OpenAI Bows GPT-4 Turbo; Instagram Paid Subscribers Trail Patreon; Facebook Bans Political Campaigns from Some Ad Tools; Waze Warns of Crash-Prone Freeway Spots

OpenAI has rolled out GPT-4 Turbo. The latest, greatest chatbot is touted as having larger memory, lower cost, and new knowledge. The debut happened yesterday during the OpenAI DevDay event. Arstechnica.com reports that OpenAI also introduced an API for DALL-E 3, and custom, sharable, user-defined GPTs. Up to now, the knowledge base for ChatGPT-4 ran through 2021…now, the latest version has knowledge of events through April of 2023. Running GPT-4 Turbo as an API will cost a third less than GPT-4 for input tokens, too…a penny per thousand tokens, down from 3 cents per 1000. 

Instagram has hit a milestone…a million paid subscribers to creators that use the platform. That is a relative drop in the bucket when compared to the some 2 billion monthly Instagram users, but it’s a start. According to theverge.com, the platform has a long haul to catch up to other platforms in this regard…Patreon has some 30 million paid subscriptions. It should be noted that Patreon has about a 10 year head start, though. Meta has announced that now creators will be able to offer 30-day free trials, and another new feature will let creators bulk direct message new subscribers to chat with them. Instagram is also expanding its ‘Instagram Gifts’…its euphemism for tips…to more countries. 

Meta has announced that political campaigns advertising on Facebook will not have access to the site’s generative AI ad tools. This policy update comes just a month after Facebook announced an expansion of its AI-powered ad tools that can make changes to images, create backgrounds, write copy, and more — all on the fly. The tool is expected to be available to all advertisers by 2024. Meta has also blocked its AI virtual assistant from creating images of public figures and committed to watermarking content generated by AI to ensure it doesn’t spread false information.

Almost any traffic reporter will tell you that repeated crashes tend to happen at certain places on the freeway system. Caltrans studies have verified this. Now, engadget.com says Waze will let you know if you are taking such a route. Waze will send you a prompt that says ‘history of crashes.’ The prompt is designed to give you time to slow down or make extra effort to keep alert. Waze has been accumulating crash data for several years, and the feature will work on both freeways and local roads. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.