samantha, an artificially intelligent virtual assistant personified through a female voice. As part of the promotion leading up to the release of GPT-4o, Sam Altman on May 13 tweeted a single word: “her”.

OpenAI claimed that each voice was based on the voice work of a hired actor. Specifically, OpenAI claimed “Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice.” Already in September 2023, OpenAI had claimed their upcoming new talking version of its ChatGPT assistant that sounded like Scarlett Johansson “wasn’t meant to resemble” the actress.

In the statement, Johansson also used the incident to draw attention to the lack of legal safeguards around the use of creative work to power leading AI tools, as her legal counsel demanded OpenAI detail the specifics of how the Sky voice was created. Observers noted similarities to how Johansson had previously sued and settled with The Walt Disney Company for breach of contract over the direct-to-streaming rollout of her Marvel film Black Widow, a settlement widely speculated to have netted her around $40M.

Also on May 21, Shira Ovide at The Washington Post shared her list of “most bone-headed self-owns” by technology companies, with the decision to go ahead with a Johansson sound-alike voice despite her opposition and then denying the similarities ranking 6th. On May 24, Derek Robertson at Politico wrote about the “massive backlash”, concluding that “appropriating the voice of one of the world’s most famous movie stars — in reference […] to a film that serves as a cautionary tale about over-reliance on AI — is unlikely to help shift the public back into [Sam Altman’s] corner anytime soon.

Will new AI tools create a better Siri or voice assistant? ComputerWorld (Video) 18:37 Thu, 16 May

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AIAssistants ,ArtificialIntelligence ,TechInnovation ,SmartTechnology ,DigitalHelpers ,MachineLearning ,FutureOfTech ,AIRevolution ,VirtualAssistants ,IntelligentAutomation ,CognitiveComputing ,InnovationInTech ,#AIApplications,AutomationTools ,DigitalTransformation ,SmartAssistance,TechTrends ,AIForBusiness ,NextGenTech

Friday, June 5, 2026

Bots Now Outnumber Humans On The Web  And Most Aren’t Here To Search

Cyrus S., who previously led global SEO at a major tech company and now publishes commentary on search and AI growth, shared today the figures from Cloudflare Radar that have drawn significant attention across the marketing community. The data, covering a seven-day window ending June 5, 2026, shows bots accounting for 57.4% of web traffic to HTML content, with human visitors at 42.6%. The crossing of the 50% threshold, according to Cyrus S., happened “much faster than expected……Continue reading…

By: Luis Rijo

Source: PPC Land

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Critics:

 Internet bots are able to perform simple and repetitive tasks much faster than a person could ever do. The most extensive use of bots is for web crawling, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers. More than half of all web traffic is generated by bots. Efforts by web servers to restrict bots vary. Some servers have a robots.txt file that contains the rules requesting how bots should behave on website.

Any bot that does not follow the rules could, in theory, be denied access to the affected website, while in practice, a website owner cannot force a bot to follow the rules or ensure that a bot’s creator or implementer reads or acknowledges the robots.txt file. Some bots are “good”, e.g. search engine spiders, while other “bad” bots are used to launch malicious attacks on websites or applications, such as political campaigns.

Some bots communicate with users of Internet-based services, via instant messaging (IM), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), or other web interfaces such as Facebook bots and Twitter bots. These chatbots may allow people to ask questions in plain English and then formulate a response. Such bots can often handle reporting weather, postal code information, sports scores, currency or other unit conversions, etc.

Others are used for entertainment, such as SmarterChild on AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger. Additional roles of an IRC bot may be to listen on a conversation channel, and to comment on certain phrases uttered by the participants (based on pattern matching). This is sometimes used as a help service for new users or to censor profanity. Social bots are sets of algorithms that take on the duties of repetitive sets of instructions in order to establish a service or connection among social networking users.

Among the various designs of networking bots, the most common are chat bots, algorithms designed to converse with a human user, and social bots, algorithms designed to mimic human behaviors to converse with patterns similar to those of a human user. The history of social botting can be traced back to Alan Turing in the 1950s and his vision of designing sets of instructional code approved by the Turing test.

In the 1960s Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a natural language processing computer program considered an early indicator of artificial intelligence algorithms. ELIZA inspired computer programmers to design tasked programs that can match behavior patterns to their sets of instruction. As a result, natural language processing has become an influencing factor to the development of artificial intelligence and social bots.

And as information and thought see a progressive mass spreading on social media websites, innovative technological advancements are made following the same pattern. Reports of political interferences in recent elections, including the 2016 US and 2017 UK general elections, have set the notion of bots being more prevalent because of the ethics that is challenged between the bot’s design and the bot’s designer. 

Emilio Ferrara, a computer scientist from the University of Southern California reporting on Communications of the ACM, said the lack of resources available to implement fact-checking and information verification results in the large volumes of false reports and claims made about these bots on social media platforms. In the case of Twitter, most of these bots are programmed with search filter capabilities that target keywords and phrases favoring political agendas and then retweet them.

While the attention of bots is programmed to spread unverified information throughout the social media platforms, it is a challenge that programmers face in the wake of a hostile political climate. The Bot Effect is what Ferrera reported as the socialization of bots and human users creating a vulnerability to the leaking of personal information and polarizing influences outside the ethics of the bot’s code, and was confirmed by Guillory Kramer in his study where he observed the behavior of emotionally volatile users and the impact the bots have on them, altering their perception of reality.

There has been a great deal of controversy about the use of bots in an automated trading function. Auction website eBay took legal action in an attempt to suppress a third-party company from using bots to look for bargains on its site; this approach backfired on eBay and attracted the attention of further bots. The United Kingdom-based bet exchange, Betfair, saw such a large amount of traffic coming from bots that it launched a WebService API aimed at bot programmers, through which it can actively manage bot interactions.

Bot farms are known to be used in online app stores, like the Apple App Store and Google Play, to manipulate positions or increase positive ratings/reviews. A rapidly growing form of internet bot is the chatbot. From 2016, when Facebook Messenger allowed developers to place chatbots on their platform, there has been an exponential growth of their use on that app alone. 30,000 bots were created for Messenger in the first six months, rising to 100,000 by September 2017.

Avi Ben Ezra, CTO of SnatchBot, told Forbes that evidence from the use of their chatbot building platform pointed to a near future saving of millions of hours of human labor as ‘live chat’ on websites was replaced with bots. Companies use internet bots to increase online engagement and streamline communication. Companies often use bots to cut down on cost; instead of employing people to communicate with consumers, companies have developed new ways to be efficient.

These chatbots are used to answer customers’ questions; for example, Domino’s developed a chatbot that can take orders via Facebook Messenger. Chatbots allow companies to allocate their employees’ time to other tasks. One example of the malicious use of bots is the coordination and operation of an automated attack on networked computers, such as a denial-of-service attack by a botnet.

Internet bots or web bots can also be used to commit click fraud and more recently have appeared around MMORPG games as computer game bots. Another category is represented by spambots, internet bots that attempt to spam large amounts of content on the Internet, usually adding advertising links. More than 94.2% of websites have experienced a bot attack.

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InternetBots ,AIChatbots ,DigitalHelpers ,Automation ,TechTrends ,FutureOfAI ,SmartTechnology ,OnlineBots ,BotRevolution ,ArtificialIntelligence ,ChatbotInnovation ,MachineLearning ,VirtualAssistants ,WebAutomation ,TechSavvy ,BotProgramming ,AIinBusiness ,InternetAutomation ,BotDevelopment
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