Forward Future News Episode 2

tl;dr:

• ChatGPT now has Plugins

• Adobe Launches Firefly Beta - MidJourney Competitor

• Github Supercharges Copilot

• Google Launches Bard - ChatGPT Competitor

• Dalai makes installing LLMs locally easy (but gets in trouble)

Another week of insane progress in the world of AI. Things are moving so quickly it’s truly hard to keep up. But I’ll keep bringing you the best news and launches each week.

OpenAI Launches Plugins for ChatGPT

OpenAI is one step closer to making ChatGPT ubiquitous. This week, they launched Plugins, which they describe as: “Plugins are tools designed specifically for language models…and help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services.”

ChatGPT is no longer hindered by its lack of information about anything happening after 2021. ChatGPT can now provide information on anything from booking travel to ordering food to deep scientific knowledge. The possibilities are endless.

Developers can build applications on top of ChatGPT, giving them superpowers in any domain. Here are some of the plugins available at launch:

I just received access to ChatGPT Plugins (you can join the waitlist here) and I’m super excited to try it. I’ll be making a video in the next 1-2 days reviewing them.

Adobe Firefly Launches

Adobe launches a direct competitor to MidJourney called Firefly. I was able to get an early look and play around with it and so far, it’s quite impressive. Here’s a video review and walkthrough I made for it:

Be sure to sign up for beta access here.

Github Copilot X

As an engineer, one of the best things to happen to my productivity when writing code was the introduction of Github Copilot. It allowed me to increase my efficiency in writing new code by about 50% immediately. Here’s what that looked like:

Now, Github has supercharged Copilot into Copilot X, which now includes all the power of ChatGPT right in Visual Studio Code! You can ask Copilot anything about your codebase and get answers immediately. This is going to be extremely useful, especially when trying to understand a legacy codebase, here’s an example:

I haven’t had a chance to try this out but as soon as I get access, I will!

Google Bard Launches

Google launched their ChatGPT competitor called Bard. I was able to get into the beta and tested it out. I made a video comparing it to GPT-4. A few people pointed out that my grading rubric wasn’t super scientific, so take the results with a grain of salt. I do think GPT-4 is superior, but the results of the testing didn’t land that way.

Here’s the video I made comparing Bard to GPT-4:

Dalai Makes LLMs Local

The last big story this week is a project called Dalai, which allows anyone to install LLMs locally. From LLaMA to Alpaca, you can easily install models locally and play around with them with no connection to the internet.

It turns out the LLaMA model was leaked from Meta and they aren’t too happy. The author of Dalai, Cocktail Peanut (not his birth name :P), received takedown notices from Meta’s legal team but is a staunch advocate of LLMs being open source. He then decided to make Dalai (and LLMs) into a torrent-based download, which effectively prevents Meta from blocking people from getting to the models.

Here’s the video I made explaining how to install Dalai:

I find this saga fascinating and will probably make a video explaining all of the drama. I stand with Cocktail Peanut!

Closing

To close out this episode of Forward Future News, here are some images created by Adobe Firefly: