The week in AI: Ukraine unveils AI-generated diplomat

In partnership with

Welcome to The Dispatch! We are the newsletter that keeps you informed about AI. Each Thursday, we aggregate the major developments in artificial intelligence; we pass along the news, useful resources, tools and services, and highlight the top research in the field as well as exciting developments in open source. Even if you aren’t an engineer, we’ll keep you in touch with what’s going on in AI.

NEWS & OPINION

Ukraine Ministry of Foreign Affairs unveils AI-generated spokesperson

-------------------------

Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has introduced ‘Victoriya Shi’, an AI-generated avatar, as the department’s digital spokesperson - a first in the world of diplomacy. Victoriya will deliver pre-prepared official statements on behalf of the ministry. The avatar's appearance and voice are modeled after Rosalie Nombre, a Ukrainian singer and reality TV personality.

Shi will comment on consular services, currently a controversial topic. Ukraine last week suspended such services for men of fighting age living abroad, making it necessary for them to return to their country for administrative procedures and potentially face the draft. You can see the first video of Victoriya here. To combat deepfakes, each of Victoriya's statements will include a unique QR code linking to the official text version on the ministry's website.

As the first “AI diplomat”, Ukraine’s avatar is an early adoption of tech that might become commonplace throughout government affairs. While the AI is only visual for now, it’s not hard to imagine a future where an AI trained on international law and foreign policy handles far more critical tasks and communication.

OpenAI makes 'Memory' feature available to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers

-------------------------

In February, OpenAI started testing a new “Memory” feature in ChatGPT where the chatbot will remember things discussed in conversations to make future interactions more helpful. OpenAI has now made Memory available to all ChatGPT Plus users. Now that GPT-4 remembers conversations, you can hopefully stop repeating yourself.

• You can add a Memory by just telling ChatGPT in your chat what you want it to remember.

• You are completely in control of ChatGPT’s memory. You can switch it off in the settings. If you want ChatGPT to forget something, just tell it. You can also view and delete specific memories or clear all memories in settings.

• Worth highlighting since it may feel counterintuitive: deleting a conversation from ChatGPT doesn’t also destroy the memories associated with it.

• If you’d like to have a conversation without using memory, use ‘Temporary chat’. Temporary chats won’t appear in history, won’t use memory, and won’t be used by OpenAI to train models.

• Custom GPTs will have separate memories, and builders have the option to enable it for their GPTs. You might need to repeat details to different GPTs since each GPT has its own memory.

Users may have some skepticism over OpenAI storing personal info and potentially using personal details to improve future AI models. OpenAI’s FAQ for the feature even reads, “Memories may be used to train our models depending on your choices and plan.” Users can opt out from training future models (by going into Settings and Data controls) while still having the Memory feature enabled.

Claude 3 goes mobile and expands for business use

-------------------------

Anthropic has just released the Claude iOS app, available on the App Store now. We’ve been using Claude since its public release and consider it to be the best alternative to ChatGPT overall. Anthropic has also created a “team plan” making available its Claude 3 suite of models to cater to the growing demand for AI solutions in enterprises. For $30 a month, the Team plan offers advanced features and controls specifically designed for businesses, while the iOS app brings the power of Claude 3 directly to your fingertips:

• All models available: The Team plan will give access to all three Claude-3 models - Haiku for speed and cost efficiency, Sonnet for a balanced approach, and Opus for maximum intelligence. You can choose the model that suits your requirements the most.

• Increased usage: Provides greater usage per user, priority access during high-traffic periods, and early access to new features, compared to Claude’s Pro plan which costs $20 a month. The usage limit depends on the message length, conversation length, and Claude’s current capacity.

• Context window benefit: The teams can benefit from Claude 3’s huge context window of 200K tokens, one of the largest in the industry. This is important for businesses that need to maintain context over very large documents.

• Other/upcoming features: It also includes administrative tools to conveniently control user and billing management for easier onboarding. Features like citations for AI-generated content, integration with data repositories, and a collaborative workspace for team projects will be rolled out soon.

The Claude iOS app features seamless syncing with web chats (pick up where you left off across devices) and vision capabilities - you can use photos from your library, take new photos, or upload files so you can have real-time image analysis, contextual understanding, and mobile-centric use cases on the go.

MORE IN AI THIS WEEK

• Elon Musk wants to turn Tesla’s fleet into AWS for AI - would it work?

• AI is making Meta’s apps unusable

• Are these states about to make a big mistake on AI?

• 60 Minutes: Meet Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the man behind the $2 trillion company powering today's artificial intelligence

• MIT Technology Review: An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

• Scale AI’s 2024 AI Readiness Report

• Google urges US to update immigration rules to attract more AI talent

• US Homeland Security names AI safety, security advisory board

• Microsoft announces US$1.7 billion investment to advance Indonesia’s cloud and AI ambitions

Free SOC 2 Compliance Checklist from Vanta

Are you building a business? Achieving SOC 2 compliance can help you win bigger deals, enter new markets, and deepen trust with your customers — but it can also cost you real time and money.

Vanta automates up to 90% of the work for SOC 2 (along with other in-demand frameworks like ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR), getting you audit-ready in weeks instead of months and saving you up to 85% of associated costs.

Download the free checklist to learn more about the SOC 2 compliance process and the road ahead

TECHNICAL, RESEARCH & OPEN SOURCE

GitHub Copilot Workspace: Welcome to the Copilot-native developer environment

-------------------------

GitHub has just launched the technical preview of Copilot Workspace, an advanced development environment designed to extend AI-assisted capabilities across the stages of planning, building, testing, and running code. The service integrates AI to transform a GitHub issue described in natural language into a structured plan for implementation, emphasizing the enhancement rather than replacement of developer creativity. Copilot Workspace will facilitate a systematic approach where it generates a step-by-step plan and corresponding code, fully editable, allowing for team collaboration and iterative refinement within a shared workspace.

The "Open in Workspace" feature begins with the AI generating a specification from an issue, then crafting a plan that might include tasks like adding validation functions or creating documentation. This process is streamlined through a series of interactive buttons that generate plans, implement code, and facilitate debugging within a GitHub Codespace. This integration provides a seamless workflow from issue to implementation, including testing in a built-in terminal, culminating in the creation of a pull request linked directly to the workspace.

Despite its innovative approach, Copilot Workspace has received mixed reactions from the developer community. Some developers express skepticism, particularly concerning the AI's ability to handle complex codebase modifications, suggesting that while the tool excels in generating brief code snippets, it struggles with larger, more intricate changes. However, others see the potential for such tools to expand the coding community by lowering entry barriers and necessitating skilled developers for more complex project phases. Looking ahead, GitHub plans to expand Workspace's integration, potentially including a Visual Studio Code extension.

Amazon CodeWhisperer is now called Q Developer and is expanding its functions

-------------------------

In other AI-assisted coding tool news, Amazon’s CodeWhisperer is being rebranded as Q Developer, a part of Amazon’s Q family of business-oriented generative AI chatbots that also extends to the newly announced Q Business. Available through AWS, Q Developer helps with some of the tasks developers do in the course of their daily work, like debugging and upgrading apps, troubleshooting and performing security scans - much like CodeWhisperer did.

Similar to Copilot, customers can fine-tune Q Developer on their internal codebases to improve the relevancy of the tool’s programming recommendations. And, thanks to the “Agents” feature, Q Developer can autonomously perform things like implementing features and documenting and refactoring (i.e. restructuring) code. Agents function similarly to GitHub’s Copilot Workspace, generating and implementing plans for bug fixes and new features in software.

Q Developer can also help manage a company’s cloud infrastructure on AWS - or at least get them the info they need to do the managing themselves. It can fulfill requests like “List all of my Lambda functions” and “list my resources residing in other AWS regions.” Currently in preview, the bot can also generate (but not execute) AWS Command Line Interface commands and answer AWS cost-related questions as well.

MORE IN T/R/OS

• Gradient releases Llama 3-8B model with over 1 million token context window

• StarCoder2-Instruct uses self-alignment for improvement in code generation

• Supercharge your development with Gemini in Android Studio

• A new list of high-quality datasets, tools, and concepts for LLM fine-tuning

That’s all for this week! We’ll see you next Thursday.’